Owing to strong advertising gains, the social media company posted earnings per share of $0.42 on revenue of $2.91 billion excluding one-time items. After an initial decline following the results, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is presently (5:10PM EDT) trading at $74.07 up $2.78 or 3.91% in extended trading. Prior to the earnings call the company was up $2.02 on the day closing at $71.29 for a gain of nearly 3% in Wednesday’s trading.
Elation from Palo Alto to Menlo Park
“Strong performance across the board shows personalized marketing at scale is working,” said Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB). She added that Instagram is “seeing great results” in advertising but is “still taking it really slow.”
In addition to the upside that still exists on Instagram ads, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) now has 1.5 million active advertisers up 50% from the 1 million active advertisers it had last June.
The Street was calling for earnings of $0.32 per share and anticipated sales of $2.81 billion according to Thomson Reuters.
The after-close announcement and gains weren’t limited to Facebook as LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp and Weibo all posted gains following Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s earnings beat in after hours trading.
FB mobile ads driving growth
“What’s happening here is advertisers are getting a good yield and a good return on investment with mobile ads,” said Martin Pyykkonen, senior research analyst at Rosenblatt Securities. “So they’re working from the advertisers’ side.”
Active mobile use was up nearly 40% from this time last year while total daily active users grew 19% year-over-year. To translate, in June Facebook saw an average of 650 million mobile users according to the company. Year-over-year mobile advertising sales were up 30% and now represent 62% of Facebook’s total advertising revenue.