Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Platforms (META) is set to report third quarter earnings on Wednesday, October 30. Evercore ISI senior managing director and head of internet research Mark Mahaney joins Catalysts to discuss what investors can expect from the social media giant's results.

"I think fundamentals are well intact with Meta," Mahaney explains, specifically highlighting its performance in the advertising space. He tells Yahoo FInance, "The fundamentals have been amongst the most and probably the most impressive in the advertising space. I mean, especially at their scale, they're doing well over 20% revenue growth. That is truly impressive."

He believes there are still "untapped areas" for Meta, pointing to Threads, WhatsApp, and Facebook Marketplace as opportunities to sustain "premium growth." While expectations are high for Meta, he believes the company will be able to deliver.

While Mahaney likes Meta, it is not one of his top stock picks because it is not dislocated. "It's probably the most consensus long in large-cap internet," he states, however, if the stock were to trade off, it would likely be due to an aggressive capital expenditures (CapEx) outlook for next year.

Many investors are cautiously watching Meta's CapEx spending as it goes all in on its AI investments. Mahaney believes that investors will begin to see return on these investments:

"If you look at the ability of this company to recover to almost 30% ad revenue growth, that came because of AI. They used AI to rebuild the user interface to make it more of a media platform rather than a social platform. And they used it to dramatically improve the ad targeting, campaign management, ad creative for marketers. And that's why Meta right now is perceived to be kind of the easy buy amongst marketers, amongst advertisers."

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This post was written by Melanie Riehl