Facebook’s Mobile Momentum Grows as Sales Top $3 Billion

Facebook again exceeded expectations with strong revenue growth as the social network finds gains on mobile.

Facebook is valued at more than $200 billion, but the social network still continues to come out ahead of Wall Street’s expectations with ballooning sales.

The Menlo Park, Calif., company exceeded analysts’ revenue forecasts for the tenth consecutive quarter in Tuesday’s report, which detailed profits of $806 million, or 30 cents a share, on sales of $3.2 billion, the first time Facebook has topped $3 billion in revenues in a single three-month period. Analysts had expected Facebook to report revenues of $3.12 billion, according to a Thomson Reuters survey, and Facebook also topped adjusted-profit projections.

Facebook’s mobile efforts continued to bloom: After admitting to going public in 2012 without a plan to monetize mobile, nearly two-thirds of Facebook’s advertising revenues came from mobile ads, up from just shy of half at this time last year.

The need to score big mobile revenues is key for Facebook, which said more than a third of its 1.35 billion active users access the site only through mobile devices.

“We expect this shift and strength in mobile to continue,” Stern Agee analyst Arvid Bhatia wrote in a note ahead of the earnings report, in which he correctly predicted Facebook’s 66 percent mobile-revenues ratio. “We believe over the next two years, mobile advertising revenue could represent about 80 percent of total advertising revenue for Facebook.”

Facebook shares rose 49 cents to reach a record closing high of $80.77 Tuesday. In after-hours trading, the shares dropped $6.62, or 8.2 percent, to $74.15.

This article appeared in print in the October 29th, 2014 edition of Hamodia.