Facebook reported they had 2.93 billion users in the third quarter of 2021.
For the fourth quarter, they reported 2.929 billion users.
Due to that being the first quarter in the companies history where they saw a drop in users, Facebook saw one of the worst drops in a companies value in all of history.
Here’s why that meant nothing.
It’s hard to grow with 2.9 billion users.
4.6 billion people globally have internet and 63% of them are on Facebook.
Factor in China, which Facebook is banned in, where 70% of the population has internet. That means of the 1.7 billion remaining internet users without Facebook, almost half of them legally cannot access it.
In fact, of internet users in countries Facebook isn’t banned in, Facebook has about 85% of global internet users.
While they should hope for the other 15%, Facebook has been around for almost 20 years and they’ve likely decided to avoid.
Instagram & WhatsApp
Instagram has over 1 billion users and still growing.
WhatsApp has 2 billion users.
Neither products are fully monetized and combined larger than the core business to Facebook.
For Facebook, my personal feeling is Instagram may collapse long term, but not a serious worry now.
Profit/Revenue
Facebook made 86 billion dollars in revenue for 2020 and 29 billion in profit.
A 33.7% margin
Higher than Apple, Google & Microsoft.
Numbers look even better for 2021, where they made 28 billion in the first three quarters.
Oculus
Oculus sales aren’t revealed, but it looks like 15 million units were sold in 2021.
I’m a skeptic of the market size on meta and think most of it is just hype.
That being said, there still is a powerful chance for gaming and some commercial applications.
While it’ll get more competitive when Nintendo, Sony & Microsoft all make more serious attempts to enter, there is a real chance Facebook can sell 100 million units by 2025.
This puts them in a totally different business to social media, which could also be huge.
Final thoughts
I believe Facebook will become the largest company on earth one day and right now am willing to dump most of my free cash into what will become a trillion, two trillion and three trillion dollar company.
They’ll be a lot of rough days ahead I’m sure, but long term, Facebook will do well.