Profits and revenues better than forecasts were not enough for Facebook to celebrate the good quarterly (published in the Italian night after the closure of Wall Street) in the best possible way. The market was mainly disappointed by the contracting margins and revenues deriving from the core business of advertising deemed unsatisfactory, albeit improving.
For this reason, the shares of Mark Zuckerberg's social network have been subject to strong volatility in the after-hours: they came to initially lose 10%, then rose by 1% and subsequently returned to yield more than 4%. Facebook closed the session at $31,24, up 1,46%. The threshold of 38 dollars set for the IPO price last May therefore remains far away, but the stock is still recovering from the historic lows reached in September ($17,55 intraday).
In the fourth quarter of 2012, the Menlo Park, California-based group recorded a 79% contraction in profits on the back of the increase in costs and expenses (+82% after +64% in the previous three months). The result thus arrived at 64 million dollars from 302 million in the same period of the previous year. Excluding exceptional items, earnings were $426 million, or 17 cents per share, versus $360 million a year earlier. Analysts were expecting 15 cents per share.
