Facebook ends 2015 with strong revenue growth and profits

Facebook’s user grow shows no sign of slowing yet with the company seeing 1.59 billion monthly active users, up 14 percent year-over-year, and 1.44 billion are monthly mobile users, up 21 percent over Q4 2014.

In the holiday quarter of 2015, Facebook income from advertising surged to $5.8 billion surpassing the $3.6 billion it generated a year earlier.

Past year marked a big investment period for Facebook, which hired thousands more people and poured money into projects including its virtual-reality arm Oculus VR, artificial intelligence and extending internet access to remote areas. “We continue to invest in better serving our community, building our business, and connecting the world”, he said. The company stated that 1.04 billion people use Facebook everyday now, which reflects a 17% year-over-year (YoY) boost. On top of all of this, Mark Zuckerberg has announced he wants to program a custom A.I. to up Facebook’s position in that sector.

If we look over the past 12 months we can see that Facebook’s growth on the stock market was steady from March of 2015 until August when it took a tumble.

That’s still a lot of ground for Facebook to make up, but it’s not impossible, given the digital dossiers that it has compiled about its users’ passions, friendships and other services that they visit while signed into the social-networking service.

Bernstein analyst Carlos Kirjner wrote in a note before the earnings were released that it’s “difficult to have great confidence on the rate at which Instagram revenue will ramp up over the next few years, or when, how, and how well WhatsApp will monetize”. Analysts on average had expected earnings of 68 cents per share and revenue of $5.37 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

The two company’s fortunes are increasingly different, with Apple telling investors Tuesday that iPhone sales growth has stalled, while Facebook Wednesday said ads on mobile devices are booming.

Facebook has been talking about the power of video views, which now total 8 billion per day on the social network, but when it comes to client success some point to the direct sales and actions the site and the app provides.

The count of mobile daily active users was 934 million on an average for December, a growth of 25 per cent on year.