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Stukje uit RV Capital interview over Meta, oktober 2022:

Metaverse investment
[00:33:26] Florian: I just wanted to expand on your comments about Meta. Andreas, you’ve been an investor for a long time, and I remember Rob, last year, you mentioned your basic hypothesis on your Meta investment and you were very bullish about their prospects, despite their heavy spending on R&D like this 10 billion spending which you can see little impact on the bottom line so far. Just wondering over the course of the year as the share price is half once again, did you expand on these positions address? Did you or Rob, what are your views on that? And is the basic hypothesis still intact, or are they like any reflections on how the situation might have changed for this company?

[00:34:26] Rob Vinall: You want to go first on that?

[00:34:27] Andreas Lechner: Yeah. First some words on the 10 billion investments in the Metaverse, you have to see there is a component of creating credibility to it. Back when they started the Metaverse. They wanted to establish a new mobile application platform next to iOS and Android and you cannot just do that if you’ve Meta her by saying okay, let a vice president to the presentation. And spend half a billion per year on that. No serious app developer will develop or dedicate people to this new app platform and develop applications when he can just use the same people to develop applications for iOS or for Android. So if your Meta you have to show that you’re serious and you show that you’re serious by having the CEO to the presentation by renaming the company, and by saying you spend 10 billion a year. So there is no other way if you want to succeed in that sector, and there is no way of acquiring the leading Metaverse play in five years because they’re not even allowed to acquire some company like Giphy anymore from a regulatory antitrust perspective. So they have to build the businesses themselves.

And it’s quite common in the high-tech industry. If you look at Amazon and Google, they have all projects where they invest billions of dollars every year and lose money. Some of them turn out well and some of them don’t. So as an investor, I just set aside, let’s say I reserve of 50 billion for the Metaverse. The negative value that this may create over the next five years and in five years it’s either successful or it’s failed. They close it down in five years or it succeeded. And I just approach it from some of the parts’ perspectives. Evaluate the operating business, the core business that they have and value the Metaverse maybe with a -50 billion, and I think I’m on the conservative side for that.

[00:36:39] Rob Vinall: I mean, I’d have to listen back to what I said in March, but I would say on balance, I would say maybe even more bullish today than I was then. If I go back to March ATT, which was the main thing which has harmed Facebook over the last two or three years was already well established. It was clear that was going to negatively impact his cash flow, but I think from the perspective of last March, the biggest fear I had was around sort of TikTok and the potential for TikTok to take engagement away from the Facebook family of apps, and in that respect, I think the market share gains have TikTok has flattened and I think Facebook is having incredible success with reels. I saw that it’s, I think, 20 or maybe 30% of page impressions are now reels which haven’t yet started to be monetised. So yeah, I would say that’s one where I’m still pretty optimistic. What about you?

[00:37:36] Andreas Lechner: Well what we’ve seen so far is Apple’s action of disabling or requiring consent to tracking. But we have not seen Facebook’s reaction yet, so they’re rebuilding the advertising stack right now, they are investing in AI. Much of this data centre investment that they planned for last year and this year 30 billion, last year 40 billion, and this year 70 billion in total are going into AI capacity which helps with analysing the videos in the reels, so what topics are they on, tagging them, and matching them with ads. So I’m quite optimistic that something great will grow out of that. I think the AI capabilities within Facebook or within Meta are nothing short of what we see at OpenAI with ChatGPT. But they just don’t use it for a chat, but they use it for advertising placement. And we’ll see that over the next year.

Edit: Blijkbaar toch uit 2022 ipv ‘23. Wel nog actueel.

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Het kan verkeren…! Dat dividend had voor mij niet gemoeten. Maar dat is natuurlijk een peulschil. Bij Jens_Dev is Meta terug de grootste positie vermoed ik?

[BRT]

META is nu nog een grotere hap uit mijn PF, leuke sprong.

Ad impressies blijven double digit stijgen, ongelofelijk. Dit gaat echt nog knallen als de koopkracht terug aantrekt, en adverteerders budgetten verhogen.

De waardering van META is vermoedelijk zeer hoog, al even niet meer uitgerekend, maar ben van het type let your profits run.

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[BRT]

Tiktok ban zou dichtbij zijn in de US.

Goed jaartje voor Meta