Facebook earnings beat Wall Street expectations

Facebook easily bettered Wall Street expectations yesterday, announcing that its once-struggling mobile business now accounted for 62 per cent of advertising revenues, The Guardian reported.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, the social network had a good second quarter. He said the Facebook community continued to grow, and see a lot of opportunity ahead as it connected the rest of the world.

Revenue for the quarter ending 30 June came in at $2.91 billion, an increase of 61 per cent over the $1.81 billion reported in the same quarter of 2013.

Excluding the impact of year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates, the social network said revenue would have increased by 59 per cent.

The company announced net income of $791 million for the latest quarter, up 138 per cent as against $333 million for the same period last year.

The number of Facebook's monthly active users as of 30 June had reached 1.32 billion increasing rising 14 per cent year-over-year.

The number of daily users stood at 829 million 19 per higher, year on year. According to Facebook, the number of mobile users topped 1.07 billion at the end of June.

Zuckerberg said on a conference call with analysts that people in the US spent nine hours a day on digital media, but less than an hour on Facebook.

Profit, at the social network more than doubled and revenues topped estimates for the ninth straight quarter, The Wall Street Journal reported. According to eMarketer Facebook's revenues from advertising on mobile devices, was expected to overtake newspapers, magazines and radio in the US for the first time.

Facebook also continued to show it could weather concerns that it was losing its "cool" factor among teens or angering users worried about privacy. The social network added another 40 million users in the second quarter, with one-fifth of the world's population now logging into the social network at least once a month.

The results saw Facebook's stock rise to an all-time high in after-hours trading, increasing 3.7 per cent to $75, nearly doubling Facebook's initial public offering price of $38.

Though Facebook started placing ads on its mobile site and app only two years ago around the time of its IPO, it now found itself entrenched in a battle with Google Inc, for mobile advertising dollars.

These would otherwise have gone to the web, print or television.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Mark Mahaney, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets as saying what Facebook had done with mobile was one of the most impressive things he had seen an internet company do in recent years, after the earnings release Wednesday.

He warned though, that Google still continued to be the behemoth in the industry and might be only beginning to assert itself on the platform.