Facebook reported a drastic slowdown in revenue growth and offered no financial forecasts after its first earnings report, sending its shares to a record low.
Facebook reported revenue increased 32 per cent in the second quarter to $1.18 billion, a hair above the average analyst forecast of $1.15 billion according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Executives from the social network pointed to early signs of success in new advertising services, but the lack of a detailed financial outlook went over poorly with investors hoping for evidence that the company could soon reverse the continuing slowdown in its business.
Shares of Facebook have shed a third of their value since their haphazard May debut at $38. They are now broke below $24.
"The question is, do you get a re-acceleration in the business at some point?" said Oppenheimer & Co analyst Jason Helfstein. "Because they didn't give you guidance, you're going to have to wait to find out what happens."
Shares of Facebook, which have shed a third of their value since their haphazard May debut at $38, broke below $24 in frenzied after-hours trading. The social networking pioneer was the first American company to debut with a market value of more than $100 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg, the 28-year-old chief executive who created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, said the company was seeing encouraging results from newly introduced advertising services and that Facebook now has a "clear path" to building a strong mobile business.
"Mobile is a huge opportunity for Facebook," said Zuckerberg, noting that the company was investing "very heavily" in improving its mobile apps.
The company, which competes with established web companies such as Google and Yahoo, said its capital expenditures more than tripled to $413 million in the second quarter.
Facebook's finance chief also said operating expenses in the second half of the year would increase significantly compared with the rate in year-ago period.
"At this early stage of our growth, investment is a top priority as opposed to managing for a target margin," said CFO David Ebersman.
Facebook posted a net loss of $157 million, or 8 cents a share, in the second quarter after taking hefty stock compensation charges related to its IPO. That compared to net income of $240 million, or 11 cents, in the year-ago quarter.
Excluding the charges, Facebook said it earned 12 cents a share, in line with Wall Street's forecast.
RISING AD PRICES
Facebook has raced through eight years of break-neck growth that was to have culminated with its May initial public offering.
Instead, its share price has headed south as investors questioned its valuation of more than 50 times earnings and its longer-term ability to sustain growth as users migrate to mobile devices.
Monthly active users grew to 955 million at the end of the second quarter, up from 901 million at the end of March. Mobile monthly active users surged 67 per cent year-on-year to 543 million users, adding further pressure on Facebook's business, which only recently began to offer limited forms of mobile advertising.
Facebook's Ebersman noted that advertising "impressions" lagged user growth during the second quarter but that new social ads, which appear directly in Facebook users' "newsfeeds", were driving up ad rates.
The average price of a Facebook ad increased 9 per cent during the quarter, Ebersman said, driven primarily by the United States where rates jumped 20 percent with the company's newly released social ads.
"It's a positive, but it's still early," said Ken Sena, an analyst with Evercore Partners, about the performance of Facebook's new ads.
"We won't likely be seeing much material impact any time soon," he said.
The stock price is also likely to come under further pressure, Sena warned, from the imminent expiry of a stock lockup imposed on many Facebook employees after the IPO. That could bring a flood of new shares to the market.
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