Facebook fall record due to sudden disappointing growth

Suddenly, he fell hard. On Thursday, Facebook's share price fell after disappointing quarterly results of nearly 20%. This means that the market value of about $ 120 billion has evaporated, about four times the total market value of the Twitter competitor. According to the Bloomberg news agency, this is by far the biggest drop in value in a day on the US stock market.

Investors were shocked by the company's prospects, which had to be drastically reduced. The growth of new users worldwide has fallen below 13% in recent months. A growth of which many companies would be satisfied, but in a company like Facebook, where huge expectations have been taken into account in the market value, it is different. In the United States, the number of users has remained the same and in Europe it has even declined.

Immunized against scandals

Facebook seemed long sheltered from scandals. The continual controversies over data misuse, false news and privacy breaches have virtually nothing financially enabled the company. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March, when data from millions of members were diverted for political campaigns, the rate recovered very quickly. After a short bath, the last weeks have even broken record after record, as if nothing had happened. But the atmosphere has changed.

It is difficult to establish a direct link between the disappointing accumulation and the scandals of the last few months. The technology company itself has always said that it has noticed few calls to users to remove their Facebook account, which have been made in various international media outlets. What is striking, though, is that in the United States and Europe, where the greatest attention has been given to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the growth is the weakest.

It is also noteworthy that Facebook directors, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, the epidemic of "Cambridge Analytica" sold about 4.1 billion shares. In 2017, they sold for about $ 4.3 billion. Yet Thursday was an expensive day for Zuckerberg: he lost about $ 15 billion.