Facebook’s share took a nosedive and closed down at $174.97 on Thursday from $217.50 on Wednesday, registering a 19 percent (approx) decline. During the earnings call, CFO David Wehner said that the sales growth is likely to decline in the next two quarters as the company prioritises new formats such as Stories (a popular feature on Instagram) and continues to invest in privacy. "We plan to grow and promote certain engaging experiences like Stories that currently have lower levels of monetization, and we are also giving people who use our services more choices around data privacy, which may have an impact on our revenue growth," Wehner said on the conference call.
Facebook earned $13.23 billion in revenue, missing Thomson Reuters consensus estimates of $13.36 billion. The Daily active users hit 1.47 billion, up only 1.44 percent as compared to Q1’s 3.42 percent. “We had another solid quarter. Revenue grew 42 percent year-over-year to $13.2 billion. And Facebook now has more than 2.2 billion monthly actives, with almost 1.5 billion using it every day,” Zuckerberg said. He mentioned all the investments the company has made over the last six months to improve safety, security and privacy across its services. Facebook now has 2.23 billion monthly users on the platform, 1 billion users on Instagram, 1.5 billion users on WhatsApp and 1.3 billion users on Messenger.