Facebook, Inc. (FB): Earnings Whisper

Facebook, Inc. (FB) is scheduled to report earnings results for Q2/FY15 after the close of the trading session on Wednesday, July 29. The Street is looking for revenues of $3.99 billion, a 37.58% growth from $2.90 billion in the same period a year earlier. As far as EPS is concerned, analysts expect Facebook’s year-over-year profit to increase by 46.87% to $0.47. Meanwhile, EarningsWhisper.com reports a whisper number of $0.49 per share.

As a quick reminder, Facebook reported 1Q/15 EPS of $0.42, $0.02 better than the Street’s consensus estimate. Revs came in at $3.54 billion versus the $3.56 billion consensus.

On valuation measures, Facebook Inc. Cl A shares are currently priced at 92.40x this year’s forecasted earnings. Ticker has a t-12 price/sales ratio of 19.58. EPS for the same period registers at $1.03. The name has a current market cap of $267.45 billion and a median Street price target of $100 with a high target of $125. Currently, there are 40 analysts that rate FB a ‘Buy’, 6 rate it a ‘Hold’. 1 analyst rates it a ‘Sell’.

In terms of share statistics, Facebook Inc. Cl A has a total of 2.25 billion shares outstanding with 3.26% held by insiders and 65.90% held by institutions. The stock’s short interest currently stands at 1.12%, bringing the total number of shares sold short to 23.49 million.

In advance of Facebook’s Q2 earnings today, we have some key data points, courtesy of Verto Analytics:

• Facebook remains the second biggest digital publisher in the U.S. with 227M unique users in June (overall), only after Google (GOOG), (GOOGL) (236M) and ahead of Yahoo (YHOO) (212M).
• In mobile, Facebook is the second biggest publisher, they have 151M uniques on mobile in June, vs. 159M for Google (# 1) and 123M for Amazon (AMZN) (# 3).
• Facebook flagship web site + app reach 227M (across all devices) and 151M on mobile (June data).
• Facebook is heavily changing its strategy with services and engagement to an app-based model, distributing use cases into different apps (Facebook Messenger, Facebook Flagship App, Instagram, What’s App). Facebook apps remain the most downloaded (and the most updated) apps in the app stores.
• Facebook has been very successful in absorbing a huge audience to its spin-out Facebook Messenger app: it had 101M unique users in mobile for June vs. 123M for the flagship Facebook app.
• In mobile apps, Instagram is one of the biggest social media apps with a monthly audience of 58M users in the U.S. What’s App is not so popular in the U.S. (only 12M uniques for June) as in other countries.
• Mobile is not only driving Facebook’s advertising revenues, but also its engagement with the online users: 34% of Facebook’s monthly audience is mobile-only, and as much as 57% of Facebook’s daily audience is mobile-only.

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