Remember the days after Facebook went public last year, when its share price wobbled and plenty of experts suggested that its IPO had been an embarrassing flop?
As a reminder, that IPO price was $38 a share, but at the end of yesterday, those same shares were selling for $71.29 apiece.
That in itself tells quite a story about the way Facebook’s business has grown since the IPO just over a year ago, and yesterday’s latest quarterly financials from the social network re-emphasised that it’s mobile driving that growth.
Key figures: Facebook’s revenues jumped 61% year-on-year to $2.91bn, while its net profits grew 138% to $791m in the same time period. Monthly active users (MAUs) were up 14% to 1.32bn, while daily active users (DAUs) were up 19% to 829m.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts that the average US Facebook user now spends 40 minutes a day using the social network, but said there is plenty of room to grow: “This is more than any other app by far, but overall people in the U.S. spend about nine hours per day engaging with digital media on TVs, phones and computers,” he pointed out.
The key stat from the latest earnings, though, is that of the $2.68bn of revenues Facebook generated from advertising, 62% came from mobile devices – up from 41% this time last year.
During the last quarter, Facebook had 1.07bn mobile monthly active users, and 654m mobile daily active users, with both the Instagram and Facebook Messenger apps attracting 200m MAUs of their own. 399m people now only sign in to Facebook from mobile devices – they don’t use desktop computers at all.
Facebook’s mobile efforts were already well established at the time of its IPO a year ago, but the 12 months since have proved that it really can make money from that mobile audience.
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