Q3 Earnings: What To Expect From Facebook

Ahead of the earnings release, investor sentiments toward Facebook Inc FB remained weakly in line with broader market sentiments. Having been a consistent earnings positive surprise provider, the Street expects the trend to have continued in the September quarter too.

However, there are other metrics besides EPS and the top line that play key roles in delivering results. For instance, monthly active users (MAUs) are a key data point most analysts and investors will be looking for.

Some of the important expectations from different analysts are given below:

• Stifel expects deceleration in total revenue growth from nearly 60 percent until the second quarter to about 53 percent in the third quarter with ad revenue expected to grow 56 percent.
• Goldman Sachs models 75 percent jump in mobile ad revenue on a year-over-year basis to $5.85 billion. For desktop ad revenue, the firm sees 5 percent growth from the year-ago third quarter. The firm’s checks on pricing suggested that CPMs were -3 to +5 percent on a quarter-over-quarter basis.
• Wedbush expects MAUs to record 14 percent year-over-year growth and 3 percent on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Currently, it has more than 1.7 billion MAUs. The firm expects to expand monetization of under-penetrated assets like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
• Citi sees penetration of Facebook’s recent Workspace enterprise software to be higher.
• Street analysts expect the company to report EPS of $0.97 on revenue of $6.92 billion for the third quarter.

At last check, the stock had fallen 1.94 percent on the day to $126.99.