Facebook share price soars to record high, double its IPO value
It wasn't that long ago that Facebook's stock was on a downward spiral, as investors questioned the social network's ability to make money with an increasing number of people logged in via their mobile devices.
What a difference two years makes in the world of social media and tech stocks.
Today, Facebook shares surpassed $76, a record high and double their value when the company went public in 2012.
That saw the company's market capitalisation jump to around $192.3bn, meaning that Facebook is now worth more than Coca Cola, Disney and Bank of America and ranked among the top twenty companies in the S&P 500 Index.
This surge came on the back off some pretty impressive quarterly results the California-based firm released yesterday, demonstrating that its revenue from mobile advertising was booming.
Following its botched IPO, all the more messy given the hype that surrounded it, shareholders punished Facebook in successive quarters. The concerns were over how the company could cope and continue growing its profit at a time when its users were shifting from desktop to mobile, meaning Facebook could command less for ads, the cornerstone of its business model.
But yesterday's numbers from Facebook show how well Mark Zuckerberg has adapted the social network to cater to an increasingly mobile-driven base and maintain both profit growth.
Mobile advertising revenue represented 62 per cent of Facebook's ad revenue for the three months to June this year, up from 41 per cent from the same period in 2013.
Add to this the fact that those who access the social media site exclusively via a mobile device were up by 58m to 399m, which means that almost one in three Facebook active users were mobile-only users, it seems like the firm is doing more than adapting – it's flourishing.