- Daily active users grow in every geographic area, reversing a downward trend in Europe and a plateau in North America.
- The average revenue per user, or ARPU, crushes analyst estimates at $7.37 — a 21 percent increase from last quarter and a 19 percent increase from last year.
- Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been drilling down on the company’s Stories feature.
- Revenue for the December quarter of $16.91 billion marks a year-over-year growth rate of 30.4 percent.
Here’s how the company did compare with what Wall Street predicted:
- Earnings: $2.38 per share, vs. $2.19 forecast by Refinitiv consensus estimates
- Revenue: $16.91 billion, vs. $16.39 billion forecast by Refinitiv consensus estimates
- Daily active users: 1.52 billion, vs. 1.52 billion forecasts by Refinitiv consensus estimates
- Monthly active users: 2.32 billion, vs. 2.32 billion forecasts by Refinitiv consensus estimates
- Average revenue per user: $7.37, vs. $7.11 forecast by FactSet
It proved to be a strong financial quarter for Facebook, despite growing public outrage over its privacy practices. Earnings per share jumped 65 percent from the year-ago period. Net income totaled $6.88 billion, a record profit for the company and an increase of 61 percent from the year-ago quarter.
The organization’s subsequent report will be shakier, though. Facebook is anticipating revenue deceleration for the primary area of 2019 and projecting full-year expenses to jump between 40 percent and 50 percent from the entire yr of 2018.
During the December quarter, daily active users and monthly active users exactly matched expectations, each jumping 1.8 percent quarter over quarter and 8.6 percent year over year. The increases represent slower growth than in recent quarters but still indicate that the company’s data scandals and public privacy disclosures haven’t dinged engagement too drastically. Daily active users grew in every geographic area, reversing a downward trend in Europe and a plateau in North America. Monthly active users stayed flat in North America but jumped in every other region — posting robust growth in Asia-Pacific.
Facebook will soon stop reporting person metrics for the core Facebook platform, Chief Financial Officer David Wehner stated at the organization’s earnings name. Instead, the employer will begin reporting “circle of relatives metrics.”
“We consider those numbers better reflect the dimensions of our network and the reality that many humans are using multiple of our offerings,” Wehner said. “For the time being, we can retain to reveal both sets of numbers, however over the years, we expect our own family metrics will play the primary position in how we communicate approximately our corporation, and we can sooner or later phase-out Facebook-best community metrics.”
That makes some feel for Facebook, given WhatsApp and Instagram’s outstanding boom compared with Facebook’s center platform. But it’s a change no longer not like the reporting structure shake-up at Apple that scared investors.
Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been drilling down at the organization’s Stories function, a Snapchat-like sharing choice for transient snapshots and movies. Last quarter, Zuckerberg said Stories would end up “a larger medium than Feed has been” and stated users across the Facebook circle of relatives of apps — together with WhatsApp and Instagram — post more than 1 billion Stories in line with day.
