Facebook Shares Rocket As Mobile And Video Growth Drive Q2 Earnings Beat
Forget about the law of large numbers: Despite its huge size, Facebook just blew away Wall Street’s Q2 earnings forecasts — sending shares up more than 6% in post-market trading. If that holds during the trading day tomorrow, it would set a new high for the stock.
The number of monthly active users increased 15% vs. last year to 1.71 billion while the number of mobile users rose 20% to 1.57 billion.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that he’s “particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services.”
The social network company generated $2.06 billion in net income in Q2, up 186% from the period last year, on revenues of $6.44 billion, up 59%. Analysts thought the top line would come in at $6.02 billion.
Adjusted earnings at 97 cents a share beat Wall Street’s consensus forecast by 15 cents.
Ad sales increased 63% to $6.24 billion. Investor fears that Facebook’s format wouldn’t lend itself to ads on smartphones and mobile devices proved unfounded: Mobile accounted for 84% of the ad revenue, an increase from 76% last year.
And the average revenue per user was up 38.4% to $3.82, topping expectations for $3.58.
The company’s release provided little context for the results. That’s likely to come shortly in a conference call where executives will brief, and take questions from, Wall Street analysts.
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