Meta Heralds AR and AI Traction

Meta's Reality Labs unit grew revenue by 29% in the third quarter to 270 million US dollars, driven by sales of its mixed reality headsets and smart glasses. Reality Labs' expenses were 4.7 billion dollars, up 19% year-over-year driven primarily by higher headcount and infrastructure costs.

Mark Zukerberg, CEO of Meta, said "demand for [Ray Ban Meta smart] glasses continues to be very strong. The new clear edition that we released at Connect sold out almost immediately and has been trading online for over a thousand dollars. We've deepened our partnership with EssilorLuxottica to build future generations of smart eyewear that deliver both cutting-edge technology and style." 

Meta also said Reality Labs has "evolved [its] roadmaps to respond to the earlier-than expected success of smart glasses," which now support AI functionality. The company plans to significantly scale up its generative AI infrastructure capacity, "while also prioritising its fungibility."   It anticipates full year 2024 capex will be in the range of 38-40 billion dollars, updated from the prior range of 37-40 billion dollars. Meta also expects significant capex growth in 2025. 

Meta said its Llama large language model (LLM) is seeing strong momentum, with Llama token usage growing exponentially this year (LLMs decompose text into tokens - words, character sets or combinations of words and punctuation). It has just released Llama 3.2 and is developing Llama 4. 

"We're training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100s or bigger than anything that I've seen reported for what others are doing," Zuckerberg claimed. "I expect that the smaller Llama 4 models will be ready first, and they’ll be ready, we expect sometime early next year, and I think that they're going to be a big deal on several fronts -- new modalities, capabilities, stronger reasoning, and much faster." Source: Meta

Waymo Reports Rapid Growth

Alphabet reported that its self-driving ride hailing unit has increased the number of paid rides it provides  by 50% since August. Each week, Waymo is driving more than one million fully autonomous miles and serves over 150,000 paid rides, Alphabet said. The Other Bets unit (in which Waymo is the largest component) increased revenues by 31% to 388 million US dollars, while making a loss of 1.1 billion dollars.

"Through its expanded network and operations partnership with Uber in Austin and Atlanta, plus a new multi-year partnership with Hyundai, Waymo will bring fully autonomous driving to more people and places," said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet. "By developing a universal driver, Waymo has multiple paths to market. And with its sixth-generation system, Waymo has significantly reduced unit costs without compromising safety." He went on to say that the pace at which Waymo can launch in a new city is accelerating. 

Alphabet also reported that its Lens augmented reality app is now used for over 20 billion visual searches per month. It added that one in four of these searches have commercial intent.  Source: Alphabet

Tesla Expects Energy Storage Deployments to Double

Reporting a 2% year-on-year uptick in automotive revenues for the third quarter, Tesla said that it is on-track to deliver more affordable electric vehicles starting in the first half of 2025. As a result, CEO Elon Musk posited Tesla could achieve a 20% to 30% increase in vehicle sales in 2025.

Tesla also reported a 52% year-on-year rise in energy generation and storage revenues to 2.4 billion US dollars for the third quarter of 2024. The company expects energy storage deployments to more than double year-over-year in 2024.

Tesla reported that Powerwall (a home battery that stores energy generated by solar or from the grid) achieved record deployments in the quarter, although shipments of Megapacks (a large scale energy storage solution for organisations) declined sequentially. 

Still "ramp of Powerwall 3 and the Lathrop Megafactory continued successfully – with Lathrop demonstrating 200 Megapack production (40 GWh annual run rate) in a single week," Tesla said. "As of Q3, over 100,000 Powerwalls were enrolled in Virtual Power Plant programs, delivering additional financial value to owners while providing much needed support to the grid during periods of stress. The Shanghai Megafactory remains on track to begin shipping Megapacks in Q1 2025."  Source: Tesla investor relations

Deutsche Telekom Flags Growth Opportunities

Deutsche Telekom is targeting 4% annual growth in service revenues between 2023 and 207, compared with estimated 3.6% growth between 2020 and 2024. It is also aiming for a return on capital employed (ROCE) of 9% (after tax) in 2027 compared with 9% in 2023 and 4.5% in 2022, as it looks to raise free cash flow to 21 billion euros in 2027 from approximately 19 billion euros in 2024.

Between 2020 to 2027, Telecom Deutschland is aiming to double its ROCE and "move from hardly any fiber to close to 40% of the country being fiberised," said Srinivasan Gopalan, member of the management board, responsible for Germany. 

The telco is also looking to increase its share of the German TV market from 13% today to 20% in 2027. "Magenta TV, with the plethora of streaming services, customers are looking for a simple aggregator. Magenta TV has filled that need, which is why it's one of our fastest-growing categories right now," added Gopalan, while Wolfgang Metze, managing director of private customers, described TV as "an important piece in our strategy and key to emotionalize our best infrastructures."

Elsewhere in Europe, Deutsche Telekom is looking to scale its "instant payment solution, Payzy, which is already on the market in Greece for two years," to other European countries, noted Yvette Dominique Leroy, member of the management board, responsible for Europe.  "Based on our market research and customer feedback, insurance is really something which they naturally would like to get as a service from us," she added. "The last piece here is personally my favourite is the Wi-Fi Sensing, whereas we actually try, with the help of team, to bring a product to the market where we can actually give further peace of mind of our customers when it comes to home security and also taking care of their elderly member of the families." Source: Deutsche Telekom Capital Markets day