Facebook Shares Explode After Reporting Earnings

Shares of social media giant Facebook were heading higher on Wednesday after the company reported an earnings beat in its second quarter financial results.

For its Q2 2019 report, Facebook reported revenue of $16.9 billion while analysts had been expecting $16.5 billion. Earnings per share were $1.99 compared to $1.88 expected. Daily active users for the company hit 1.59 billion compared to 1.57 billion expected. Monthly active users were 2.41 billion versus the 2.42 billion that was expected.

The company also disclosed that the FTC has opened an antitrust investigation into the company.

The Federal Trade Commission had recently levied a $5 billion fine against the company related to the Cambridge Analytica Scandal.

“We are investing in building stronger privacy protections for everyone and on delivering new experiences for the people who use our services,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated.

Zuckerberg also said on the earnings call, “This was an important quarter for us. Our community and business continue to grow and there are now more than 2.7 billion people using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger each month and more than 2.1 billion people who use at least one of our services each day. We continue to focus on our four priorities for the year, making progress on the major social issues, building qualitatively new experiences, building our business and communicating what we stand for more transparently.”

He also touched on the FTC development and said, “I want to talk about the recent news that we reached a settlement with the FTC over our privacy concerns. As part of this, we’ve agreed to pay a $5 billion fine, but even more importantly, we’re making some major changes to how we build our services and run this company. This will require investing a significant amount of our engineering resources and building tools to review our products in the ways we use data. It’ll also significantly increase our accountability by bringing the process for auditing our privacy controls more in line with how financial controls work at public companies at Sarbanes-Oxley.”

He continued, “We’ll have to certify quarterly that we’re meeting all our privacy commitments just as we have an Audit Committee of our Board overseeing our financial controls. We will now also have a new privacy Committee of our Board that will oversee our privacy program and work with an independent privacy auditor that will report to this new committee and to the FTC. We’re asking one of our most experienced leaders and product to take on the role of Chief Privacy Officer for product reporting to me and managing our privacy program.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in Facebook, Inc. Common Stock (NASDAQ: FB) and have not been compensated for this article.