Facebook (FB, Financial) displayed healthy performance in 2016, moving up approximately 10%. Moreover, the stock has endured to move upward at a rapid pace heading into 2017, rising 20% year to date.
The upswing of the smartphone trend has been a blessing for Facebook because 90% of its daily active users (DAUs) access it via smartphone. In the most recent quarter, the company detailed that out of 1.04 billion overall daily active users, 894 million were mobile daily active users.
Moreover, the revenue generated from mobile signified nearly 85% of Facebook’s entire ad revenue. The mobile advertising revenue was $7.2 billion, a surge of 80% year over year.
Currently, Facebook is the third most populated online platform, having approximately 1.8 billion monthly active users (MAUs). As a matter of fact, the social networking giant’s monthly active users base continues to surge at a healthy rate. With the continuous growth, it has become mandatory for the company to introduce several innovative features from time to-time to keep its users engage.
Considering this, Facebook has done a great job, introducing Facebook Live last year, which allows a particular user to record live videos and share them. Video plays a very significant role, as it provides huge growth opportunity on which the company’s management is executing swiftly.
Moving ahead, the company has additional plans to introduce new ways to watch videos such as bringing sound to videos in news feed, watch and scroll, vertical video and Facebook video application for TV. These features will further strengthen the company’s ambitions toward video.
Facebook also looks well poised to gain huge benefits from the virtual reality trend in the coming years. Virtual reality is still in its infancy, but it is projected to grow to $33.9 billion by 2022. It is well-known to everyone that Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are the only two high-end VR headsets that require high-end PCs.
The only problem with both the headsets was its highly expensive price. But Facebook recently slashed the price of the Rift as well as the controller by $100 each, which is a great move.
Summing up
Facebook's upward momentum started in late 2012. Since then, it has continued to reward stockholders with healthy returns every year. Moving ahead, the social network giant is enhancing, as the number of users has almost doubled over the past four years.
On the other hand, the company’s management is putting in a lot of effort into addressing the growth opportunities offered by video. As a result, stockholders should continue their long-term journey with Facebook to gain enormous benefits in the coming years.
Disclosure: No position in the stocks mentioned in this article.
