Facebook on the rise after beating Q1 earnings
On Wednesday social media giant Facebook reported its first quarter earnings, and they did not disappoint, beating Wall Street’s expectations. Revenues for the quarter totaled $15.08 Billion USD with analyst estimates coming in at $14.9 Billion. EPS came in at $1.89 which was almost 10% higher than analysts expected, with estimations in the region of $1.62. These great financials have put the stock on the rise with afterhours trading the stock is up 4%. The company also made investors aware that it recorded a charge of $3 Billion after an FTC inquiry into user data practices. This charge did eat into the company’s bottom line, and Facebook did go on to say that there is a potential for the charge to be anywhere between $3-5 Billion.
The most important figures investors are looking at with a company like Facebook is there monthly and daily user metrics, which is the number of people on the site per day and per month. The higher the number of users the more Facebook can charge for their advertising space. Facebook did match analyst’s estimates for monthly users and their daily active users.
Safety and security are still problems for Facebook
Facebook’s earnings follow their latest hit from consumer protection advocates, where Facebook said they had heavily underestimated the amount of users whose passwords are stored on internal Facebook servers. Which could be the start of a huge data breach. Originally Facebook has said that a mere tens of thousands of users were impacted by the security breach however they later revised the figure to tens of millions.
Just weeks before that, Facebook came under scrutiny for their response to the New Zealand mosque massacres. When their livestreaming service was used to publish the attacks for the world to see, critics claimed that Facebook did not act quickly enough to remove the video from their site. It was revealed that the company only found out the video was there after they were approached by police. Out of Facebooks control the video continued to be re circulated by other users and was re uploaded over time.
Lately CEO of the social media giant Mark Zuckerberg has made a promise to users of the site that they will be doing everything they can to improve both security and privacy as he believes that they are the foundations and cornerstones of the company itself. The social media network is also still trying to clean the site of ‘fake news’ articles and the spread of misinformation on the platform. Zuckerberg has said recently that the company is investing almost $4 Billion USD into improving site security and privacy for the future.
Simon Chu – Midway Management