Facebook Announces Q4 And 2015 Financial Results

It was yet another beat for Facebook, as the social media behemoth reported earnings for the fourth quarter of 2015 on Wednesday.

Net income for the quarter more than doubled compared with the year before to $1.56bn.

This spring’s debut of the Oculus Rift headset, part of the virtual-reality technology that Facebook bought for $2 billion in 2014, could open another lucrative market.

VR is still a nascent field, and has the potential of transforming computing.

Additionally, Facebook continues to dwarf the growth of social-media rival Twitter, which has recently been facing serious personnel challenges.

Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, the social networking service had over 1.18 billion monthly active users as of August 2015. “Our community continued to grow and our business is thriving”, said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. That makes it unlikely that Facebook will topple Google anytime soon. Instagram also continues to add users. Also, Facebook reports that it has brought in $3.77 per user in Q4, up from the $3.43 analysts had been anticipating.

Revenue in the quarter that ended December 31 also rose, to $5.84 billion from $3.85 billion during the same period a year earlier.

This is a massive jump, even for Facebook, which saw a 52 per cent increase in revenues throughout the final few months of 2015.

Revenue for the full year 2015 was Dollars 17.93 billion, an increase of 44 percent year-over-year. In turn, profit grew by more than twice, working out to more than $1.5 billion year on year.

“Facebook is gathering and garnering consumer attention”, said Anderson.

On the other hand, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, said, “The Internet is capturing more share of advertising and Facebook is capturing the lion’s share of that growth”.

Investors are betting on both companies. The results were quite impressive and will go a long way in giving analysts who see Facebook’s years as a growth stock coming to end, a pause. Meanwhile, the Standard & Poor’s index dipped 1 percent. “Millions of people rallied to support Nepal after the natural disaster, France after the Paris attacks and all those affected by the refugee crisis”, Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook.

“I think we are off to a good start”. “They are the two big gorillas in digital advertising”.