Facebook reported its fourth quarter results, ending 31 December 2015, and full year 2015 earnings today. Nobody really expected Facebook to do badly but the manner in which it has smashed expert estimations is beyond impressive.
Facebook hit 1.59-billion monthly active users on average in the fourth quarter, up from 1.55 billion in Q3 and an increase of 14% year-over-year. Facebook’s daily active users increased to 1.04-billion for December 2015, an increase of 17% year-over-year, compared to Q3’s 1.01-billion DAU. The company completely obliterated expert estimates of US$5.37-billion and US$0.68 eranings per share with a US$5.841-billion in revenue and US$0.79 earnings per share. The revenue is up from US$4.5-billion from the third quarter of 2015, recording a 29.8% QoQ revenue growth and up by 51% compared to Q4 last year.
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“2015 was a great year for Facebook. Our community continued to grow and our business is thriving,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “We continue to invest in better serving our community, building our business, and connecting the world.”
Read more: Apple Q1 results a mixed bag, iPhone sales at 74.8m, iPad sales drop, revenue up
Mobile penetration is huge, largely thanks to affordable mid range smartphones, and this has benefited Facebook tremendously. Africa is showing a 47% market penetration and offers 500 million potential mobile subscribers. Facebook saw a massive 80% Facebook’s advertising revenue coming from mobile, up from 78% recorded in Q3. Mobile daily active users, mostly from developing markets where laptops and desktop computers are still not affordable, increased to 934 million on average for December 2015, an increase of 25% year-over-year. Mobile monthly users were 1.44 billion as of December 31, 2015, an increase of 21% year-over-year.
The company’s user growth grew but the growth was slower than the third quarter. It recorded a 2.58% growth, compared to Q3’s impressive 4.02% growth. The slow growth is evidence that in some markets, Facebook is reaching saturation, this is why the company has targeted most of its efforts, Facebook.org and Facebook Lite, to developing markets where growth of users has a bigger potential.
Apart from the main Facebook stats, the company has revealed stats for its other services. These include that now there is 100 million hours of video watched per day on Facebook, 1 billion users on Groups, 80 million users on Facebook Lite, 500 million users on Events, 123 million events created in 2015 and 50 million small and medium sized business on Pages.
Read more: Facebook launches Instant Articles to everyone on iPhone, coming to Android later in the year
Instant Articles, its newest product, introduced in 2015, did not see any stats from Facebook. It would have been interesting to see how much Instant Articles contributed to video watching stats with its rich media content.
Facebook also released stats for the full year of 2015. The highlights include a $17.93 billion, an increase of 44% year-over-year, an income of $6.23 billion, net income of $3.69 billion, and $6.08 billion free cash flow.
