An almost doubled net profit, increasing revenues and an army that reaches one billion and 350 million subscribers. Yet this is not enough for Facebook to convince Wall Street: the giant of Mark Zuckerberg closed an excellent quarter but at the same time issued a warning on next year's profits, conditioned by the heavy investments in planned infrastructures and the "digestion" of the latest acquisitions, from WhatsApp to Oculus.
And so despite net income jumping 90% to $806 million, or 30 cents a share, from $425 million in 2013, and revenues up 59% to $3,2 billion, Facebook falls on the stock market. (in the wake of what Twitter did the day before): -11% in trading after the closure of Wall Street. The results beyond expectations had instead initially made it possible to close the regular session with an increase of 1%.
However, the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, says he is satisfied with a "good quarter with solid results". And he assures: “We continue to focus our attention on serving the community and we continue to invest to connect the world in the next decade”. Facebook is driven by friends who connect from mobile devices: the social network has in fact become primarily a mobile society, as demonstrated by the recent launch of the Facebook Audience Network. And the expected advertising response has finally arrived, also in the mobile segment: according to some estimates, by the end of the year Facebook should come to control 20% of the global mobile advertising industry, taking advantage of the slowdown of Google, whose share it should drop to 45% from 50% two years ago.
