Meta Platforms, Inc.

for joining us today. Before we get started, I just want to take a moment to say that we are very worried about the COVID situation in India and also in Brazil. I'm hoping that we can get this virus under control soon, and in the meantime, we're focused on what we can do to help there. Now, turning to the results, this was another strong quarter. More than 2.7 billion people now use one or more of our apps each day. And more than 200 million businesses use our tools to reach customers. And this has been an intense year. And I am proud that we continue to deliver value for people and businesses around the world. Now, over the past couple of quarters, our business has been performing better than we expected. And this has given us the confidence to increase our investments meaningfully in a few key areas that have the potential to change the trajectory of the company over the long term. So on today's call, I'm going to talk about the opportunities that we're pursuing in augmented and virtual reality and around commerce, business messaging, and creators. First, let's talk about building the next computing platform. Now, I believe that augmented and virtual reality are going to enable a deeper sense of presence and social connection than any existing platform. They're going to be an important part of how we will interact with computers in the future. So we're going to keep investing heavily in building out the best experiences here, and this accounts for a major part of our overall R&D budget growth. Quest 2 is doing better than we expected, even after the holiday season. We continue to see good engagement, and we keep shipping updates that make Quest better and better, including Air Link, which enables wireless streaming of games and content from PCs, and support for 120 Hz refresh rates. Now, achieving Quest's high quality in a wireless form factor has been a major breakthrough. Having wires wrapped around you just really breaks the sense of presence and immersion. The technology to deliver a great experience wirelessly is very advanced, and most companies aren't going to be able to deliver this. But we believe that it is the minimum bar for a high-quality experience. This quarter, we also shared more about our future investments, including neural interfaces for interacting with AR, and we started testing our new avatar system, which will be a key part of how people express themselves and connect. One interesting trend is that we're seeing the app ecosystem broaden out beyond games into other categories as well. The most used apps are social, which fits our original theory for why we wanted to build this platform in the first place. We're also seeing productivity and even fitness apps. So, for example, we launched a tool so people can subscribe to services like FitXR to do boxing and dancing in VR just like they would for biking on Peloton. We introduced App Lab so developers can ship early versions of their apps directly to consumers without having to go through the Oculus Store. And between App Lab and streaming from PCs, we're pioneering a much more open model of App Store than what's currently available on phones today. Now, over time, amount of value, both in people's lives and the economy overall. There's still a long way to go here, and most of our investments to make this work are ahead of us. But I think that the feedback that we're getting from our product is giving us more confidence that our prediction for the future here will happen, and that we're focusing on the right areas. Now, beyond AR and VR, I want to call out some of the other long-term opportunities that we're really focused on, especially in commerce and business messaging. Commerce has been growing in our services for a while. but it has become a lot more important as the pandemic has accelerated a broader shift towards businesses moving online. In the last year, we've seen online storefronts stay open even when physical stores closed. And going forward, online commerce will continue to offer an increasingly personalized and convenient experience. Commerce ads continue to do very well and drive a meaningful amount of our overall business. We built Marketplace into one of the world's leading services for people to buy and sell. And I am pleased to share today that more than 1 billion people visit Marketplace each month. And now we're investing in building for the future of commerce. So we launched shops last year. And as I recently shared, there are now more than 1 million monthly active shops and over 250 million monthly shops and visitors. We're also focused on building more native commerce tools across our apps. We recently updated WhatsApp catalogs so businesses can keep them updated from their computers and to include what's in stock. We launched carts on WhatsApp last year and people have used them to send orders more than five million times. We're also building up broader infrastructure to support commerce. everything from payments to customer service and support. And WhatsApp Payments is now live in India, and we have gotten approval in Brazil to launch shortly, too. We're starting to see a meaningful shift in the way that people communicate with businesses. For a lot of people, online commerce is less about websites and shops and more about messaging. So people want to to get support and make purchases right from a chat. Smaller businesses want to show their products and take orders via messages, and larger businesses want reliable and secure infrastructure to communicate with their customers. Businesses using the WhatsApp Business API are already sending more than 100 million messages per day. Over the last year, during the height of COVID, total daily conversations between people and businesses on Messenger and Instagram grew by more than 40%. More than 3 million advertisers are already using click to message ads to direct people to Messenger. And since we introduced click to WhatsApp ads, nearly 1 million advertisers have already started using them too. And now the next step here is we're going to make it possible to create those click to WhatsApp ads from directly within the WhatsApp business app. The next step is to make it easier for businesses to adopt all these services and to give them the tools that can handle messages and customer relationships. Our acquisition of customer is going through regulatory approvals, and we're looking forward to offering businesses a native way to manage their customer relationships on our platform. Now, I want to be clear that You know, we have a long way to go to build out a full-featured commerce platform across our services, and this is a multi-year journey, but I am very committed to getting there. This modern commerce system is gonna bring together a number of areas where we either already have strong offerings like in ads, community tools, and messaging, with areas like shops and business messaging and payments that we are focused on ramping up now. As part of this, we're also investing more in building out better customer support for our products. For the last several years, we focused a lot on content moderation and privacy work. And I view customer support as the next pillar of the trust and safety work for our services. The last area that I wanna discuss today is around creators. I think that a positive vision for the future of the economy is one where more people get to do creative work that they enjoy rather than jobs that they don't. And to get there, we need to build out the creative and monetization tools to support this creator economy. People create an incredibly diverse set of content across our services from long-form writing to live conversations to documentaries and augmented reality filters. And our goal is to support the full range of human expression and to be the best platform for millions of creators to make a living. Part of this is going to be delivering a suite of tools and products that span all the ways that people want to create and consume content. I believe that at the intersection of every media type and every audience size, there is a compelling experience to build. For example, I recently discussed our audio roadmap, and we already support audio calls for private audio communication, but now we're also building out live audio rooms, which we think will be especially useful for groups and communities. We're building soundbites for sharing and consuming short-form audio clips broadly, and we are supporting podcasts for sharing and listening to long-form audio. And we're also partnering with Spotify to launch a music player in the Facebook app. So we also need to connect these experiences with easy options for monetization, whether that's subscriptions, tipping, or enabling creators to give product recommendations and enable commerce. And with Instagram and Facebook, we have a unique ability to bring creators and commerce together, and we will share more on that later this year. Now, together, these efforts around creators, commerce, and the next computing platform are a few of the big areas that we are doubling down on going forward. And in each of these, there is a unique opportunity to help people connect in deeper ways and to support a stronger economy for everyone. I'm optimistic that our work in all of these areas will help accelerate some of the positive emerging trends that we are seeing in the world. And now I'm going to hand it over to Cheryl.

