Live: Will Meta Platforms Rally After Q4 Earnings Tonight?

There was speculation Meta would announce subscriptions during its conference call tonight. Justin Post from BofA Securities asked about whether the company would explore areas like subscriptions. Here’s what Meta had to say (transcript via S&P Capital IQ):

Justin Post BofA Securities, Research Division

A couple, maybe one for Mark and one for Susan. It just seems like you’re going to have a tremendous amount of capacity. How do you think about expanding your opportunities beyond ads, things like subscriptions or licensing cloud models? Just with all the interesting things you’re building, I don’t expect any product announcements, but can you do things beyond ads?

And then for Susan, it’s really interesting to see the acceleration even [ ex FX in ] advertising. I’m just wondering if you’re seeing a general acceleration in e-commerce activity, where do you think the dollars are coming from? And is the entire Internet ecosystem accelerating? I’m just wondering your thoughts on that.

Mark Zuckerberg Chief Executive Officer

So yes, we are focused on things beyond ads, I think the numbers make it so that for the next couple of years, ads are going to be, by far, the most important driver of growth in our business. So that’s why, as we’re working on this, we have a balance of new things that we’re trying to do, while also investing very heavily and making sure that all of the work that we’re doing in AI improves both the quality and business performance of the core apps and businesses that we run there.

But yes, I mean, we’ll have more to share on that. But I mean all these things, even if they scale very quickly are going to take some time to be meaningful at the scale of what the ads business is. And while we’re doing that, we’re just very focused on also delivering more value to businesses and more quality in the apps that we run ads in.

Susan J. Li Chief Financial Officer

Justin, on your second question, we saw healthy year-over-year growth across all verticals in Q4 with the exception of politics as we lapped the U.S. presidential election last year. The online commerce vertical was the largest contributor to year-over-year growth. That was followed by professional services and technology. So in online commerce, year-over-year growth was strong. It was actually relatively consistent with Q3 levels and that was broad-based across advertiser regions and sizes. In general, we saw that the demand leading up to the holiday shopping period that’s sustained through Cyber 5 and into the end of the year was very healthy for us.

Professional services in this category, we saw a strong broad-based growth of nice contributions from lead generation ads due to product improvements we’ve made, including from Advantage+ lead campaigns that we fully rolled out at the start of Q4 and the tech vertical continues to be strong for us, too, again, broad-based across advertiser regions and sizes. So in general, I would say it was very healthy, broadly growing growth.

Meta touched on how they’re achieving more productivity per employee on their conference call today.

“We speak a lot about how AI is improving our products, but I’d like to take a moment to give an update on how it’s changing the way we work. Mark mentioned our focus on making Meta a place where individuals can have significant impact. A big focus of this is to enable the adoption and advancement of our AI coding tools where we’re seeing strong momentum. Since the beginning of 2025, we’ve seen a 30% increase in output per engineer with the majority of that growth coming from the adoption of agenetic coding, which saw a big jump in Q4. We’re seeing even stronger gains with power users of AI coding tools, whose output has increased 80% year-over-year. We expect this growth to accelerate through the next half.“

Meta has finished up the prepared remarks in their conference call and is now taking questions from Wall Street. Shares are currently up 9%.

Meta shares just keep rising after hours. Shares are now up 10.3% despite their massive raise in capital expenditures this year.

Remember: Meta shares were initially down after releasing earnings. The company’s earnigns call is focusing on all the areas Wall Street wants to see, such as efficiency.

Meta shares are now up an incredible 8.3% after-hours.

The company’s conference call just kicked off at 4:30 p.m. ET. Here are the three main reasons that shares are soaring after-hours.

1. A Solid Q4 Beat: EPS of $8.88 last quarter came in significantly ahead of expectations. Prediction markets were forecasting only an 84% chance Meta would exceed Wall Street’s target of $8.19, but the company easily exceeded last quarter’s consensus.
2. Massive Acceleration in Q1: Meta also forecast $55 billion in sales next quarter at the mindpoint, that’s a significant revenue acceleration that takes Meta to 30% growth in Q1. The main ‘bear argument’ of Meta’s quarter was their projection of $115 billion to $135 billion in capital expenditures this quarter. If Meta is going to spend that much, it needs to be backed up by revenue beats, which the company just forecast.
3. Operating Income Will Grow in 2026: Despite massive investments in AI, Meta is still forecasting that 2026 operating income will increase over 2025’s levels. That discipline is important to Wall Street.

