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Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

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

#111

Post by jacquesm »

johansch wrote: post #58
chollida1 wrote: post #5

Some fun Facebook facts from the earnings call/report - Facebook has a massive, $35.5 billion hoard of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. It's the third biggest S&P 500 company by this metric that isn't paying a dividend, after Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet. - Facebook's headcount is now at 20,658. That's up 43 percent since last year - Average Revenue Per User Rises 23% to $4.73, Down from 4Q 2016 -…

This is the point where I'm smiling happily because I moved from being an FB user to being an FB stock owner. I feel like this pattern could be applied more often in real life... some company is being "evil"... don't just abandon them, buy stock in them!

Buying their stock is supporting them so if you feel they are evil do not buy their stock.

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

#113

Post by atourgates »

grandalf wrote: post #88

Interestingly, I'm someone who does not click on ads, but the last 3 ads I've clicked on were on Facebook, and two resulted in purchases. I can't help it when the ads are for cool things like a $20 USB endoscope.

I work at an agency that does a decent amount of digital PPC advertising. A year ago, we'd almost entirely steer our customers away from Facebook to PPC-search advertising. Back then, the campaigns we ran on Facebook were almost entirely wasted money.

But today, Facebook has really improved their ad platform. They offer pretty much unparalleled user targeting features, coupled with some clever tools like product ads that are much easier to use and integrate than Google's.

For some advertisers, we've been able to deliver a much lower CPA on Facebook than Adwords or other platforms.

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

#114

Post by hueving »

omot wrote: post #7
virtuexru wrote: post #4

> Facebook’s formidable ad business, along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, soaked up 99% of the online ad industry’s growth last year, according to Pivotal Research. Does that seem crazy to anyone else?

That is absolutely insane. Should we seriously be considering anti-trust regulators to crack down on their insane growth?

I'm curious, what leads you to think that super successful companies should be broken up if they aren't engaging in anti-competitive practices?

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

#116

Post by acchow »

adventured wrote: post #106
austenallred wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

> They can't discharge all of that cash without suffering severe consequences due to their need to sustain a high credit rating.

What do you mean by this?

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

#117

Post by adventured »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #73
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.…

Thank you! Out of curiosity, how did you put together that list? Googling seems to only bring up second-hand lists like https://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/08/22/big-money-the-comp... but I think I'm using the wrong terms. (That's an interesting list too -- for comparison, Apple apparently had $76.2B in 2011.)

I put most of it together off the top of my head, from knowing a bunch of the companies that were cash rich, then checked on a few I suspected were (like Samsung), and then finally cross checked a few lists for any stragglers I missed (eg Amgen). I dug through some of China's companies (eg BABA or CHL), but didn't run across any offhand that made the list (their banks obviously do as with US banks).

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

#118

Post by hueving »

dopamean wrote: post #20
solomatov wrote: post #13

Interesting thing is that GOOG's results which were released several days ago weren't so stellar. It's good to see real competition in advertisement market.

I'm not trying to be snarky but is it really competition if it's just two players?

Competition doesn't have anything to do with number of players. As long as there is more than one party and they are not colluding, they will compete for each others market and push prices down or increase the quality of service.

Pro-competition laws aren't about what's fair for other people that might want to compete, they are about what's best for consumers.

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

#119

Post by jegutman »

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"

It is odd, but not as ridiculous as it sounds. For one, many companies couldn't issue 10s of billions in debt so you do have access to that much capital (normally at reasonable costs).

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

#120

Post by acchow »

rhizome wrote: post #44
chollida1 wrote: post #5

Some fun Facebook facts from the earnings call/report - Facebook has a massive, $35.5 billion hoard of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. It's the third biggest S&P 500 company by this metric that isn't paying a dividend, after Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet. - Facebook's headcount is now at 20,658. That's up 43 percent since last year - Average Revenue Per User Rises 23% to $4.73, Down from 4Q 2016 -…

Slightly interesting aside, 3.9B for 20,658 employees is ~$188K/employee profit, which is about a 20% drop from a few years ago[1]. I'm not an economist nor statistician. 1. https://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/what-18-of-the-biggest-...

You're comparing quarterly numbers with annual numbers.
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