Facebook has a business model in need of a radical change and a still-rich $61 billion market value. What's not to "like"? Plenty.
Facebook's 40% plunge from its initial-public-offering price of $38 in May has millions of investors asking a single question: Is the stock a buy? The short answer is "No." After a recent rally, to $23 from a low of $17.55, the stock trades at high multiples of both sales and earnings, even as uncertainty about the outlook for its business grows.
The rapid shift in Facebook's user base to mobile platforms—more than half of users now access the site on smartphones and tablets—appears to have caught the company by surprise. Facebook (ticker: FB) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg must find a way to monetize its mobile traffic because usage on traditional PCs, where the company makes virtually all of its money, is declining in its large and established markets. That trend isn't likely to change. (...)
The bull case for Facebook is that Zuckerberg & Co. will find creative ways to generate huge revenue from its 955 million monthly active users, be it from mobile and desktop advertising, e-commerce, search, online-game payments, or sources that have yet to emerge. Pay no attention to depressed current earnings, the argument goes. Facebook is just getting started.
Facebook's 40% plunge from its initial-public-offering price of $38 in May has millions of investors asking a single question: Is the stock a buy? The short answer is "No." After a recent rally, to $23 from a low of $17.55, the stock trades at high multiples of both sales and earnings, even as uncertainty about the outlook for its business grows.The rapid shift in Facebook's user base to mobile platforms—more than half of users now access the site on smartphones and tablets—appears to have caught the company by surprise. Facebook (ticker: FB) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg must find a way to monetize its mobile traffic because usage on traditional PCs, where the company makes virtually all of its money, is declining in its large and established markets. That trend isn't likely to change. (...)
The bull case for Facebook is that Zuckerberg & Co. will find creative ways to generate huge revenue from its 955 million monthly active users, be it from mobile and desktop advertising, e-commerce, search, online-game payments, or sources that have yet to emerge. Pay no attention to depressed current earnings, the argument goes. Facebook is just getting started.
Facebook now gets $5 annually in revenue per user. That could easily double or triple in the next five years, bulls say. In a recent interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Zuckerberg said, "It's easy to underestimate how fundamentally good mobile is for us." His argument, coming after Facebook's brand-damaging IPO fiasco and a halving of the stock, was something only a mother, or a true believer, could love. This year Facebook is expected to get 5% of its revenue from mobile. "Literally six months ago we didn't run a single ad on mobile," Zuckerberg said. Facebook executives declined to speak with Barron's.
"Anyone who owns Facebook should be exceptionally troubled that they're still trying to 'figure out' mobile monetization and had to lay out $1 billion for Instagram because some start-up had figured out mobile pictures better than Facebook," says one institutional investor, referring to Facebook's April deal for two-year-old Instagram, whose smartphone app for mobile photo-sharing became a big hit (and at the time had yet to generate a nickel in revenue).
"Anyone who owns Facebook should be exceptionally troubled that they're still trying to 'figure out' mobile monetization and had to lay out $1 billion for Instagram because some start-up had figured out mobile pictures better than Facebook," says one institutional investor, referring to Facebook's April deal for two-year-old Instagram, whose smartphone app for mobile photo-sharing became a big hit (and at the time had yet to generate a nickel in revenue).
by Andrew Bary, Barrons | Read more:
