Facebook owner Meta said it will pay its first dividend as three of the world’s biggest tech companies post bumper numbers.
In an announcement last night, the social media giant proposed a $0.50 per share dividend, a big boost for investors.
It came as Meta booked sales of £106bn for 2023, up 16 per cent on the previous year.
Profits rose by a quarter to £31 billion.
The company, which owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook in addition to Facebook, said it now plans to pay a cash dividend on a quarterly basis.
In an announcement last night, social media giant Meta proposed a $0.50 per share divi, a big boost for investors.
With the dividend announcement, founder Mark Zuckerberg completes the so-called ‘year of efficiency’, in which the group laid off 21,000 employees and canceled several innovative projects.
The company now has approximately 67,000 employees worldwide, a fifth fewer than the year before.
Meta shares rose 14 percent in after-hours trading after the announcement.
But it wasn’t just Facebook that got a boost.
Amazon also posted great figures for the year, with sales of £451 billion in 2023.
This was up from the £403bn it made last year and came after sales reached £133bn in the Christmas quarter.
Annual profits for the full year were £24 billion.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said, “This fourth quarter was a record-breaking holiday shopping season, capping off a robust 2023 for Amazon.”
Amazon had also cut 28,000 jobs in 2023 as it pulled back from its hiring spree during the pandemic.
According to data tracker Layoffs.fyi, the technology sector will shed a total of 262,595 jobs over the course of 2023.
Meanwhile, Apple, which avoided major job cuts last year, posted a strong first quarter.
This was largely supported by sales of its iPhone and strong growth in its services business, which also includes the Apple TV streaming service.
The tech giant posted a turnover of £94 billion in the three months to the end of December, while profits were £27 billion.
The results come on the heels of fellow ‘Magnificent Seven’ members Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft, both of which posted their own quarterly results this week.
Alphabet reported its fastest quarter of revenue growth since the start of 2022, with revenues of £67.7 billion for the three months to the end of December – up 13 percent from a year earlier, boosted by its cloud computing business.
But advertising remained a sore point, with stiff competition from platforms like Facebook, Tiktok and Amazon, and a tough economic backdrop.
Microsoft, which recently became the world’s most valuable company – topping out at $3 trillion – posted record sales of £49 billion in the three months to December, thanks to growing demand for AI and cloud technology.