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If You Invested $1000 in Meta Platforms 10 Years Ago, This Is How Much You'd Have Now

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How much a stock's price changes over time is important for most investors, since price performance can both impact your investment portfolio and help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

Another factor that can influence investors is FOMO, or the fear of missing out, especially with tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in Meta Platforms (META - Free Report) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to META for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

Meta Platforms' Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at Meta Platforms' main business drivers.

Meta Platforms is the world’s largest social media platform. The company’s portfolio offering evolved from a single Facebook app to multiple apps like photo and video sharing app Instagram and WhatsApp messaging app owing to acquisitions. Along with in-house developed Messenger, these apps now form Meta’s family of products used by almost 3.81 billion people on a monthly basis as of Mar 31, 2023.

Meta uses metrics like daily active users (DAUs) and monthly active users (MAUs) to measure Facebook’s user base. As of Mar 31, 2023, DAUs and MAUs were 2.037 billion and 2.989 billion, respectively. Newly introduced metric, which is the family daily active people (DAP) that measures daily users of its family of products, was 3.02 billion.  

Headquartered in Menlo Park, CA, Meta generated revenues worth $116.61 billion in 2022. Advertisement accounted for 97.5% of revenues. Marketers buy ads that can appear on multiple platforms including Meta, Instagram, Messenger and third-party applications and websites.

Meta, thanks to its huge user base gained a significant market share in the advertising space wherein it faces tough competition from Google, Twitter, Amazon and Snapchat-parent Snap.

Meta also faces significant competition from the likes of Apple (messaging), YouTube (advertising and video), Bytedance (social media) and Tencent (messaging and social media).

Meta core app enables people to connect, share, discover and communicate with one other on mobile devices and personal computers. User engagement on core Meta platform is fostered by News Feed that displays an algorithmically-ranked series of stories and advertisements customized for each user.

Instagram is a community for sharing photos, videos and messages, enabling people to discover interests that they care about. People can express themselves through photos, videos and private messaging via Instagram Feed and Stories.

Messenger helps people to connect with friends, family, groups and businesses across platforms and devices. WhatsApp is a simple, reliable and secure messaging application, used by people and businesses around the world to communicate in a private way.

Meta also offers virtual reality (VR) products through its Oculus division.

Bottom Line

Anyone can invest, but building a successful investment portfolio takes a combination of a few things: research, patience, and a little bit of risk. So, if you had invested in Meta Platforms a decade ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today.

A $1000 investment made in July 2013 would be worth $11,981.53, or a gain of 1,098.15%, as of July 7, 2023, according to our calculations. This return excludes dividends but includes price appreciation.

Compare this to the S&P 500's rally of 170.34% and gold's return of 46.85% over the same time frame.

Looking ahead, analysts are expecting more upside for META.

Meta shares have outperformed the industry year to date. It is benefiting from steady user growth across all regions, particularly Asia Pacific. Increased engagement for its offerings like Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook has been a major growth driver. The company is leveraging AI to recommend content which is driving traffic in Instagram and Facebook. Its restructuring plan is expected to reduce expenses driving profitability. However, challenging macroeconomic conditions is negatively impacting Meta’s advertising revenues. Unfavorable forex, targeting and measurement headwinds due to Apple’s iOS changes are headwinds. Meta’s second-quarter guidance reflects macroeconomic and forex concerns. The company continues to expect Reality Labs operating losses to increase year-over-year in 2023.

The stock is up 10.36% over the past four weeks, and no earnings estimate has gone lower in the past two months, compared to 3 higher, for fiscal 2023. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.

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