Facebook Joins Apple And Amazon In Having A Really Good Quarter

Facebook (FB) has surpassed revenue and earnings expectations. The company’s stock price went up almost 7 percent on Wednesday in after-hours trading. The company’s figure for earnings was $3.30 per share, beating the expectation of $23.67 per share. The tech company was expected to have revenue of $23.67 billion but surpassed this amount with almost than $3 billion. The company recorded revenue of $26.17 billion in the first quarter. The company figures for Daily Active users (DAUs) and Monthly Active Users (MAUs) were quite disappointing as they did not beat the forecast. The company had Daily Active Users 1.88 billion compared to 1.89 billion that was projected by Factset. The figure for Monthly Active users was 2.85 billion as against 2.86 billion that was projected. With $9.27, the company’s Average revenue per user (ARPU) surpassed Factset’s projected $8.40.

The company’s revenue of $26.17 billion for the quarter was up 48 percent compared with the previous year. Facebook witnessed some steady growth. Net Income rose 94 percent to $9.5 billion; almost double that of last year. The value for Net Income from a year ago was $4.9 billion. Facebook says that the significant growth in revenue is as a result of to a 30 percent year over year increase in the average price per ad and a 12 percent increase in the number of ads that is being delivered.

Mark Zukerberg talked about delivering a user-tailored experience to users and said that the company would be focusing more on developing its e-commerce features. “Commerce have been growing in our services for a while, but it has become a lot more important as the pandemic has accelerated a broader shift towards businesses moving online”, the CEO said. The CEO hinted that the company is working on a payment technology which will enable more commerce on Facebook’s services. “Commerce across all these platforms is going to be very important, and certainly in a platform that we’re building like this, we want to enable payments very easily to make it so that economics all work out for developers”, the CEO added.

Zuckerberg also mentioned that a number of features that will enable Instagram creators make money are being developed. According to him, these features will encourage creators to make and post more content on Instagram; it is a form of incentive. Following the CEO’s remarks about these upcoming incentive-based creator features, the company’s stock rose slightly.

Facebook’s Monthly Active users across all its platforms rose to 3.45 billion from 3.30 from the last quarter. The company’s Other Revenue which accounted for 3 percent of the company’s revenue stood at $732 million and was up 146 percent compared to last year.

The company says that it expects revenue growth for the next quarter to either remain stable or grow modestly and expects that revenue growth in the third and fourth quarters to slow down. The company says that the revenue for Q3 and Q4 last year was boosted by the pandemic and now that everything is slowly opening up, revenues for this year’s Q3 and Q4 are not expected to be the same.