Facebook strikes 1.86 billion monthly active users as earnings rush

Social networking giant ‘Facebook’ shares bounced with utterance that profit more than doubled in the final quarter of last year, coming back down after a vow to spend heavily on the future.

In earnings that topped most forecasts, Facebook said it made a net profit of $3.7 billion (roughly Rs. 24,943 crores) on revenue of $8.6 billion (roughly Rs. 57,979 crores) in the fourth quarter, as compared with profit of $1.6 billion on $5.6 billion in revenue in the same period a year earlier.

Meanwhile, the number of people using the leading social network monthly increased 17 percent to 1.86 billion. The ranks of people accessing Facebook from mobile devices each month grew to 1.74 billion, an increase of 21 percent from the same period a year earlier. Daily active users went up to 1.23 billion, up 18 percent year on year, while mobile daily active users went up to 1.149 billion, up 23 percent year on year.

To shed more light on this, Baird research analyst Colin Sebastian in a note to investors, said "We believe concerns over user engagement and other social competitors are likely overblown, as few companies share Facebook's combination of scale, strong technology orientation, and platform breath/diversit."

"Our mission is to connect everyone in the world and it's hard to do that over the long term if we don't find a way to serve the more than billion people who live in China," Zuckerberg said while answering questions from analysts.

"But one of the big things that we need to think about here is of course we're only going to do this in a he way that we're comfortable with over the long term."

Well, the Facebook shares jumped more than two percent in after-market trades, returning to 15 cents above the closing price of $133.23 after chief financial officer David Wehner reminded analysts that the social network has essentially run out of spare room for ads and plans to invest "aggressively."

"Our business did well in 2016, but we have a lot of work ahead to help bring people together," said Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. "Our mission to connect the world is more important now than ever." He added.