Facebook is now called Meta. The company behind social media services like Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook has rebranded itself to advertise a world where meeting up in the real world can be substituted or at least supplemented by extended reality solutions like VR and AR. This is most likely part of a strategy to shift awareness from recent revelations by whistleblower Frances Haugen and ongoing anti-trust investigations towards a seemingly brighter future. When it comes to revenue generation, this vision of the future might come sooner rather than later for Meta.
When comparing the earnings of GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) of the first nine months of 2020 with those of the first nine months of 2021, Mark Zuckerberg’s company emerges as a clear winner in terms of growth, increasing its revenue by 45 percent to $84.2 billion year over year. Alphabet boasts an identical growth percentage, although the revenue numbers are in a completely different ballpark. Google’s parent company earned almost $100 billion more than its competitor, putting it firmly into third place after Amazon and Apple. Across the board, almost every company managed to increase the percentage of growth year over year. For Apple, this can be attributed to the tech giant releasing its newest iPhone two weeks before the end of its fiscal quarter, which boosted last-minute sales, while in the case of Microsoft, the increasing importance of cloud services was one of the main drivers for its revenue growth.
The only company that couldn’t improve on its growth percentage was Amazon. Of course, this did in no way break Jeff Bezos’ bank, but the decrease in growth from 35 to 27 percent can be seen as symptomatic for supply chain interruptions and Amazon’s marketplace services becoming less important due to the easing of restrictions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic across major markets.
This chart shows revenue growth for selected tech companies in the first nine months of 2021.
