Facebook recorded a significant increase in profits in the first quarter of 2018, thanks to a growing user base and bigger revenues from ads as the social media giant seems to suffer neither harm nor backlash after the recent data leak of over 87 million Facebook users.
The profits the Silicon Valley-headquartered company recorded in the first quarter of this year soared by over 63% from last year to $5 billion, while total revenues witnessed an increase of 49% to $11.97 billion, according to earning figures shared by the company.
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who despite spending most of the last month under pressure from the international community following the news of his company failing to protect data of millions of users from a third-party app, shared a message to investors in a bid to uplift their spirits. “Despite facing important challenges, our community and business are off to a strong start in 2018,” Zuckerberg said.
We are taking a broader view of our responsibility and investing to make sure our services are used for good. But we also need to keep building new tools to help people connect, strengthen our communities, and bring the world closer together,
his message added.
Following the release of the earnings figures for the first quarter of this year, the shares of the company on the stock market witnessed a hike in after-hours trades of over 4.7% to $167.33 a share.
Last month, when the data leak scandal news surfaced, a campaign known as #deletefacebook emerged encouraging users to delete their Facebook accounts. The campaign also saw the participation of several tech personalities such as Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and Brian Acton, founder of Whatsapp (bought by Facebook Inc. in 2014). However, figures released by the social network reveal that its monthly active users increased by 13% from last year to reach 2.2 billion users coming the end of March.
GHB Insights analyst, Daniel Ives said about the earnings in a research note that it
“should give the bulls finally something to hang their hat on after the company (and its investors) have just gone through the darkest chapter in Facebook’s history.
The strong earnings report of Facebook come somehow as a disappointment for many industry experts, who expected the social media giant to, at least, suffer small losses in terms of revenues and user count after the data privacy scandal. Especially since reports suggested that the social media giant made colossal amount of money from the information it stores about its users.
Mark Zuckerberg also had to appear twice at Capitol Hill in Washington in front of American law makers in a total of 10 hour questioning after the Cambridge Analytica scandal was made public.
However, when the scandal is impacting Facebook’s membership or advertising is unrevealed in the earnings figures from the first three months of the year, but the issue is most likely to surface during a routine call with financial analysts.