Facebook eases past Wall Street estimates, sees spending up in 2017 | Reuters

 

Facebook Inc (FB.O) cruised past Wall Street’s earnings and revenue expectations on Wednesday with strong growth in its mobile ad business, demonstrating that controversy over so-called “fake news” and inaccurate advertising measurements had little impact on its financial performance.With quarterly profit of $3.57 billion, more than double the $1.56 billion it reported a year ago, the company showed no signs of slowdown in growth. The results handily beat analysts’ expectations, and shares ticked up about 0.2 percent in after-hours trading.The company had warned in November that ad growth would likely slow “meaningfully” due to limits on ad load – the total number of ads Facebook can show to each user. But there was little sign of that in the fourth quarter as total revenue soared to $8.81 billion from $5.84 billion a year ago.”I think the rate of growth will decline, but it will remain very high,” said analyst Mochael Pachter of Wedbush Securities. “They grew 57 percent in 2016, and our current model has ‘only’ 38 percent revenue growth in 2017. That’s still pretty impressive.”

Källa: Facebook eases past Wall Street estimates, sees spending up in 2017 | Reuters