The jump in shares was set to add almost $33 billion to Facebook’s market value, putting the company on track to re-enter the $300 billion club.
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Excluding some items, the company earned 79c per share. If there’s any doubt that mobile is pushing Facebook’s profits, consider that mobile MAUs were 1.44 billion, a 21-percent increase. That statistic far surpasses Snapchat’s 100 million mobile users, mostly confined to the U.S. Meanwhile, Facebook is building out internationally. That is to say, they never touch the desktop version of Facebook. This trend makes people shift from desktop computers to mobile devices. “Our community continued to grow and our business is thriving”, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO who had been away on paternity leave for two months following the birth of his first child, said in a statement about the results on Tuesday.
With respect to average daily users, Facebook now sits at 1.04 billion, an increase of 17 percent over the same period previous year.
It won’t be long before Facebook’s 1.6 billion users have more ways to quickly express their feelings on the world’s largest social network.
Ken Sena, analyst at Evercore ISI, said: “It’s much stronger ad growth than we were expecting”. This was in sharp contrast to the same quarter of 2014, when mobile ad revenue accounted for just 69% of Facebook’s revenue.
The company also reported that an astounding 80 percent of its ad revenue ($4.5 billion) was generated by mobile advertising.
Sandberg also spoke about expanding Facebook’s capabilities in real-time sharing, such as with its new Sports Stadium service, and how important it could be surrounding the upcoming USA election. The figure is more than China’s population, of 1.3 billion people.
The announcement came after markets closed Wednesday, but Facebook shares leapt more than 12 percent in after-hours trading.
Zuckerberg said during an earnings call that he is happy with pre-orders for Rift, which was priced at $599, but did not disclose specifics. Later this year, Facebook will ship Oculus Touch controllers that enhance the virtual reality experience through intuitive hand movements and gestures, he said, reiterating his view that VR has the potential to change how people live and communicate.
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Facebook’s monthly active users were 1.59 billion as of December 31, 2015, an increase of 14 per cent year-over-year.
