The Californian group generated 7.47 billion dollars of net profit in the first quarter, a result down 21% over one year, for a turnover approaching 28 billion dollars (+7%).

Its title jumped 18% during electronic trading after the closing of the New York Stock Exchange.

Above all, it has not lost users again.

These figures were eagerly awaited by investors after those of February, when the social network admitted to having lost, for the first time, around one million active daily users in three months.

At the end of March, Facebook had 1.96 billion daily users, up from 1.93 at the end of December 2021, according to the company's earnings release.

And some 3.64 billion people around the world use at least one of the group's platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp) every month.

But Meta still has to "face the reality: Facebook user growth is stagnating," said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

“So it falls to Instagram to serve as an engine of growth,” she added.

"The Metaverse is generating a lot of press, but Horizon Worlds, Meta's VR social platform, only has a few hundred thousand users at this point."

Mark Zuckerberg's group changed its name in October to signal a shift in strategy.

The social networking giant intends to focus on the "metaverse", considered in Silicon Valley as the future of the internet: a parallel universe where the public will use augmented or virtual reality glasses to interact, work or be entertained.

The TikTok racing car

In the immediate future, the world's second largest player in online advertising is nevertheless facing many headwinds.

Rules imposed by Apple last year - to prevent apps from harvesting user data for advertising purposes without permission - are affecting Meta's bottom line.

This issue, "combined with the rise of TikTok, brand concerns over problematic content, and changing user behaviors on social media, heralds turbulence for Meta's ad revenue," commented analyst Jasmine Enberg. from Insider Intelligence.

“It is still clear that advertisers continue to use Facebook and Instagram to reach their huge audiences,” she nuanced.

Hugely popular rival app TikTok is chipping away at audience share from every major platform, from YouTube to Instagram, which has copied its funny short video formats (along with "YouTube Shorts" and "Reels," respectively).

"Our transition to short formats is not yet generating substantial revenues for the moment, but we are optimistic in the long term," assured Mark Zuckerberg, the group's boss, during the conference call with analysts.

He also recalled that his company was investing in technologies to circumvent the problem posed by its neighbor Apple.

As for Google, the world leader in digital advertising, comparisons in 2022 with the year 2021, marked by the explosion of web and mobile platforms thanks to the pandemic, are unfavorable to Meta.

And in the face of inflation and supply chain challenges, advertisers need to tighten their budgets.

"We expect revenue in the range of $28 billion to $30 billion in the second quarter of 2022," Meta said, "taking into account trends that affected growth in the first quarter, particularly in the late, early of the war in Ukraine".

Facebook and Instagram have been blocked in Russia, and the American group no longer accepts Russian ads in the world at large.

© 2022 AFP