NEW YORK — Facebook didn’t hit it out of the ballpark with its latest quarterly report, but the bar isn’t so high these days for the image-battered social networking giant.
The company reported a slight revenue miss but stronger than expected profit for the July-September period.
Coming three months after its stock suffered its worst one-day drop in history, wiping out $119 billion of its market value, the mixed results were perhaps not the redemption Facebook hoped for.
But shares inched a bit higher after-hours, suggesting, at least, that the social media giant didn’t further spook investors. With the myriad problems Facebook is facing, that’s what passes for good news these days.
“Overall, given all the challenges Facebook has faced this year, this is a decent earnings report,” said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.
The company’s user base was up 10 percent from 2.07 billion monthly users a year ago.
The company earned $5.14 billion, or $1.76 per share, up 9 percent from $4.71 billion, or $1.59 per share, a year earlier. Revenue was $13.73 billion, an increase of 33 percent, for the July-September period.
Analysts had expected earnings of $1.46 per share on revenue of $13.77 billion, according to FactSet.
The company warned last quarter that its revenue growth will slow down significantly for at least the rest of this year and that expenses will continue to balloon. The following day the stock plunged 19 percent. The shares not only haven’t recovered, they’ve since fallen further amid a broader decline in tech stocks.
Facebook’s investors, users, employees and executives have been grappling not just with questions over how much money the company makes and how many people use it, but its effects on users’ mental health and worries over what it’s doing to political discourse and elections around the world.
There are stricter privacy regulations in Europe that can impede how much data Facebook collects on users. Facebook and other tech companies face a new “digital tax” in the UK. It is spending heavily to boost security, moderating content and investing in new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that more than a quarter of U.S. Facebook users have deleted the app from their phones and 42 percent have taken a break for at least a few weeks.
Younger users were much more likely to delete the app than their older counterparts.
Nonetheless, Facebook is still enjoying healthy user growth outside the U.S.
Facebook’s stock climbed $2.68, or 1.8 percent, to $148.90 in after-hours trading.
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