The market value of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, lost $230 billion on Thursday due to a drop in stocks. This was the company’s biggest drop in a single day.
Shares of the company lost 26.4 percent as the company’s quarterly balance sheet figures disappointed the investors.
Meta reported that the company’s daily active user had fallen for the first time in its 18-year history.
The company announced that the number of daily users decreased to 1 billion 929 million in the last quarter of last year.
For the previous quarter of 2021, this number was 1 billion 930 million.
Advertisers on Facebook, which stated that revenue growth has slowed down in the face of TikTok and YouTube competition, are also reducing their spending.
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said that the company’s sales growth has slowed as its target audiences, especially young users, are turning to their competitors.
Meta, which owns the world’s second largest digital advertising platform after Google, said that it was also negatively affected by Apple’s privacy changes in its operating system.
$31 billion from Zuckerberg’s fortune
The loss in the company’s stocks took away $31 billion from Zuckerberg’s wealth, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires index.
This data is equivalent to Estonia’s one-year GDP.
However, despite this decline, Zuckerberg is still one of the richest people in the world, with a fortune of $ 90 billion.
Sachin Mittal, head of telecommunications and internet research at DBS Bank, a Singapore-based bank, emphasized that Facebook’s competitor Snap has announced healthier financials.
Mittal said that all technology companies are negatively affected by Apple’s changes, but companies that do not have algorithms to deal with these changes are in a more difficult situation.
The decline in Meta’s shares also negatively affected other social media companies such as Twitter, Snap and Pinterest.
But Snap’s shares rose 60 percent for the first time on the company’s quarterly profit announcement.