Facebook Up 370% From IPO Price

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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courtesy of Facebook Inc.
Facebook’s (NYSE: FB) IPO struggled out of the gate on May 18, 2012. With its price set at $38, it closed at only $38.23 at the end of that day. It dipped for several days after that. However, the early debacle is a very distant memory. Facebook’s shares are up 370% from the first day of trading to $150.25. Its market cap is $425 billion, which places it fifth among all publicly traded companies.

The two things which have been the primary drivers of the huge run are its user numbers and rapid revenue grow. It has also helped that Facebook is very profitable. In 2010, Facebook’s revenue was $2 billion, and its net income $606 million. In 2016, revenue reached $27.6 billion, and net income $10.2 billion. EPS has moved from $.49 to $3.56 over the same period.

Facebook’s first quarter 2017 numbers will be released on May 3. They are expected to show more strong double digit improvement.

At the end of last year, Facebook had 1.86 billion monthly active users, and important metric for the social media sector.  A research firm called Internet Live Statistics claims the current Facebook count is just shy of 1.9 billion, which means it could top 2 billion by mid year.

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A by product of Facebook’s size it that it is part of what ad industry expected call the internet advertising duopoly. According to the FT:

Google and Facebook will extend their dominance of digital advertising this year to control 60 per cent of the growing market, according to a new forecast from eMarketer.

US digital ad spending will grow 16 per cent to $83bn, the research group projected, as Google’s revenues rise 15 per cent and Facebook’s increase 32 per cent.

The two companies’ hold on online spending has created a digital duopoly that is upending the advertising business. In 2015 they accounted for 75 per cent of all new online ad spending, according to Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the US venture capital fund

Google’s parent Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has a market cap of $639 billion, which puts it second among all companies behind only Apple

If Facebook continues to take large bits from the online visitor universe, its shares will continue to rally

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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