Facebook's mobile business is still aggressively investing this year

Beijing time January 31, foreign media published in Thursday analysis of the article said that social networking site Facebook through mobile devices from advertisers to obtain more advertising investment has made progress, but it is not enough to shake the burden of Wall Street's expectations.

As the world's largest social networking site, Facebook's fourth-quarter earnings, released in Wednesday, showed a 40% per cent increase in revenues to $1.59 billion a year. At the same time, the company's advertising business grew to the best of 2012 years by aggressively expanding its mobile business and introducing new tools to advertisers to better position consumers.

But Facebook's fourth-quarter net profit fell 79% from a year earlier, as a result of the new move to increase spending. Facebook's fourth-quarter performance was roughly in line with Wall Street analyst's average expectations.

Facebook's fourth-quarter mobile ad service was particularly prominent. In the past quarter, Facebook's overall advertising revenues rose 41% to $1.33 billion a year earlier, and mobile advertising has accounted for 23% of the company's advertising revenues. In the third quarter of 2012, Facebook's mobile advertising revenue was 153 million dollars, just 14% of advertising revenue.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, said in a Wednesday analyst conference call that "Facebook has become a mobile company, which has been uncontroversial this year." ”

Of course, as investors have recently pushed up Facebook's share price, they have been tepid in their performance. Facebook's share price fell by about 5% per cent in the trading after the earnings were released, but as sales became smaller, the company's share price finally fell 3.8% to $30.05. Facebook's shares were closed at $31.24 in regular trading in Wednesday, up 1.5% per cent from the previous session. Facebook's share price has fallen somewhat recently, after a 70% rebound from last September.

For some analysts, the growth of Facebook's mobile business has not impressed them. Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, Richard Greenfield, said Facebook had been able to get around $3 million trillion of revenue by mobile advertising by the end of the third quarter, with little change in the fourth quarter. Greenfield said, "despite Facebook's dramatic increase in mobile news advertising, growth seems to be slowing." "In the conference call, Facebook executives stressed that the company's mobile business was still at an early stage of development.

Jordan Rohan, an investment banker Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan, said, "The growth of Facebook's mobile business has not reached the highest market expectations." But the analyst added that he was still encouraged by the progress Facebook has made so far.

Since the IPO in May 2012, Facebook has struggled to improve its presence in mobile advertising, which has long been seen as a weakness for Facebook to sell more ads on smartphones and tablets. Facebook has released a range of new products, including Messenger apps for smartphones and several other advertising formats. Earlier this month, Facebook launched a social search engine called Graph search, which was also described as an important pillar of the Facebook business.

Facebook said that by the end of December, the total number of users using smartphone social apps each month had reached 680 million, a 57% increase from a year earlier. David Ebersman, chief financial officer at Facebook, said, "We did not have a mobile revenue David Ibbosman two quarters ago." Our mobile business is just getting started. ”

Market research firm emarketer predicts that overall, the US mobile ad market grew nearly twice times in 2012 to $4 billion trillion and is expected to surpass $7 billion trillion by 2013. An advertising industry executive said they had noticed that Facebook's efforts to move the advertising business were reaping results. "There is no doubt that Facebook's mobile advertising business is moving in a positive direction," said Colin Kinsella, chief executive of Digitas North America, a advertising reason company. ”

In a conference call in Wednesday, Facebook also described how to take steps to get advertisers to connect with their clients. Facebook said it had released its Facebook Exchange last September to help marketers locate consumers instantly by matching their browser records. Currently, Facebook Exchange has provided about 1 billion advertising impressions per day for more than 1300 advertisers.

Chris Zaharias, the advertising company's Triggit chief battalion, said the demand for advertising via Facebook exchange had increased dramatically. Triggit's customers have grown about twice times since last summer, driven by Facebook exchange. He says more than 100 customers are currently using Facebook Exchange.

Facebook continues to face challenges, including how much money the company invests in more than one perspective, and whether it will eventually be able to deliver returns to investors. Users may be tired of advertising, especially with a very limited screen size for smartphones.

In a conference call, Mr. Zuckerberg reminded investors that some of Facebook's new businesses should be given appropriate expectations. He said Facebook would continue to "aggressively" invest, especially in this year's increase in headcount. Facebook's spending rose 82% in the fourth quarter of last year, to $1.06 billion trillion. "We're not going to maximize our profits this year," Zuckerberg said. All we do is to build the best service and business in the long run. ”