Thanks, Mark. And hi, everyone.

I hope you're all safe and healthy. This was a really strong quarter for our business. Our total revenue for Q1 was $26.2 billion, which is a 48% year-over-year increase. We've seen good growth in all regions, and we continue to see strong results in verticals that have performed well during the pandemic, like e-commerce, retail, and CPG. Our performance has been driven in large part by the continued digital transformation. as more and more businesses shift online. For years, we've invested in products and tools to support this shift, and these investments have helped many businesses reinvent themselves during the pandemic. One of the best parts of my job is I get to meet SMB owners and hear what's on their minds. Many of them tell me how they've used Facebook to adapt and grow. At a virtual roundtable with SMBs from Detroit this quarter, I spoke to La'azer Johnson, who runs an all-natural skincare company called Ella J Essentials. When COVID hit and she had to close her store, she started a Facebook group called The Garden, which now has more than 1,000 members. They give her product ideas, and when she makes the projects, they suggest, as she says it, they sell quicker than she can keep them on the shelves. By pivoting online, she's been able to replace all of the income she lost from her store. I also spoke to Ida Reyes, who runs a yoga studio in nearby Ann Arbor. She started doing outdoor classes during the pandemic and needed to get the word out. She couldn't afford to advertise to everyone in the city. Not everyone in the city wants to do yoga, so she uses personalized ads. This enables her to advertise to people in the area who are interested in yoga or meditation. It's all done in a privacy-protected way. We show her ads to those people, and we don't share their information with her. and then they sign up for her classes. Like everyone else, the business owners I talk to want to know what will happen next. Many are all in online, so even when things fully reopen, they want to be able to do more online than they did before. So understandably, they're asking us what we can do to help them, not just now, but over the long run. Part of the answer is continuing to improve our tools and products and creating new ones to suit their needs. And part of it is helping them navigate the headwinds that are coming down the line, whether it's the iOS 14 changes or potential regulation. On the first part, tools and products. We're all into. From day one of COVID, we fast-tracked our work to help people buy and sell online. Initially, we focused on getting the experience right for sellers. As Mark said, we launched shops nearly a year ago. we've continued to develop new features to help personalize the shopping experience and worked with partners to make transactions as seamless as possible. And we've created new formats like live shopping, which bring to life the unique commerce experiences our platforms can offer. Now we're equally focused on getting the experience right for consumers. We're rolling out the Shop tab in more countries and exploring new immersive formats like product tags and drop stickers, that enable more people to shop with creators and brands they love. We're also constantly developing and improving our ad products to help businesses reach people where they are and get the best possible return on investment. We continue to see strong growth in stories ads and video ads, which we've invested in heavily. We've also seen strong growth across ads in Facebook Watch, which now has more than 1.25 billion people visiting every month. As the number of people watching video grows, We're developing more opportunities for businesses and creators to reach them. We're expanding paid online events to more countries. We're enabling more people to run in-stream ads, including in live videos. And we're developing ads in short-form videos, where we're testing the ability for content creators to monetize their Facebook stories with ads that look like stickers. On the second part, headings. Yes, there are challenges coming to personalized advertising, and we've been pretty open about that. We're doing a huge amount of work to prepare. We're working with our customers to implement Apple's API and our own aggregated events measurement API to mitigate the impact of the iOS 14 changes. We're rebuilding meaningful elements of our ad tech so that our system continues to perform when we have access to less data in the future. And we're part of long-term collaborations with industry bodies like the W3C on initiatives like privacy-enhancing technologies that provide personalized experiences while limiting access to people's information. It's also on us to keep making the case that personalized advertising is good for people and businesses and to better explain how it works so that people realize that personalized ads are privacy-protective. Small businesses don't have to understand the alphabet soup of acronyms they'll need to comply with But they do need to have confidence that they can still use our tools to reach the people who want to buy what they're selling in a privacy-safe way. We're confident they can and that they can continue to get great results as digital advertising evolves. With the rollout of vaccines, there's reason to be hopeful. But the pandemic is still causing real heartbreak and hardship for people in many countries. And in particular, like Mark, my thoughts are with our friends and colleagues in India and Brazil right now. If the last year has taught us anything, it's to not make assumptions and to not expect things to get better for everyone at the same time. Whatever happens, we'll continue to keep people connected, support the public health response, and invest in ways to support businesses now and in the long term. I want to close by saying how grateful I am to all the businesses who work with us, big and small, who we learn from every day, and to our incredible teams who have supported millions of businesses through this turbulent time and set them up for success now and in the future. Now, over to Dave.