The social networking giant reported a profit of $1.5 billion, up by 53 percent from $701 million a year ago, and with 77 cents earnings per share.
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“We had a great start to the year”, said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, said in a statement. “We want to help them make a bigger difference today, not 30 or 40 years down the road”, he wrote.
Daily active users rose 16 percent to 1.09 billion on average for March, while monthly active users increased 15 percent to 1.65 billion in March. Daily active users on mobile saw a 24-percent increase to 989 million on average.
Mobile advertising represented approximately 82% of ad revenue during the quarter, up from 73% a year ago.
Facebook also announced Wednesday that the board has agreed to create a new class of nonvoting stock, or Class C capital stock. The change will be considered at Facebook’s June 20 annual stockholders meeting. Furthermore, 54.2 percent of Facebook users now access the social network exclusively from a mobile device. “Facebook doesn’t provide any guidance, so when they are beating estimates, it’s against a consensus that Wall Street is independently establishing”. WALL STREET had expected reported earnings of about 62 cents per share on $5.26 billion in revenue, according to THOMSON REUTERS.
“After Intel and IBM last week, and then Twitter and Apple yesterday, this is by far the best number I’ve seen in technology”, said Daniel Morgan, senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust Company, commenting about Facebook ad revenue.
Facebook has spent most of this past quarter launching and promoting its livestreaming video service, which it hopes will keep people glued to the app and website. Though each share of all classes of stock will hold the same dollar value, each class of shares does not have the same voting rights.
While the company had some trouble with its LiveRail video ad division, it’s still showing strong user growth and revenue momentum in its 12th year.
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The company’s stock closed slightly up 0.12 percent at $108.89 per share. The company also beat expectations of monthly active users, with 1.65 billion versus the expected 1.62 billion.
