Pinterest shares rose more than 8% in morning trading while Snap stock rose over 9% on Thursday after strong results from online advertising competitor Meta Platforms.
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. rose by 20% in morning trading after reporting improving conditions that point to signs of recovery for the social-media giant, which has weathered privacy restrictions and growing competition from rival TikTok.
Meta said it would buy back an additional $40 billion in shares this year, reduced its estimate for costs and said revenue from January to March would reach as high as $28.5 billion. That would exceed the company's sales in the first quarter of 2021, right before Apple Inc. introduced privacy measures that curtailed revenue by cutting off the company's access to data. Meta last year began laying off employees after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company hired too aggressively.
On Wednesday, Meta reported quarterly revenue of $32.2 billion, or a drop of 4.5% compared with a year ago and the third consecutive quarter of declining sales. Still, the sales figure was ahead of Wall Street estimates.
Growing competition from TikTok, the tough economic climate and the fallout from Apple's ad-tracking changes in 2021 weighed on the digital ad market, denting results for Meta and others. Snap Inc. on Tuesday predicted a plunge of as much as 10% in sales for the current quarter.
Meta posted a net profit of $4.7 billion for the fourth quarter against the $6 billion analysts surveyed by FactSet were expecting. The latest number represented a 55% decline from the year-ago period, but rose from the three months through September. That snapped a streak of three quarters in which Meta's profit had retreated from the prior quarter -- a slump the company hadn't experienced in a decade.