By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO (AA) – Facebook announced Wednesday that it is getting even bigger and richer during a quarterly earnings call.
The news comes on the same day company stock saw an all-time high price of $124.34 per share. During the second quarter earnings call following the close of markets, shares of Facebook soared more than 6 percent in after-hour trading to top $131.
“Our community and business had another good quarter,” Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “We’re particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services.”
The company announced 1.71 billion people are using Facebook at least once a month, a 15 percent increase compared to the same period last year. The company said 60 million people signed up for Facebook during the second quarter of fiscal year 2016 alone. This further solidifies Facebook as the world’s largest social network. WhatsApp is the second largest and Facebook Messenger is the third, both owned by Facebook.
In June, 1.13 billion people on average were logging into Facebook every day.
Facebook’s quarterly revenue beat analyst expectations by a vast margin. The company pulled in $6.44 billion for the quarter, trouncing earlier estimates of $6.02 billion. About $6.24 billion came from advertising, with 84 percent of that amount coming from mobile advertising.
While Facebook was experiencing an all-time high stock price, it’s long-time competitor Twitter had a very bad day on Wall Street.
After a disappointing quarterly earnings report published Tuesday, Twitter’s stock nosedived more than 14.5 percent, to $15.77 per share.
Twitter said that it had 313 million monthly active users in its report, less than a fifth of Facebook’s population.
