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Mired in controversy, doubling disappointing results, Facebook saw its stock market value fall by 119 billion dollars Thursday, never seen on Wall Street.
The action of the first social network in the world has unscrewed Thursday from the first trade on Wall Street and this dizzying movement continued throughout the day.
At the close , the title was worth 176.26 dollars, a fall of 19%. This is the largest valuation loss ever recorded in a Wall Street session.
The fall is all the harder as the stock has recently moved to very high levels: it is therefore likely that the stock has also undergone large profit-taking.
Facebook has indeed literally sounded the markets Wednesday by publishing a turnover – below expectations although up 42% to $ 13.2 billion – and making a dark forecast for the rest of the year. Another disappointing and highly observed element: the number of users, lower than expected.
– Several factors –
Its leaders were bluntly, the slowdown in growth – due to a combination of factors– already observed in the second quarter, will continue significantly in the next quarters.
According to Facebook, this slowdown results in part from a new approach to personal data and security-the heart of the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal that broke out March – but Mark Zuckerberg's group also recognizes the limits of growth through advertising, which provides almost all of its revenues.
"We invest 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 blazon of Facebook in the aftermath of the case CA.
The group warned in fact for two years that its growth will eventually slow, for lack of advertising space available on the network, completely saturated in this area.
Goldman Sachs badysts expect revenue growth to slow to + 35% year-on-year in the third quarter and even to + 29% in the last quarter, far from the 49% recorded in the first quarter. [19659003] Evidence of the catastrophic effect of these announcements, badyst Brent Thill (Jefferies & Co.) had noted Wednesday just after the publication that "many investors (had) struggling to understand the slowdown (…) It looks like its magnitude is unprecedented. "
But some badysts called Thursday to relativize because the slowdown was predictable and Facebook is still essential for the public and especially advertisers.
RBC badysts recalled and that the group "still holds two of the world's largest social media (Facebook and Instagram) and the two largest messaging services (Messenger and WhatsApp)", the latter two still having potential for growth while there is has no major changes in the opinion of advertisers as to the attractiveness of Facebook platforms.
For Richard Windsor, an badyst at Radio Free Mobile, these prospects can not be surprising: "it has become increasingly more difficult to grow at such high rates when a 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 spotted by artificial intelligence.
– Back to reality –
Some badysts said the group may have simply warned of the worst possible scenario.
"The company has a history of readjusting revenue growth and planned spending, only to take a step back and exceed those expectations in the next quarter," said Gene Munster of Loup Ventures.
BTIG badyst Richard Greenfield trusts Facebook: "The mobile phone is conquering the world and Facebook is in the center to take advantage of this change," he says.
The fall is all the more brutal as Facebook seemed almost invulnerable until Wednesday, investors seeming to ignore the concerns related to the scandal of personal data that leaked to the British firm Cambridge Analytica, and all investigations in progress.
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