Facebook 3Q Results Fly Past Expectations

Facebook’s stock is soaring after the company reported a 60 percent revenue increase in the third quarter thanks to mobile advertising growth. The numbers beat Wall Street’s expectations for the second quarter in a row.

The world’s largest social network said Wednesday that it earned $425 million, or 17 cents per share, in the July-September quarter. That’s up from a loss of $59 million, or 2 cents per share, in the same period a year ago.

Shares of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook jumped $5.22, or 10.7 percent, to $54.23.

Adjusted earnings were $621 million, or 25 cents per share, in the latest quarter. That’s 6 cents better than analysts expected. This figure excludes special items, mainly stock compensation expenses.

Revenue grew 60 percent, to $2.02 billion from $1.26 billion, helped by increasing mobile advertising revenue.

Analysts, on average, were expecting revenue of $1.91 billion, according to FactSet.

“The strong results we achieved this quarter show that we’re prepared for the next phase of our company, as we work to bring the next five billion people online and into the knowledge economy,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Facebook’s advertising revenue was $1.8 billion, up 66 percent from a year ago. Mobile ads accounted for 49 percent of the company’s total ad revenue during the quarter. In the second quarter, mobile ads amounted to 41 percent of the total. The increase shows Facebook’s strategy to become a “mobile-first” company is paying off.

At the same time, Facebook is growing its share of the mobile advertising market. Research firm eMarketer estimates that Facebook will grab 15.8 percent of the world’s mobile ad spending this year, up from 5.4 percent last year. Google Inc., meanwhile, is expected to capture 53.2 percent this year, up slightly from a 52.4 percent share in 2012.

There were 1.19 billion Facebook users as of the end of September, up 18 percent from a year ago. Of these, an average of 728 million users logged in every day during the month of September, up 25 percent from a year ago.

Facebook had 874 million monthly mobile users at the end of the quarter, up 45 percent year-over-year.

As expected, the quarter’s operating expenses increased as Facebook continued to invest in growing its staff and enhancing its technical infrastructure. Total costs were $1.28 billion in the latest quarter, up 45 percent from $885 million a year ago.

Facebook went public in May 2012 at $38 per share. It took the stock more than a year to surpass that price, as the company worked to prove that it could grow mobile advertising revenue at a time when an increasing number of its users were accessing it on cellphones and tablet computers.