Facebook defies estimates, registers growth

Defying all the estimates by analysts, Facebook made $1.41 profit per share instead of the $1.31 that Wall Street was expecting and registered a strong growth in its mobile advertising business with total revenue reaching $8.8 billion from $5.84 billion last year.

The quarterly profit was $3.57 billion -- more than double ($1.56 billion) the company reported last year.

For the full year, Facebook's revenue climbed by $10 billion or 54 per cent to just over $27.5 billion compared with $17.9 billion in 2015 and the company's net income for the year more than doubled to $10 billion, Fortune reported on Thursday.

Mired in controversies like "fake news" and inaccurate advertising, Facebook itself expected a slowdown in the growth rate of its advertising revenue.

The report said that one way by which the Menlo Park company registered the growth was by adding more than 265 million new monthly active users in 2016 -- almost as many users as Twitter has in total.

Facebook now has more than 1.8 billion users who log on every month and more than 1.2 billion users who do so every day.

Another major growth engine for the social media giant was mobile.

Over 1 billion of Facebook's daily users access the site primarily on their phones or tablets and that number grew by 23 per cent in the latest quarter. Mobile ad revenue made up about 84 per cent of the company's total ad revenue.

Facebook also said it earned $12.4 billion in income from operations last year, nearly double the total from 2015 ($6.2 billion).

--IANS

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