3. Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 225
Earlier this year Jim Cramer said in a program praised Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)’s “breathtaking” quarterly report and said that stock had more room to run. Cramer said that his charitable trust owns a position in Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META).
Cramer praised Mark Zuckerberg’s use of AI to reinvigorate growth at Instagram and Facebook, which were facing a downward trend in usage, according to Cramer. People were not checking their feeds and they were not posting content on these platforms. Zuckerberg then decided to use AI to improve these platforms’ ranking and recommendation systems, according to Cramer. Cramer said only Microsoft is doing more with AI “although Mark may be doing more, to tell you the truth.”
Cramer referred to Q2 earnings call of Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) where Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the company’s AI plans. Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg had said:
“Investments that we’ve made over the years in AI, including the billions of dollars we’ve spent on AI infrastructure are clearly paying-off across our ranking and recommendation systems and improving engagement and monetization. AI recommended content from accounts you don’t follow is now the fastest-growing category of content on Facebook’s feed. Now, since introducing these recommendations, they’ve driven a 7% increase in overall time spent on the platform. This improves the experience because you can now discover things that you might not have otherwise followed or come across. Reels is a key part of this discovery engine and Reels plays exceed 200 billion per day across Facebook and Instagram. We’re seeing good progress on Reels monetization as well with the annual revenue run-rate across our apps now exceeding $10 billion, up from $3 billion last fall.
Beyond Reels, AI is driving results across our monetization tools, through our automated ads products, which we call Meta Advantage. Almost all our advertisers are using at least one of our AI driven products. We’ve also deployed Meta Lattice, a new model architecture that learns to predict an ads performance across a variety of datasets and optimization goals. And we introduced AI Sandbox, a testing playground for generative AI powered tools like automatic text variation, background generation and image outcropping. Business messaging is another key piece of our monetization strategy and we recently announced that the 200 million users of our WhatsApp Business app will now be able to create Click-to-WhatsApp ads for Facebook and Instagram without needing a Facebook account.”
Read the full earnings call transcript here.
As of the end of the second quarter of 2023, 225 hedge funds out of the 910 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey had stakes in Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META). The biggest stakeholder of Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) was Chase Coleman and Feroz Dewan’s Tiger Global Management LLC which owns a $2.5 billion stake in the company.
Artisan Global Value Fund made the following comment about Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in its Q2 2023 investor letter:
“Our best performing stocks this quarter were Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META), Alphabet and Heidelberg Materials. Meta was the largest contributor to performance. Its shares have almost fully recovered from last year’s declines, rising 35% during the quarter and 138% YTD. During the quarter, the company reported earnings that showed a return to growth and healthy user engagement metrics. Most importantly, profitability appears to have stabilized and is poised to improve as significant cost reduction actions implemented over the past six months begin to have an impact. Separate from fundamental performance, there is excitement over AI’s potential to help the company’s business. While Meta’s technology prowess and massively scaled media platform certainly position the company to take advantage of AI, we believe it’s far too early to estimate any discrete tangible benefits. Overall, we view AI as one of several drivers that will contribute to Meta’s continued growth.”
