According to Facebook’s recently released Q4 2015 earnings, the company now has 1.59 billion monthly active users, a number that exceeds investor estimates of 1.58 billion, and an increase of 14 percent over the same period past year. “Our community continued to grow and our business is thriving”, company founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
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The company clocked revenue of $5.84 billion for the quarter ending December 2015 earning 79 cents per share.
Facebook’s dominance in mobile advertising helped to allay Wall Street concerns over its heavy investments in messaging service WhatsApp and virtual reality unit Oculus, which have not yet generated profits. Still as advertising on it has improved and it’s increased its usage to more than a billion regular members, the money has been pouring in and now, for the first time ever, the social network has made a billion dollars profit in just the last quarter.
“Even as the world has tended towards greater openness over time, in many communities we also see greater fear over what a connected world and more technological progress means for them”, Zuckerberg said. The company managed to post 1.04 billion daily active users (DAUs) per month in December, an increase of 17% YoY.
Facebook delivers another quarter of record revenue as it sells more ads via videos, mobile devices and Instagram, sending its shares up more than 8%.
Up to Wednesday’s close at $94.45, Facebook’s stock had risen almost 25% in the past 12 months. In 2014, Facebook bought the virtual-reality technology for $2 billion, and hopefully, this will open another lucrative market for the firm.
“Heading into 2016, it is clear that consumers have shifted to mobile and businesses know they need to catch up”, said Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.
Mobile ad revenue also saw a big jump – it now makes up 80 percent of total advertising revenue, up from 69 percent a year earlier.
California-based Facebook has been relentlessly innovating to keep its social network tuned to Internet-age lifestyles. Daily active users (DAU), monthly active users (MAU) and the mobile segments of both were all slightly more than company guidance. The figure is more than China’s population, of 1.3 billion people.
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“It’s much stronger ad growth than we were expecting”, Evercore ISI analyst Ken Sena said. In 2015, Facebook’s stocks climbed 34 percent while Google’s rose 47 percent.
