Photo: ReutersPhoto: ReutersWOW! After underwhelming results from Apple, Google and other big tech names, investors finally found a friend in Facebook after the company shredded Wall Street's forecasts for revenue, profit and user growth.
Facebook's shares jumped 11 per cent to a record high of $120 in early trading on Thursday giving a $30-billion boost to the social networking company's market value.
"FB remains in a class by itself across the combination of scale, growth, and profitability," JP Morgan Securities analyst Doug Anmuth said in a research note. "While there are broader concerns of macro softness toward the end of 1Q, Facebook isn't seeing them." Analysts don't see Facebook's growth slowing anytime time soon as it grabs a bigger share of the advertising market particularly on mobile devices. At least, 24 brokerages raised their price targets on Facebook's stock with RBC the most bullish at $165.
Facebook reported a powerful surge in profits in the first quarter on Tuesday as the user base continued to climb. Profit tripled from a year ago to $1.5 billion as revenue jumped to $5.4 billion from $3.5 billion in the same period a year earlier. "We had a great start to the year," said Facebook cofounder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
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The key metric of monthly active users rose to 1.65 billion, up 15 per cent from a year ago. And those using Facebook daily rose 16 per cent to 1.09 billion with strong gains in numbers of people using mobile devices.
"Facebook continues to generate very high and very profitable growth-an extremely rare combination," RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney said.
Ad revenue jumped 57 per cent to $5.2 billion. Mobile ad revenue accounted for about 82 per cent of total ad revenue, up from about 73 percent a year earlier.
(With inputs from Agencies)
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