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The action of the first social network in the world unscrewed Thursday from the first trade on Wall Street.
Around 16H40 GMT, the title was worth 177.44 dollars, a drop of 18.40%. At this level, this equates to a loss of more than 115 billion dollars in market capitalization, which would be a record.
This abysmal fall comes after the publication of disappointing results in the second quarter while its officials warned that the slowdown should continue.
Group Financial Director Dave Wehner warned in a conference call with badysts that revenue growth had already "slowed down" in the second quarter and would continue to slow significantly in the coming quarters.
Evidence of the catastrophic effect of these announcements, badyst Brent Thill (Jefferies & Co.) noted during this call that "many investors are struggling to understand the slowdown (…). its magnitude is unprecedented. "
According to Facebook, this slowdown results in part from a new approach to personal data and security – the heart of the scandal Cambridge Analytica (CA) that broke out in mid-March – but the Mark Zuckerberg's group also seemed to recognize the limits of growth through advertising, which provides almost all of its revenues.
Need for Humans
For Richard Windsor, an badyst at Radio Free Mobile, these prospects should not be surprising.
"It has become increasingly difficult to grow at such high rates when group reaches this size, "he writes on his blog.
The badyst adds that Facebook is forced to recruit more staff to handle tasks such as filtering inappropriate content not identified by artificial intelligence.
"Weaknesses in AI force (Facebook) to continue to hire humans to do the work that machines are unable to do," he says.
For Brian Wieser, expert at Pivotal Research , Facebook seems to have reached a "ceiling" in revenue growth through advertising.
Ross Gerber, an badyst at Gerber Kawasaki, sees in these figures the proof that the wind is turning for social networks. "They have reached their peak," he tweeted
The disappointment
Until Wednesday, the action of Facebook had reached records. Investors appeared to ignore concerns over the personal data scandal, including investigations into the leak of such information to the British firm Cambridge Analytica (CA).
But the results disappointed.
Turnover well that up 42% to $ 13.2 billion is below badysts' expectations. With 2.23 billion monthly active users, Facebook is barely more than the end of March and, again, it is less than anticipated by the markets.
"We are investing so much in our security systems that it will start to affect our profitability, we are starting to see it this quarter," tried to justify Mark Zuckerberg, after spending months trying to restore Facebook blazon in the aftermath of the case CA.
Some badysts were nevertheless rather rebaduring, explaining that the group may have simply warned of the worst possible scenario.
"The company has a history of readjustment of growth in sales and forecast spending, only to take the opposite direction and exceed these expectations in the next quarter, "said Gene Munster, Loup Ventures, in a note.
BTIG badyst Richard Greenfield trusts Facebook despite these pessimistic predictions: "Mobile phones conquer the world and Facebook is in the center to take advantage of this change."
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