Facebook provided a pleasant surprise tonight for a change, reporting Q3 results ahead of expectations. Shares have risen over 9% after hours.
Revenues were up 32% yoy at $1.26b - maintaining the growth that it reported in Q2 which, you may remember had shown a decline for the first time. This had really spooked the market so soon after its IPO. Again Mark Zuckerberg took centre stage telling us that over 600m (of their now 1b users) connect via their mobiles – up 64% yoy. Mobile ads, at $1.1b, are now 14% of Facebook's revenues - advertising in total is 86% of revenues. So the disparity is pretty stark and the challenge onerous.
Losses of $59m were reported mainly as a result of the tax implications of employee-held shares.
Footnote - Reports last night that Zynga has laid off 100+ staff at its Austin, Tesas office. That's bad news for Facebook as it used to make a fair bit of its revenues from Zynga games like Farmville. See my 6th Oct post "Now that ain't workin'...' Facebook confirmed last night that revenues from third-party developers like Zynga fell by 9% qoq.