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Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#101

Post by nl »

danmaz74 wrote: post #63
djakademiks wrote: post #11

Where are all the "analysts" from hn claiming fb wouldn't make it? Thats right. They left. Moral of the story is.... Never believe the consensus that is hacker news. Dare i say inverse Edit: why the downvotes? Is it because my networth is 23 mil?

The consensus I remember was that Facebook posed a real threat to a free and open internet, because it's a kind of walled garden. That consensus, alas, is as current as ever.

You aren't looking back far enough. There was a very strong feeling that FB could never make money.

Then suddenly people started complaining about the walled garden effect...

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#102

Post by adventured »

mars4rp wrote: post #93
adventured wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring debt: Microsoft ($126b), Apple ($256b), Facebook ($35b), Berkshire Hathaway (near $100b), Cisco ($68b), Google ($92b), Oracle ($66b), Softbank (a lot), Amgen ($38b), Ford ($40b), Samsung ($73b), Johnson & Johnson ($39b), GE ($82b) There are a lot of financial entities and the like that have more cash than that of course. It's held under a different financial context than the cash that eg Apple is sitting on.…

Ford has $40b cash and its market cap is $43b ?? I should buy some. Edit: I guess I missed "Ignoring Debt" they have too much debt.

Maybe. Net tangible assets are $30 billion. Obviously much like GM, they're carrying a large pile of liabilities around on their balance sheet. I suspect Ford has to keep a significant amount of cash on hand for numerous legacy reasons (pensions?) to support their credit rating. $244b in assets stacked against $213b in liabilities.

GM is far more profitable than Ford, has $22b in cash, and $39b in net tangible assets. With a $53b market cap, GM is sporting a realistic 4.x to 5.x PE ratio currently (depending on how you want to account for their 4Q16).

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#103

Post by mahyarm »

losteric wrote: post #52
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet. These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB. Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and stan…

It turns into email with all of it's problems. And everyone will just use a gmail equivalent or whatever else they signed up with 15 years ago anyway.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#104

Post by nl »

tedunangst wrote: post #82
danmaz74 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consensus I remember was that Facebook posed a real threat to a free and open internet, because it's a kind of walled garden. That consensus, alas, is as current as ever.

At the time of the IPO there were lots of "finally I can short this disaster". Then the stock went down a bit and "I'm making so much money shorting this anchor! Short now before it hits zero!" You don't see as many of those comments these days.

You do see those same comments. Now they are about SNAP.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#105

Post by nradov »

loceng wrote: post #87
TomSawyer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of anti-trust laws is not to punish success, but to police against an entity using their dominant position in one market to take over a different market.

So what about FB replicating all of SNAP and overtaking them rapidly, taking the advertising growth market share they would of had otherwise? Time to breakup FB?

Is Snap actually in a separate market for antitrust purposes? Looks like the same market to me, but of course that decision is always a somewhat arbitrary judgment call made by the antitrust enforcers and court system.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#106

Post by adventured »

austenallred wrote: post #96
adventured wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring debt: Microsoft ($126b), Apple ($256b), Facebook ($35b), Berkshire Hathaway (near $100b), Cisco ($68b), Google ($92b), Oracle ($66b), Softbank (a lot), Amgen ($38b), Ford ($40b), Samsung ($73b), Johnson & Johnson ($39b), GE ($82b) There are a lot of financial entities and the like that have more cash than that of course. It's held under a different financial context than the cash that eg Apple is sitting on.…

And to be fair, "ignoring debt" is kind of an odd way to measure something like "who is sitting on cash"

In any real scenario, debt should obviously never be ignored, but we're counting cash in a vacuum here basically.

Some of these companies are carrying vast amounts of debt now, Microsoft and Apple for example. They can't discharge all of that cash without suffering severe consequences due to their need to sustain a high credit rating.

I added the ignoring debt tag, because who knows which of those cash / cash-like instruments are being used in what way in relation to some of those immense debt piles.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#108

Post by confounded »

StevePerkins wrote: post #77

Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now. Their website is almost meaningless to my day-to-day life at this point. I login once every couple of weeks, upload some pics of my kids for Grandma to look at, and then log off. I don't personally know anyone who still uses it regularly as we did back in 2007. I don't know a tactful way to put this... but it seems lik…

> I login once every couple of weeks, upload some pics of my kids for Grandma to look at, and then log off

Pretty much proves the point: Even people who actively dislike the company and product exhibit engagement and retention that other consumer apps would kill for. It sounds like you've been using it for a decade!

It's less of a 'product' than a globalized, cross-generation, ubiquitous social norm.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#109

Post by hueving »

loceng wrote: post #87
TomSawyer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of anti-trust laws is not to punish success, but to police against an entity using their dominant position in one market to take over a different market.

So what about FB replicating all of SNAP and overtaking them rapidly, taking the advertising growth market share they would of had otherwise? Time to breakup FB?

That just means SNAP sucked if it was that easy for Facebook to entice users. They in no way forced people to use their SNAP replica or charged less than SNAP did.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#110

Post by hueving »

Silhouette wrote: post #35
TomSawyer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of anti-trust laws is not to punish success, but to police against an entity using their dominant position in one market to take over a different market.

This is an interesting question for two-sided operations like Google and Facebook. Having a near-monopoly in online search also gives Google a near-monopsony in online search advertising. Likewise for Facebook with social networking. I'm wary of introducing regulation without clear evidence of its necessity. However, there is a reasonable argument that if exploiting a monopoly to gain advantage in an adjacent market…

I'm sorry, but what are you suggesting is harmful here?
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