Facebook’s stock infamously took a nosedive in the months following its public debut in 2012 after analysts wondered if the social network was too overhyped in its IPO and employee share lockups expired. But those days now seem a distant memory.
On the back of a strong Q2 report, Facebook stock is at an all-time high in after-hours trading. It’s been creeping up for the last hour and is currently at over $75/share. Its close today at $71.29 is $1.30 shy of Facebook’s 52-week high, and values the company at just under $183 billion.
The company today presented strong Q2 results, beating analyst estimates on revenues of $2.91 billion and over 1.3 billion users. But just as its financial numbers are rising, importantly, so are the company’s usage numbers.
During the call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that on average, a Facebook user in the U.S. spends 40 minutes per day in the app. As a point of comparison, just over a year ago, all social media usage by the average person in the U.S. totalled 16 minutes per day.
The U.S. is Facebook’s most loyal and valuable market at the moment, so this not only is a sign to investors that it’s still doing well at home, but is also a potential signal of things to come in regions where Facebook usage is still less developed. There is “still so much room to grow,” as Zuckerberg noted today.
Interestingly, the strength of the existing business is also giving the company some breathing room in how it implements new monetization features elsewhere, such as messaging. Today Zuckerberg admitted that payments will eventually “overlap” with messaging (something many suspected, especially since Facebook’s key messaging acquisition WhatsApp has sworn off all advertising on its platform), but as Josh noted earlier, don’t hold your breath.
