Analysts are going gaga for Facebook's earnings beat
The social networking giant beat expectations when it reported its Q1 2016 earnings on Wednesday - sending stock soaring in after-hours trading by 8% to an all-time high. The growth comes off the back of its strong mobile business.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also proposing a new share structure that will allow him to give away the majority of his fortune to charity while retaining voting control of the company.
Analysts are responding uniformly positive to the news, raising their price targets for the company as they reiterate overweight/buy ratings across the board.
We've rounded up a selection of reactions from analysts - but first, here are the key numbers, via my colleague Jillian D'Onfro:
- Earnings per share:$0.77 vs. $0.62 expected.
- Revenue: $5.38 billion vs. $5.25 billion expected, and up 52% year-over-year. Ad revenue is up 57% year-over-year.
- Monthly active users: 1.65 billion vs. 1.62 billion expected.
- Daily active users: 1.09 billion on average for March 2016. This quarter, 66% of Facebook's monthly active users (MAU) were daily active users, which is up from 65% during the same period last year.
- Total costs and expenses were $3.37 billion, up 29% year-over-year, and capital expenditures were $1.13 billion.
- Free cash flow for the first quarter of 2016 was $1.85 billion.
- Facebook has 13,600 employees, up 35% from the same time last year.
- Most of Facebook's revenue comes from North America and Europe with about only 24% ($1.3 billion) coming from Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. But those areas account for 66% of its monthly active users. The average revenue per user in those regions is still tiny, compared to in the US: $1.56 and $0.91, respectively, versus $12.43 and $3.98 in the US and Europe.