Facebook's quarterly profits rise to $6.9 billion
- by Arthur Torres
- in Finance
- — Feb 7, 2019
The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has posted a record quarterly profit, reporting per-share earnings of $2.38 in the fourth quarter; up from $1.44 past year and beating Wall Street analysts projects of $2.18.
The number of employees for the Menlo Park, California, Titan as of December 31 was 35,587, an increase of 42 per cent year-on-year as a result of a hiring spree to help monitor the platform to weed out abuse, misinformation, and manipulation.
Shares in the tech giant, which makes most of its money from online advertising, jumped 11.5% to $167.67 (£127.80) in after-market trades following the release of the earnings.
Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said: 'Our community and business continue to grow.
An estimated 2.7 billion people use Facebook's "family" of services including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and its core social network, based on the latest update.
While a large majority of the press warns users about Facebook's practices, the social network continues to grow.
While Stories across all its products emerged as a strong source of revenue, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg emphasised that there are plans to bring new products to bring "major improvements to people's lives". "Advertisers are clearly still very reliant on Facebook". "This is going to be a long-term project that I think will probably be to whatever extent we end up doing it in - a 2020 thing or beyond", said the Facebook CEO.
But it has also been battered by criticism that it was more focused on growth than protecting users or thwarting deception, bullying and harassment.
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Most backlash against the proposed integration is likely to come from outside of the US. Ruggie Capital Group now owns 446 shares of the social networking company's stock valued at $58,000 after purchasing an additional 156 shares in the last quarter.
Advertising revenues for 2018 were a staggering $55bn.
Among one of the most publicised scandals was a data breach affecting 50 million Facebook users in September.
Facebook today announced that there are a combined 2.5 billion people on their 3 messaging platforms, and on the earnings call suggested this would enough to create an iMessage-type layer which could replace SMS messages completely.
"We're going to get to a point soon where people feel like Facebook is about as communities as it - is about communities as much as it's about your friends and family where nearly everyone is in a group that's meaningful to them and that community is a central part of their experience", asserted Zuckerberg.
While Facebook is still the most popular social media channel in Singapore, it seems to be following the global trend of losing its younger users.
One analyst cautioned the risk to Facebook's stock may be further in the future, when European regulators get more deeply involved in their privacy probes.
