Facebook’s holding company, Meta, took the biggest hit, with net income down 52% for the period over the year before. 

This is because its revenue dropped 4% (from $28bn to $27.7bn) and its spending went up by 19% because of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s moonshot plan to build a metaverse. 

Its Reality Labs division lost $3.7bn (more than $1-billion more than last year’s $2.6-billion in the same period), and these losses will grow “significantly” next year, it warned. 

Facebook shares immediately fell 19% and are down 61% for the year. 

Zuckerberg’s delusional attempt to build a virtual reality (VR) world, starting with a VR game called Horizon Worlds, is an abject failure. It only has about 200,000 users, who require an expensive Oculus VR headset to access. 

Cash cow Google, through its holding company Alphabet, has seen its revenue miss analysts’ estimates and its online advertising sales slow down. 

Although it made a profit of $13.9-billion for the three months to September, it was down 27% from the previous year. Its revenue grew 6% to $69.1-billion, but ad sales only rose 4% to $39.5-billion.

With inflation hammering the world and marketing budgets being scrapped (and therefore online sales weakening), Google and Facebook are going to go through a lot more pain.

Even Apple’s 8% revenue increase (to a whopping $90.1-billion for the quarter) had a downside. Sales of the iPhone rose 10% to $42.6-billion, but that was down from the 47% it earned in the previous year’s quarter. 

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It’s always worth noting that half of Apple’s revenue comes from the smartphone, but it is increasing the percentage it receives from services (which includes apps revenue and its own subscription services). 

Overall, Apple’s profits only went up 1% – but were a healthy $20.7-billion.

Similarly, Microsoft’s 11% revenue growth to $50.1-billion was its slowest in five years. Its profits were down 4% to $17.6-billion.

It’s not often you hear a US company complain about weakening currency causing a cash crunch, but South Africans might have a wee bit of schadenfreude about the $2.3-billion in revenue lost. 

This was due to the pound’s crash because a lettuce outlasted an incompetent prime minister. Microsoft shares were down 6% that day. Liz Truss’ are down forever.

It’s also worth noting how Microsoft’s share of revenue is continuing its shift from selling Windows licences to cloud services. Windows sales fell 15% as the last two years’ work-from-home trend changed, while its cloud computing Azure service grew 35%.

Meanwhile, Amazon seemed to have bucked the trend with a 15% sales increase to $127.1-billion, making $2.9-billion in profit to reverse two previous lossmaking quarters.

People still buy iPhones, cloud services and software, but advertising revenue is taking a hit – especially as Apple has turned off the ability for ad software to track iPhone users. 

Facebook already reported a $10-billion hit to its revenue from this. 

Apple is also increasingly getting into the advertising business, taking away ad revenue from the social media giants.

Meanwhile, social media upstart TikTok has reached a billion users and is sucking up all the advertising oxygen (and interest) in the room. 

Instagram is desperately trying to imitate it, without much success, as it sacrifices its photo-sharing strengths by trying to pivot to video. 

Over at Twitter, it’s hard to know what to say about the “chaos energy” that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk brings as his management style. 

With 90% of its revenue coming from advertising, Twitter is just as likely to be hammered – especially with all his firings and sudden changes.

Google and Facebook are still minting it, but there are signs of this inevitable decline beginning. 

Expect more pain. BM/DM