We’re into the second week of earnings season, and the VentureBeat staff is ready for the freakin’ weekend, y’all.
But before we depart for book-reading and beverage-imbibing, here’s what we learned from covering financials this week:
Facebook is awesome, and Amazon investors are 100 percent daft.
Also, check out the first “earnings week” stock price movement.
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After months of lagging and slumping, Facebook bounced right the heck back with an earnings report that blew away analysts’ expectations. Revenues were up to $1.8 billion, but the big story was mobile.
“Mobile first!” is the battle cry of our era, and mobile revenues were suspected to be around a third of Facebook’s total income. Well, spank me and call me Charlie if Facebook’s mobile revenues didn’t account for a full 41 percent of the whole.
“When it comes to mobile, I’m very pleased with the results,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the understatement of the quarter. “Soon, we’ll have more revenue on mobile than on desktop.”
All that good news had an immediate and palpable impact on Facebook’s stock price, which surged a remarkable 31 percent this week. Currently, Facebook is trading at $34, its highest price since the company’s disastrous IPO. (P.S. — Toldja.)
“Facebook has a been doing well since the IPO in terms of company performance,” said Gartner analyst Brian Blau in an interview with VentureBeat.
“While their financial results are not stellar from quarter-to-quarter, they certainly have been able to meet expectations, grow, and have started to make convincing arguments that their mobile strategy is paying off.”
Here’s a breakout of the stock price this week:
Also reporting this week were Zynga, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon.
Apple’s revenues were up, leading to a respectable but relatively underwhelming bump in stock price. Netflix missed growth goals and saw a dip in stock price accordingly. Zynga reported a year-over-year revenue loss of around 30 percent — oh, Zynga — and its stock dropped 10 percent. So much for the company’s big surge to $3.43 following the announcement of its new CEO.
The one weird note was Amazon’s earnings. The company posted seriously mixed results with very little real information and lots of unanswered questions. And then, a stock bump happened, prompting media reporter Tom Cheredar to issue a call to Amazon shareholders to “wake the hell up.”
Here’s a look at percentage changes for the week. We’re off to books and beverages.
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