Facebook and the reasons why its collapse occurred on the stock market | Trade | Economy | Business

2018 is not a good year for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, the company he co-founded and directs

After the data leaks scandal of thousands of people. users of the social network to the company Cambridge Analytica and criticism for its inability to fight against the spread of false news now the opposite comes from the stock market.

Facebook shares fell on Thursday after the company announced to investors that their rate of profit was falling while that of spending rose

In total, their shares lost nearly 19% of their value , which translates into a loss of more than 120,000 million US dollars the largest in history for a single-day company

This fall also brought down the # 39, index Nasdaq which closed down 1%. 19659006] ZUCKERBERG WARNING

"It is We invest so much in security that this will have a significant impact on our profits" warned Mark Zuckerberg at the end of this Wednesday.

"The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was an important moment for our industry.We saw a decrease of about a million people in the number of active users per month in Europe ", he added.

The company said it expects to increase its spending by 50% or more in its attempt to improve content monitoring, explore advertisers and process user data, areas in which it has been submitted to the review of the regulators.

In addition, the company predicts that profit growth will be affected when people start using new options to limit advertising.

Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, said its growth forecast for the remainder of the year will be reduced to a 30% margin, compared with 44% in the final quarter.

RISK OF CONTAGIO?

Although Facebook's annual earnings growth was more than 40%, nervousness seemed to extend to the Twitter values ​​that faced Facebook-like reviews, which will release its quarterly results on Friday, closed Thursday with a 3% drop. 19659015] Other companies have been more resilient.

Alphabet, owner of Google and YouTube, which also depends on digital advertising, ends the day with a drop of less than 1%, while Spotify increases by nearly 4.5%

UNIQUE FACTORS [19659015] Many of the factors that affect Facebook are unique to the company, said Daniel Ives, director of strategy for GBH Insights.

The social network was subjected to an examination after learning that it did not prevent the filtering of data from millions of users at the British company Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook has also changed the wall appearance of its users, highlighting family and friends posts about those businesses or Ganisations, something that Zuckerberg has already noticed would affect the benefits.

BTIG Research badyst Richard Greenfield thought investors reacted in exaggerated form.

"We were pretty stressed during the Facebook conference and " From his point of view, Facebook is still a great opportunity for advertisers and the investments he's making today will translate into by greater growth in the long term, "he said, term

" The mobile is eating the world and Facebook is a company to benefit from this change. "

But for Daniel Ives, the # 39, the future of the social network is not so encouraging: "(Facebook) offered a very disappointing forecast for the second part of this year and 2019 and this will have a significant weight on stocks short term. "

Dave Lee, the BBC's tech correspondent in San Francisco, understands the most optimistic and pessimistic

" In general, it seems that people are not abandoning Facebook. " 39 monthly active users – that is, those who interact at least once a month – remain stable in the United States, have declined slightly in Europe and are increasing in the rest of the world, "he said. he said – a company that is accustomed to these growing numbers throughout the year, the lack of significant growth worries, if not panic. "

LESS RICH

Thursday's bad data personally affect Zuckerberg himself, who in one day lost nearly 16 billion US dollars

which made him fall twice on the list of billionaires of the world of Forbes: he went down from fourth to sixth place behind Spanish fashion mogul Amancio Ortega. American businessman Warren Buffett

Zuckerberg is now 81.9 billion US dollars "poorer" than Jeff Bezos founder and president of Amazon, which is always in the lead