Facebook's stock passed $38 for the first time
Shares of Facebook Inc. increased 1.2 percent
to $38.08 in morning trading Wednesday.
That's the highest the stock has traded since
the company's highly anticipated initial public
offering ended with a thud. The stock is up
by more than 50 percent since last week.
The world's biggest online social network has
been on a roll since reporting stronger-than-
expected earnings on July 24. Investors are
especially upbeat about its fast-growing
mobile advertising revenue.
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Facebook's ability to grow mobile revenue
was one of the biggest concerns in the
weeks leading up to its IPO last year.
Investors were worried that its ad business
was not migrating to mobile gadgets as
quickly as its user base. Facebook urged
patience.
In the April-June quarter, Facebook derived
41 percent of its ad revenue from mobile
advertising, or about $656 million of $1.6
billion. That's up from zero in the spring of
2012 and from 30 percent in the January-
March quarter of this year. CEO Mark
Zuckerberg said last week that the company
has "made good progress growing our
community, deepening engagement and
delivering strong financial results, especially
on mobile."
Still, Facebook has room to grow. Research
firm eMarketer expects Facebook to increase
its mobile advertising revenue more than
fourfold to more than $2 billion this year.
This would give the Menlo Park, Calif.,
company a 13 percent share of the global
mobile ad market, up from about 5 percent
last year.
Facebook is currently No. 2 in mobile ads,
well behind Google. EMarketer estimates that
Google had a 52 percent share of the global
$8.8 billion mobile ad market last year. This
year, the firm expects Google's share to grow
to 56 percent.
