Meta shares surge after tech giant reports $13.5bn profit

The California-based tech giant said that it expected revenue in the third quarter to come in at between $38.5bn and $41bn.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has reported a higher-than-expected profit of $13.5bn for the most recent quarter, sending its shares nearly 7 percent higher.

Revenue in the April-June period came in at $39bn, above market expectations and up 22 percent compared with the previous year, Meta said in its latest earnings report on Wednesday.

The California-based tech giant said that it expected revenue in the third quarter to come in at between $38.5bn and $41bn.

“We had a strong quarter, and Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

“We’ve released the first frontier-level open source AI model, we continue to see good traction with our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, and we’re driving good growth across our apps.”

Meta’s strong performance comes after several of the tech giants that make up the “magnificent seven” mega-cap stocks reported mixed results.

Microsoft’s stock price plunged as much as 8 percent on Tuesday after the company reported lacklustre growth of its Azure cloud computing services despite revenues rising 15 percent year-over-year.

Google parent company Alphabet and Tesla also failed to satisfy investors with earnings reports last week showing YouTube advertising revenues and car sales, respectively, falling short of expectations.