Facebook Earnings Rise on Mobile Growth
 Facebook Inc. isn’t signing up new users the way it once did, but the social network is generating a lot more revenue from each user. Its fourth-quarter earnings grew 34%, to $701 million, propelled by a 49% increase in revenue, to $3.58 billion. Mobile advertising surged, helping Facebook narrow the gap with rival Google Inc. The Menlo Park, Calif., company’s spending limited profit growth for the second quarter in a row. Total expenses jumped 87%, to $2.7 billion. Research and development costs, which includes salaries for much of the staff absorbed through recent acquisitions, more than doubled, to $1.1 billion, from $408 million. Operating margins fell to 29% from 44% a year earlier. The 3% increase in daily active Facebook users last quarter was the lowest since 2012. The share of users who visit daily, which Facebook terms “engagement,” remained flat at 64%, the first time that ratio didn’t increase since the company went public more than two years ago. Still, it is collecting more advertising revenue for each user. Globally, that figure rose 31%, to $2.81, compared with $2.14 in the same quarter a year earlier. In the U.S. and Canada, Facebook’s most-developed market, revenue grew even faster, to $9 a user, up from $6.03. Most of Facebook’s user growth is outside North America, where spending on advertising pales in comparison. In its Asia-Pacific region, average revenue was $1.27, and elsewhere it was 94 cents. Facebook said 85% of its users now access the network via mobile devices, and more than a third access it exclusively via mobile. Advertisers are following: Facebook said 69% of its $3.6 billion in advertising revenue came on mobile devices, up from 53% of advertising revenue in the year-earlier period. |
