With little competition, Facebook officially pulled in $12 billion last year
After Apple reported oil-company-like earnings numbers this morning, Mark Zuckerberg and the boys at Facebook are chiming in with their latest quarterly earnings. As expected, the Menlo Park, CA-based social network beat estimates, reporting $3.85 billion in revenue (up from $2.59 billion the previous year) and earnings of $0.54 a share (up from $0.31 previous year) for Q4 2014. With little-to-no competition in the social network space (well, there’s Google+ kind of), that means they officially pulled in $12 billion for 2014.
Facebook says their daily monthly active users totaled around 890 million, with a monthly average of about 1.39 billion users. Since Facebook’s initial public offering in May of 2012, their value has nearly doubled to about $215 billion. But they still have their work cut out for them lest they end up another Myspace.
Facebook has lost around 3.3. million teens (ages 13-17) since 2011, and another 3.4 million in the 18-24 range. Ironically, they’ve seen an 80% growth of the 55+ group over that same time, with grandparents flocking to the social network to keep up with friends and family, which could be a reason all the youngsters are leaving in favor of hipper social networks like Instagram or Snapchat.
Facebook’s mobile business is where they’re making the most money, accounting for nearly 69% of their profits. This includes now monetized Instagram with 300 million+ active users, and the 600 million on WhatsApp. Facebook’s gross margins took a hit, down 15% compared to the previous year thanks to “big bet” acquisitions like their 19 billion dollar WhatsApp purchase last February, or Oculus VR back in March.
Looking ahead, Facebook says their goal for the next decade is to continue to evolve by focusing on serving and growing the community for people and businesses. They plan on doing this by making WhatsApp and Messenger “indispensable” services, continuing to developing Facebook Search, making Facebook a truly “cross platform platform” for developers, and finally connecting the world to the internet (and Facebook in the process) via their Internet.org efforts.
[Facebook]