US trading on the Nasdaq closed at the end of Thursday’s session with a sudden decline in Facebook’s stock price, which fell by 19% or $176 per share, in addition to a decline in the company’s market value to $503 billion.
This led to Facebook losing all momentum and gains recorded in the first half of this year. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the social networking giant, lost more than $15 billion.
The drop in the stock price led to a loss of more than $100 billion of the company’s market value, which was about $ 618 billion just 24 hours before the end of Wednesday’s trading session According to senior US stock market analysts, investors want to remove Mark Zuckerberg from his position as president of the company after the $100 billion losses.
Earlier on, the company posted record revenues of $13.23 billion in the fourth quarter, up 42 percent from a year earlier, even higher than the $ 13.3 billion forecast.
David Wehner, Palo Alto’s chief financial officer, said: “We expect strong growth to fall by one margin due to the evolution of previous quarters.” Investors were particularly dissatisfied with the number of new users registering on the social media platform, with Facebook reporting 2.23 billion active monthly users and 1.47 billion active users per day. Although the two values rose 11% from the previous year, they were not close to analysts’ expectations of 2.25 billion active monthly users and 1.48 billion active users per day.
However, Facebook was able to keep pace with its earnings per share of $1.74, compared to $1.72 per share last year over the same period.
Facebook’s major shareholders have now begun to ask for the resignation of Zuckerberg, especially after the current financial crisis, the recent scandals like Cambridge Analytics and Russian interventions in the 2016 US election.
These investors began to express their fears last month when they demanded that CEO and President positions to be held by different people.
This is not the first time that investors are not forgiving Zuckerberg. Last year, 51 percent of independent investors voted against his nomination as chairman. But this move failed because Zuckerberg holds the Class B shares that gave him the power of majority vote.
Finally, it should be noted here that no company in the history of stock exchanges has previously lost $100 billion in one day. On September 22, 2000, Intel lost about $ 90.7 billion, followed by Microsoft on April 3, 2000 with an $80 billion loss.
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