Facebook announces Q3 results with 1.79 billion monthly active users and $7.01 billion revenue

By Karthekayan Iyer | Updated on 04-Nov-2016

03 Nov 2016 11:35

HIGHLIGHTS

Facebook passes over one billion "mobile only" users for the first time

Facebook had another successful quarter with strong growth in both revenues and active users. Facebook earned revenue of $7.01 billion in Q3 2016, a growth of 56 percent from the same quarter last year.

Facebook also saw significant growth in monthly and daily active users. Facebook says it has 1.79 billion monthly active users, which is a 16 percent increase year over year. The daily active users stood at 1.18 billion while daily active users on mobile grew to 1.09 billion. In an investor filing, the social networking platform confirmed it had 1.66 billion mobile monthly active users, up from 1.57 billion reported in Q2 2016.

Facebook's numbers surpassed most analyst estimates which pegged the revenue to be around $6.92 billion in revenue and $0.97 earnings per share. However, Facebook share price declined in after market trade after CFO David Wehner confirmed that Facebook is hitting maximum ad load on its platform.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg summed up the earning by saying,"We had another good quarter." Facebook is slowly transitioning itself into a video-driven platform with key focus on putting video ahead of status updates. The recent quarter result suggests the idea is working in its favour. "We're making progress putting video first across our apps and executing our 10 year technology roadmap," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.

Facebook says mobile advertising revenue contributed to approximately 84 percent of advertising revenue with capital expenditure standing at $1.10 billion. Facebook earned $2.37 billion in profit, a solid growth of over 160 percent year-over-year.

Facebook also confirmed that it is sitting on $26.14 billion in cash in the form of cash, cash equivalents and market securities. The number gives a nice hint to the fact that Facebook can easily acquire any fledging startup. Another interesting data was yesterday's earnings call was the fact that Facebook still has 66 per cent monthly actives, an indicator that Snapchat is not really eating into the platform.