Facebook should not be considered a growth stock anymore if the social network’s disastrous revenue guidance were to become to the new normal, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Monday.
“You have a company that has expenses going up dramatically … [and] revenues are decelerating dramatically,” said Cramer, whose charitable trust had previously cut its Facebook holdings in half. “That’s the prescription for a short sale.”
Short selling is a practice in which traders can bet against a company by selling shares they don’t own and buying them back at a lower price.
Cramer popularized the term FANG, referring to the technology powerhouses Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet‘s Google.
Monday on “Squawk on the Street,” Cramer said Facebook’s management was “buying the heck out of the stock” in June when the price was much higher. “Are you telling me they had no knowledge and could they really have burned that much money?” he asked.
Facebook on Thursday lost about $119 billion in stock market value, the largest one-day market-cap loss by any company in U.S. stock market history. The name plummeted nearly 19 percent that day, with losses continuing on Friday and early Monday.
During the earnings call after the bell Wednesday, Facebook CFO David Wehner said shareholders can expect “revenue growth rates to decline by high single-digit percentages from prior quarters” for the third and fourth quarters. Revenue of $13.23 billion for the second quarter came in short of analyst expectations as the company struggled with the fallout from privacy and fake news scandals.
“When things are good, these people are champs,” Cramer said Monday of Facebook management. “When things were bad, they were completely helpless and out of their element.”
Cramer, host of “Mad Money,” had previously called out co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg for being notably silent for days after reports on March 17 of the massive Cambridge Analytica data harvesting.
However, even with a three-session drubbing developing, Facebook still had a market value of $490 billion on Monday.
Facebook had no comment.
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