Total revenues of the company advanced from $3.85 billion to $5.84 billion, with ad revenue growing 56.8% to $5.64 billion in the period holiday shopping season, when expenditure on advertising characteristically spikes.
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Those numbers, are up from 1.55 billion users and $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter, and have beaten the $5.3 Billion revenue estimate and the 68 cents earnings per share estimates of the Wall street.
In a statement, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said 2015 was a great year for his company: “Our community continued to grow and our business is thriving”.
This week, it boosted a yearly increase of 25% with 1.59 billion monthly users overall. Just how much more will be disclosed Monday, when Alphabet is scheduled to announced its fourth-quarter earnings.
The better-than-expected results are thought to be because of new advertising formats and an improved mobile app which led to a sharp rise in ad sales. Facebook earned 54 cents a share, surpassing the 42 cents a share expected during that period.
Facebook ad revenue numbers continue to accelerate on a quarterly basis – and this is before it has even given serious consideration as to how it might monetise its next two billion users on Messenger and WhatsApp. After losing almost three percentage points by close of business, Facebook stock is trading up more than six percent in after-hours trading. As a result its operating margin rose to 44 percent from 29 percent a year earlier. Annual revenue for Facebook in 2015 was $17.92 billion, as compared to $12.46 billion in 2014.
In January, Facebook began taking orders for a consumer version of the Oculus Rift, a head-mounted virtual reality unit. The Financial Times reports that Facebook’s share price rallied seven per cent in the immediate aftermath of the announcement, as its performance in mobile advertising surpassed earlier analyst expectations. This was in sharp contrast to the same quarter of 2014, when mobile ad revenue accounted for just 69% of Facebook’s revenue.
“Certainly economic uncertainty in the broad macroeconomic environment affects all businesses, it affects our clients, it affects us, but that said we think we’re really well positioned to continue to take advantage of and double down on the shift to mobile which is happening”, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said.
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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. He specifically pointed to video as an “important part of the Facebook experience” and said that 100 million hours of video are watched daily on the social network.
