Facebook has just revealed its earnings for the first quarter of 2017 and as expected, the company has had a good quarter overall — although, it was not its best. The company has managed an impressive $8.03 Billion in revenue and has also recorded a 4.3 percent increase in its user numbers, leaving it very close to the awesome, 2 Billion user milestone.
While the number of daily actives reached 1.28 Billion (that is almost one in every seven, take a moment to reflect upon that) the total number of users stood at 1.94 Billion at the end of the first quarter. This makes it very likely that Facebook will arrive at the 2 Billion users milestone in Q2, 2017. As far as the rate of user growth was concerned, it also grew from 3.91 percent last quarter to 4.3 in this.
The role of mobile has increased with regards to the company’s ad revenue and mobile accounted for 85 percent in this quarter. In the last quarter, this figure stood at 84 so its a growth of merely 1 percent, but that is to be expected as mobile usage reaches saturation. The company generated $3.06 Billion in profits in Q1 upon $6.7 Billion in revenue.
While the company beat expectations in ad revenue, it managed to exceed the earnings per share expectations as well. EPS expectations stood at $0.87 EPS whereas the company reported $1.04.
We can expect the company do continue its good run and maybe even enhance it further in the upcoming quarter. The first quarter is usually the hardest for tech and Internet companies.
Facebook has also launched a whole slew of new products this quarter so we can expect them to start yielding serious revenue in the near future as well. The different new initiatives launched by Facebook include Messenger Day, Facebook Stories, WhatsApp Status, Ads between videos and so on. The company can be expected to move to monetize the features that it hasn’t already monetized yet and with that, we can expect an increase in its earnings in the next quarter. Of course all that is merely conjecture at this point. What is important is that Facebook has managed to continue its unbroken run of churning out one good quarter after another.
