Facebook Announces Q4 Results, Revenue Up 40% to $1.59B

Facebook reported its Q4 results today showing a year-on-year revenue growth of 40% to %1.59 billion. Mobile revenues grew to make up 23 percent of the company’s total and mobile monthly active users rose to 680 million, or up 57 percent year-over-year.

Facebook also beat analysts’ estimates on EPS and net income with about $65 million in net income to an average estimate of $45.8 million, and EPS excluding certain changes of 17 cents, compared to the forecast of 15 cents a share from the same Bloomberg survey. In the same time a year ago, Facebook earned $302 million in net income on $1.131 billion in revenue.

As for the revenue breakdown, Facebook has two primary revenue sources: advertising and payments. Ad revenue was $1.33 billion, up 41 percent from the year before. Payments revenue came in at $256 million, but was essentially flat year-over-year if you factor in some accounting changes that required Facebook to count four months of revenue instead of the normal three for the quarter.

Fourth Quarter 2012 Operational Highlights

  • Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.06 billion as of December 31, 2012, an increase of 25% year-over-year
  • Daily active users (DAUs) were 618 million on average for December 2012, an increase of 28% year-over-year
  • Mobile MAUs were 680 million as of December 31, 2012, an increase of 57% year-over-year
  • Mobile DAUs exceeded web DAUs for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2012

Recent Business Highlights

  • Mobile revenue represented approximately 23% of advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2012, up from approximately 14% of advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2012
  • Facebook launched Graph Search Beta, a structured search tool that enables users for the first time to find people, places, photos and other content that has been shared on Facebook
  • Launched Facebook for Android 2.0, completely rebuilt to deliver improved stability and faster performance and opened Facebook Messenger to anyone with a telephone number

Credits: TechCrunch

Prateek Panda: Prateek is the Founder of TheTechPanda. He's passionate about technology startups and entrepreneurship and enjoys speaking to new founders every day. Prateek has also been consistently regarded as one of the top marketing experts in the region.