(BFM Stock Exchange) – Formerly little appreciated by the market for its hazardous investments in the metarers and augmented reality, Meta is now considered a rigorous society and above all capable of using AI judiciously in its economic model. Meta also signs the best stock market performance of the seven magnificent, in 2025.

In a way, Meta alone represents the excesses of a market that tends to burn what he loved. And vice versa.

In 2022, the whole tech suffered from Wall Street, in particular due to the increase in interest rates, itself linked to the high inflation experienced by all developed countries. These high rates, by construction, penalize growth values, such as tech groups.

Facebook’s parent company, Instagram and WhatsApp is particularly massacred by investors. The Meta title collapsed by almost 65% in 2022.

The company then suffers from a sluggish advertising market, of unfavorable changes in confidentiality policies on the iOS operating system of Apple, but also with a marked disenchantment of investors for its initiatives in the metavers and augmented reality.

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Since the fourth quarter of 2020, Reality Labs, the division responsible for these projects, has accumulated $ 26 billion in operational losses (the figure will increase to 60 billion in 2025). Meta wipes a tackle by Tim Cook, the Director General of Apple, who considers that the group is wrong because “the average person does not know what the Metals is”.

“Meta is in the midst of an identity crisis. The company has one foot in a long -term risky bet on the metarers and the other foot unable to compete with Tiktok,” said Mike Prolux, research director at Forrester.

At the lowest, the Meta action fell to 88.09 dollars on November 4, 2022.

“Year of efficiency” and dividend

Almost three years later, the title Meta made an impressive reporta scholarship. The action evolves around $ 731, an increase of almost 730%

Compared to the hollows affected in 2022.

To win back Wall Street, Meta notably tightened costs, a fortiori in 2023, its managing director Mark Zuckerberg qualifying this vintage “year of efficiency”. Over the 2022 and 2023, the company announced 21,000 job cuts. Last January, the company still claimed to want to decrease its workforce by 5% (around 3,700 stations), the group counting “to raise the bar” in terms of performance management.

This change of software convinced investors. Meta was also carried by the more general trends in the market, namely the drop in interest rates and a revival of appetite for tech values ​​linked to the general craze for artificial intelligence (AI). Growth leaves more beautifully. After deciding 1% in 2022, income climbed by 16% in 2023 and then 22% in 2024.

A sign of a certain maturity but also of his desire to take into consideration his carriers, Meta began to pay a dividend in early 2024. Jane Shoemake, manager at Janus Henderson, explains that the payment of a coupon allows, for the tech groups which have taken the step, like Meta and Alphabet, to attract new investors for which the dividend is an essential component of the investment strategy.

A model of OpenSource validated by Deepseek

Sailing point: beyond five-year performance, Meta is mainly the member of Wall Street’s “Seven Magnificent” who signs the best performance over the whole of 2025. The action of the group led by Mark Zuckerberg wins 24.7%, ahead of Nvidia (+18.3%) and Microsoft (+17.3%).

How to explain such an outperformance? Part of the response relates to the good dynamics of the company in terms of results. The 2024 annual accounts, delivered at the end of January, like those of the first quarter of 2025, published on April 30, satisfied, if not met the expectations of Wall Street. The action had rediculated more than 8% on the two sessions according to the results of the first quarter. “Meta exploded all the figures that the market hoped,” said Stephen Innes, of Spi Am, in May.

Meta especially benefited from its repositioning on artificial intelligence (AI), in particular via its large -scale language model (LLM), Llama. Morningstar believes that Llama 4, its last iteration, should not be ashamed of the most recent versions of Gemini (Alphabet) or GPT (Openai).

When the tidal wave Deepseek rocked Wall Street in January, Meta did not tank, unlike the other “seven magnificent”. As a reminder, Deepseek is a Chinese start-up that would have managed to develop LLMs as efficient as those of American groups but at least at least 5.6 million dollars. In comparison, the cost of training of GPT-4 of Open AI would amount to $ 100 million, according to estimates cited by Deutsche Bank.

These feats of arms led investors to question the hundreds of billions of dollars spending by the Etrees-United States in AI.

For a number of reasons, Meta escaped the storm. In a post on LinkedIn, Yann Lecun, scientific chief and responsible for AI at Meta, noted that the success of Deepseek actually demonstrated the superiority of “open source” models (whose design is open to the general public, which allows you to share and modify technology), as Meta therefore, by opposition to “owners” (and therefore closed) models.

Deepseek also based on the Llama model to build its own LLM. Bloomberg estimates that Deepseek has somewhat validated Meta’s strategy in AI.

Monetization of the impressive AI

Another point that this time mentioned Meta’s financial director, Susan Li is that Meta does not develop her AI to sell it to third parties, but for the internal needs of the company.

“The direct monetization of the Llama model is not really what we are focusing on, in itself. Our goal is to take advantage of the technology that we are developing” to improve the current advertising activity by making it much more personalized on a large scale, the manager explained to analysts in January.

CNBC also notes that Llama 4 is “multimodal”, that is to say that it manages to dissect and analyze both texts and images or environments. This “stimulates the growth of Meta advertisements by allowing advertisers to create custom advertisements in a rapid and profitable manner, and stimulates commitment and performance on Facebook and Instagram”, explains the American channel.

This ability to convert its own AI technologies into additional advertising revenue explains the strong growth of the company. In the first quarter, Meta revenues increased by 16%, surpassing alphabet growth in its advertising activities (+9%).

“To date, these accounts (those of Meta, Editor’s note) are the best example of a company that obtained sensitive investment feedback thanks to AI,” said Deepwater AM managers in May. These managers explain that the AI ​​brings the huge installed base of Meta (1 billion users) to spend more time on social networks, and therefore treats the level of engagement, while improving advertising targeting. Deepwater experts also consider that AI has led Meta to improve its productivity and reduce its expenses.

“Over time, we believe that current competition based on models in the field of AI will give way to competition -based competition and monetization. As the competitive dynamics of AI evolve, we believe that Meta, thanks to its unmatched base of users and creators, can distribute and monetize its investments in the Genai (genetive). Morningstar.

Agentic and large cous

“Meta’s investments in AI already make it possible to obtain tangible commercial results,” Bank of America in May concluded.

The American bank even believes that Meta will have a great advantage in the so -called “agentic” AI, ie of AI systems designed to act independently, make decisions and achieve specific objectives.

“Although Google is likely to experience strong growth in subscription income linked to AI and that it could be in pole position for the use of agenic AI on Android devices, Google is not immune to a risk of disruption of use”, explains the establishment in a note published last week.

“We believe that Meta is best positioned in the short term for optimism around agentic AI and (…) Meta’s AI assistant has more than a billion users and has the potential to evolve towards a fundamental interface for agency interactions, serving as an entry point to the consumer where users delegate tasks and where AI takes care of execution”, develops Bank of America.

“Meta has also established in-depth advertising partnerships with its largest advertising partners and aims to allow the execution of fully automated campaigns and focused on objectives, which could generate additional advertising expenses,” she continues.

This potential evolution remains “undersized” by the market, considers Bank of America.

Obviously Meta must keep this competitive advantage. Even if it means heating the checkbook. Sam Altman, the director general of Openai, said in a podcast that the group did not hesitate to promise bonuses up to $ 100 million to convince the employees of the start-up to change teams and thus join Meta. Without success so far, according to Altman.

Meta recently announced an investment of $ 14.8 billion in Scale AI, specializing in structuring, annotation and validation of data intended to cause AI models.