Meta shares are now up 5.4% after-hours after initially dropping.

• Revenue growth of 24% came in ahead of Wall Street’s expectations of 22% growth.
• Daily Active Users grew 6.9%
• Most importantly, the company’s guidance of $55 billion in Q1 revenue (at the midpoint) absolutely smashed Wall Street’s expectations. This guide implies 30% revenue growth in Q1.

The bottom line: growth is accelerating which is allowing Wall Street to overlook ambitious capital expenditure plans.

As of 4:19 p.m. ET, Meta shares are up 3.6%.

It appears that the company will rise despite the absolutely massive increase to its capital expenditure plans.

META | Meta Platforms, Inc. Q4’25 Earnings Highlights:

• Adj. EPS: $8.88 (Est. $8.20) [✅]; UP +11% YoY
• Revenue: $59.89B  [✅]; UP +24% YoY
• Net Income: $22.77B (Est. $X.XB) [✅]; UP +9% YoY

Outlook:

• Revenue: $53.5-56.5B [✅]
  • Our guidance assumes foreign currency is an approximately 4% tailwind to year-over-year total revenue growth, based on current exchange rates.
  • We expect full-year 2026 total expenses to be in the range of $162-169 billion, driven primarily by infrastructure costs and employee compensation.

Q4 Segment Performance:

• Family of Apps Revenue: $58.94B [✅]; UP +24% YoY
• Reality Labs Revenue: $0.96B  [✅]; DOWN -12% YoY

Other Key Q4 Metrics:

• Adj. Operating Income: $24.75B [✅]; UP +6% YoY
• Adj. Operating Expenses: $35.15B  [✅]; UP +40% YoY
• R&D Expenses: $17.14B [✅]; UP +40% YoY
• Free Cash Flow: $14.08B; UP +7% YoY
• Effective Tax Rate: 10% (vs. 12% YoY)
• Capital Expenditures: $22.14B; UP +53% YoY
• Cash, Cash Equivalents, and Marketable Securities: $81.59B as of December 31, 2025
• Long-term Debt: $58.74B as of December 31, 2025
• Headcount: 78,865 as of December 31, 2025; UP +6% YoY

CEO Commentary:

• Mark Zuckerberg: “We had strong business performance in 2025. I’m looking forward to advancing personal superintelligence for people around the world in 2026.”

CFO Commentary:

•  “We expect first quarter 2026 total revenue to be in the range of $53.5-56.5 billion. The majority of expense growth will be driven by infrastructure costs, which includes third-party cloud spend, higher depreciation, and higher infrastructure operating expenses.”

Wow, this has been a big reversal! After initially dropping on the capital expenditure numbers we listed earlier, Meta shares are now up more than 3%.

The good news is that despite this massive surge in capital expenditures, Meta expects improving operating profits in 2025.

Revenue guidance for Q1 of $55 billion is also helping after hours as that number significantly outpaces Wall Street’s expectations.

Meta’s results were very strong with EPS of $8.88 (versus expectations of $8.18).

Revenue of $59.89 also exceeded expectations.

Advertising revenue exceeded expectations.

So why is Meta falling? Its capital expenditure figures for 2026 are massive at $115 billion to $135 billion. That’s significantly above estimates.

And it’s an immediate drop. The company beat on EPS and revenue.

We’ll continue updating with more analysis.

We’re just 10 minutes from Meta’s earnings, here are a few key areas to watch for when they report:

• Do They Beat Last Quarter’s EPS Number: Wall Street is looking for about $8.18 in adjusted profits.
• Where Does Ad Growth Land: Wall Street is looking for 22% growth.
• What Margins Does the Company Report: Investors are expecting margins to decrease throughout 2026, what commentary willt he company provide?
• What’s the Cap Ex Update: All eyes will be on how much Meta plans to spend this year.

We expect Meta earnings to be released at 4:05 p.m. ET.

The moment they hit newswires we’ll begin updating this live blog with news and analysis.

Prediction markets are giving Meta an 84% chance of beating earnings tonight. That might sound strong, but Microsoft is currently at 93%, the same odds as IBM.

The company with the lowest odds of beating earnings tonight is Tesla. The company has just a 40% chance of beating earnings on Polymarket.

Meta’s odds started the day at 91%, but have slipped. It’s worth noting that only around $20,000 has been place on predictions around Meta’s earnings, so this isn’t an extremely liquid market.