Meta Hits Competitive Headwinds

After announcing revenue growth of 21% (at constant currencies) for the fourth quarter of 2021, Meta forecast revenue growth of just 3% to 11% for the current quarter. That would equate to first quarter 2022 total revenue to be between 27 billion and 29 billion US dollars.

Meta (owner of Facebook) expects year-over-year growth in the first quarter to be impacted by headwinds to both [ad] impression and price growth.  "On the impressions side, we expect continued headwinds from both increased competition for people’s time and a shift of engagement within our apps towards video surfaces like Reels, which monetise at lower rates than Feed and Stories," explained Dave Wehner, CFO. "On the pricing side, we expect growth to be negatively impacted by ... Apple’s iOS changes ... and regulatory changes....and we’re hearing from advertisers that macroeconomic challenges like cost inflation and supply chain disruptions are impacting advertiser budgets." Source: Meta collateral

Qualcomm Lifted by 5G and IoT

Chip supplier Qualcomm reported a 30% year-on-year rise in revenues for the quarter ending December 26th to 10.7 billion US dollars. QCT revenues (from sales of chips, rather than licensing) rose 35%. Qualcomm anticipates revenues of between 10.2 billion and 11 billion dollars in the current quarter, which would represent an increase of between 29% and 39%.

Qualcomm estimated that shipments of 3G, 4G and 5G handsets grew 7% in calendar 2021, including approximately 535 million 5G handsets. For calendar 2022, the chip designer anticipates sales of more than 750 million 5G handsets.

Qualcomm reported IoT revenue growth of 41% year-over-year in the quarter ending December 26th across consumer, edge networking and industrial. "In consumer IoT, our early investments, collaboration with Microsoft and the recent acquisition of NUVIA uniquely positions us to drive the PC industry transition to ARM-based computing for next-generation connected laptops," Qualcomm said. "We're also seeing strong growth in premium and high-tier Android tablets, further highlighting the convergence of mobile and PC."

The company also reported that its "Wi-Fi 6 immersive home platforms" are seeing significant growth in China, one of the fastest-growing markets for Wi-Fi 6 for both retail and carrier deployments. It also said that "5G as wireless fiber" continues to gain scale and expand globally, while combined smart utility meter, tracking robotics and retail revenues more than doubled over the past year. Source: Qualcomm collateral

Vodafone Pleased with Performance

 

Vodafone reported organic revenue growth of 3.7% year-on-year for the quarter ending December 31st to 11.69 billion euros.  It said that service revenues grew 0.5% in Europe and 4.4% in Africa. Source: Vodafone collateral.

Alphabet on Cloud Nine

For the fourth quarter of 2021, Alphabet reported a 33% increase in consolidated revenues to 75.3 billion US dollars in constant currency. In the fourth quarter, Google Cloud revenue grew 45% year-over-year to 5.5 billion dollars, while YouTube advertising revenue grew 25% to 8.6 billion dollars.

Alphabet said YouTube has just hit 5 trillion all-time views and now generates 15 billion views each day globally.  The group also said its "Other Bets" division, which includes self-driving car start-up Waymo, made an operating loss of 5.3 billion dollars in 2021, compared with 4.5 billion in 2020. Source: Alphabet collateral