Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the e-G8 summit in France with president Nicolas Sarkozy. Photo: Cyril Attias/Flickr
Facebook is in the Wall Street doghouse once again. Its shares fell this morning to their lowest levels yet, down much more than 40 percent considering that their disorganized debut this previous May. Pressure is mounting on Facebook to push marketing ever far more aggressively.
The organization must resist.
It’s simple to forget that Facebook is, by practically any metric, a healthy and developing firm. It created $ 1 billion in profit final year on $ 3.7 billion in income. Final quarter, profit grew as much as analysts expected, and income was up 32 percent—gold-star growth for nearly any other company even just before you adjust for the weak economy.
But investors anticipate a lot more. They want to climb aboard a profit rocket and shoot for the stars. And there are few such possibilities elsewhere. Monetary services is a large mess. Manufacturing and customer spending at retail have weakened. Automakers are getting trouble, thanks partly to fears of European sovereign debt crises. And although stocks general are at their highest point in practically three months, “corporate income are having their worst quarter in years.” Even other current tech IPOs, like Groupon, Pandora and Zynga, have proved to be letdowns.
Facebook itself must take considerably of the blame for Wall Street’s inflated expectations. It spiraled up its valuation in 7+ years of venture rounds, eventually promoting shares privately a year-and-a-half ago at a valuation of $ 50 billion—just about what the company is worth these days. Subsequent, CFO David Ebersman priced and sized Facebook’s initial public providing insanely aggressively, valuing the organization at $ 104 billion.
So it’s no surprise a lot of investors want to see meteoric growth. But Facebook has vowed to cater first to its customers, who are rightfully sensitive to how their private data and relationships are leveraged. In yesterday’s Facebook earnings call, executives took pains to say they have held back promising marketing schemes even though the proposed changes had been carefully tested on customers.
“We’re going to proceed slowly with this,” Ebersman stated of Facebook’s top-priority marketing product, identified as “sponsored stories.”
Ebersman continued: “The biggest mistake we could make is to move as well swiftly and to uncover ourselves in a predicament where we’re possessing an effect on user engagement that we didn’t anticipate or that is difficult for us to manage.”
Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg later echoed Ebersman: “We’re getting fairly cautious … at limiting the quantity of sponsored stories. We intend to be continually cautious as function on the user perception.”
This is a intelligent approach. No matter how aggressive Facebook gets with marketing, income will go down if users begin to pull away from the service.
Facebook is in a pinch of its own making, with foaming-at-the-mouth investors on one side pushing aggressive ads and touchy customers on the other demanding privacy. The business will have to let someone down. Facebook would do much better by far to disappoint Wall Street, to admit it’s not the $ 100 billion business it recently mentioned it was. Investors will come flocking back anytime the company figures out how to much better leverage its massive user base. If Facebook chases away these users, on the other hand, the climb back to such a rich valuation at any point in the future just gets steeper.
