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Comment by extraduder_ire | Hacker News Reader

For reference: that's below $1 per resident.

True, but if we look at GDP ratios instead of population, it looks different.

Nigeria's GDP in 2022 was $472B, compared to US's at $25.2T, so Nigeria's total economy is roughly 2% the size of the US.

Meta / Facebook made $134B in revenue and $39B in net income (profit) last year. Assuming 1/3 of their business is in the US, that's roughly $43B revenue & $13B profit in the US last year.

If we assume their business is proportionate to GDP, they made $860M revenue & $260M profit in Nigeria last year.

So this fine is basically the company's entire profit in the country in a year.

There’s no way Meta made $860 million in revenue from Nigeria. The country’s economy is too dilapidated to deliver that kind of revenue.

According to the World Bank it’s less than that, but still it’s interesting to contemplate Meta monetizing the same in Nigeria and Colombia, and more or less the same in Romania:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...

I’d be shocked if the numbers were that high.

> Assuming 1/3 of their business is in the US

Americans often massively underestimate the size and importance of the US.

Meta derives ~80% of its revenue from the US and Canada.

Based on their reports it’s approx. 42%. Do you have other sources?

https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2024/q1...

Yeah I was also going by their quarterly earnings reports since they're a public company. Though that only breaks down the revenue by continent, but was using it to approximate US revenue at 30% of worldwide.

> If we assume their business is proportionate to GDP...

This is a really bad approach. Megacorps like fb are happy to take a loss on small countries to maintain a worldwide monopoly. Perhaps I'd go with a power law distribution, rather than uniform? A few whales can cover a whole lot of leeches.

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