(Reuters) - A year after Facebook Inc’s fumbled IPO, Wall Street remains slow to recognize what Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg argues has been an across-the-board improvement in its business.
Facebook’s ability to deliver ads to mobile phones, improvements in measuring the effectiveness of its ads and increasing user engagement have all put the world’s largest social network in a better position than before the IPO, Sandberg told the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Wednesday.
“When I look back at the last year since we went public, I believe we are unequivocally a much stronger company today than we were on literally any metric I can think of,” Sandberg said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Wednesday.
Facebook became the first U.S. technology company to debut with a value of more than $100 billion, in May 2012. Its shares have lost almost 40 percent of their value since.
“I can’t speak to the stock price but I do feel strongly that we are a better positioned, stronger company than we were a year ago,” she said.
With 1.1 billion users, Facebook is one of the Web’s most popular destinations for consumers and advertisers. But growth in the company’s revenue has slowed sharply from two years ago and some investors fret that a new crop of mobile apps aimed at younger users could chip away at Facebook’s hold on consumers.
Analysts also wonder if the company’s depressed share price could dampen morale and hamper its ability to attract talent in Silicon Valley’s ultra-competitive talent arena.
“I don’t think it’s actually had a huge impact,” the ex-Google Inc executive said, adding that while there had been some worries in the company about it, she was less worried as she had been through it before.
The cool investor reception to Facebook and other recent consumer dotcom debutantes from Groupon to Zynga has helped chill the Silicon Valley IPO train. “If you miss in the first six months of being a public company, you’re in the penalty box for a very long time,” Sequoiapartner RoelofBotha said at a panel about the fate of Silicon Valley public offerings.
“If you beat too much, you’re an idiot because you should have forecast higher.”
OLD AND NEW
Under co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s new mission is to carve out a dominant position in smartphones and tablets to keep up with shifting consumer habits.
The company’s mobile ads, which appear directly in users’ newsfeeds and now account for 30 percent of Facebook’s overall ad revenue, command higher prices than its previous PC ads and are tougher for competitors to replicate, Sandberg said.
It has recently introduced new features that have been popularized on rival service Twitter, such as verified user accounts and “hashtags,” which make it easier for users to follow activity on the social network.
Within the last year, Facebook made its largest acquisition ever, paying about $700 million for Instagram. Sandberg said the company was in no hurry to generate revenue from the mobile photo-sharing app.
Source: Reuters
