Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2018 Results | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2018 Results

investor.fb.com

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Pre:

- options pricing in move of almost 10%

- going in the stock is down about SalesForce's entire market cap

Numbers:

- 3Q Ad revenue $13.54B

- 3Q Daily Active Users 1.49B

- 3Q EPS $1.76, Est. $1.47

- 3Q Rev. $13.73B, Est. $13.80B

- 3Q Monthly Active Users 2.27B

- North America DAU was relativly flat

- European DAU down

- operating margin is lowering, not too out of line but lowest we've seen, watch this...

- Capex was up 90% compared to last Q2 to $3.4B

Notes:

- 2 Billion+ people used atleast one service once a day

- 2.6 Billion people used facebook atleast once a month

- big after hours trading in terms of volume, not much in terms of price moves, straddle sellers won this one

Questions:

- Will we hear from Sheryl Sandberg? Has anyone had a larger fall from grace due to recent large tech company backlash?

- After hours trading suggests that Wall Street is happy with facebook at its current valuation, meaning they'll have to find some large growth to join the big boys Google, Apple, Microsoft and Apple

- FB Said they would have hit their numbers except for currency issues. watch to see if they start seriously hedging expenses and earnings, swap or open market?

- Have now lost the founders of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Was bound to happen at some point but still is a lot of knowledge lost. This effect will probably play out over the next 2-8 quarters and not immediately.

- What is FB doing with US mid terms coming up? Last election they really failed, and that's being polite. What will Mark let us know about their plans for the US elections?

> Will we hear from Sheryl Sandberg? Has anyone had a larger fall from grace due to recent large tech company backlash?

What happened to Sheryl?

MAU and DAU numbers are here:

https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q3...

It's down 1 million DAU in Europe (279 to 278) from last quarter give or take some decimal precision. Basically flat in both regions.

Wow the US is worth more to FB than the rest of the world combined.

I get the impression that the spotlight and bad press gave them a huge boost in sales despite basically flat year-over-year users. OTOH, when everyone's talking about how your ads can elect governments, it s a huge compliment.

I think generally speaking Ads spending in US is also much bigger than EU. The only place on earth which has similar in dollar value is China, but that is advertising against a 900 million users base, so not an entirely fair comparison, but relevant one.

- 2 Billion+ people used atleast one service once a day

Sad to be in that group. Although I haven’t use FB for years, WhatsApp seems to be the App of choice for direct messaging.

> What will Mark let us know about their plans for the US elections?

The fact that this is even a question is frightening.

They have a war room up to watch the current US elections. Same war room for the Brazilian elections.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/technology/facebook-elect... [2]https://gizmodo.com/hey-howd-that-facebook-war-room-fare-dur...

The fact, that this is frightening should be a concern for stockholders, because it means a looming legislation.

How could FB mitigate this? Maybe by iterating over these war-rooms often enough, that they could be offered as a tool, so that neutral institutions normally obliged with observing the fairness of a country's election could use that tool to gain back control.

At Oculus they still have John Carmack - I think that matters a lot more than the kickstarter founder they had that left.

Don't forget Michael Abrash too, who, isn't going anywhere else anytime soon. If Abrash and Carmack can't deliver on VR, I don't think anyone else will, at least in this generation.

2b connections [lets just say one off] in one day is 23 per ms. That's insane consider database connections and hardware that goes there.

> - options pricing in move of almost 10%

The options sellers win again. Collect them juicy premiums boys. Like stealing candy from a baby.

> - North America DAU was relativly flat

Shocking considering the dozens of articles saying everyone was leaving FB.

> - What is FB doing with US mid terms coming up?

Probably making bank on all that political ad spending. Apparently a few records being set for funding raising for midterm. A lot of it has to be going into online ads.

More detail here: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q3...

edit: Massive increase in headcount too: Headcount – Headcount was 33,606 as of September 30, 2018, an increase of 45% year-over-year.

It was swinging a lot after hours. The results look pretty good. For a growing company 20 p/e is pretty good.

My question is at what point does Facebook realize that publically displaying people's likes and tagged ins and such is a terrible idea and just stop doing it? And providing real privacy options?

When it stops making them a ton of money. So, probably never.

What are it's DAU/MAU numbers for the US and Western Europe?

https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q3...

Flat from last quarter

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