Facebook now has more than 900m users


24 Apr 2012

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

Facebook filed its fourth amendment to its S-1 for its upcoming IPO, saying it has made US$1.058bn in revenue for the first quarter of 2012 and now has 901m monthly active users.

The figures come as Facebook prepares to IPO, which may happen on 17 May with an expected value of US$104bn. It would be the largest stock market flotation made by an internet company to date.

According to the S-1, its revenue is down 6.5pc from the fourth quarter of 2011, but up 44pc from the same period last year. Advertising made up US$872m of its revenue, with payments and other fees accounting for the remainder.

Social gaming firm Zynga helps Facebook make a sizeable portion of its revenue, however, Facebook’s dependency on this company appeared to decrease slightly, falling from 19pc of its revenue last year to 15pc this year.

International revenue made up 49pc of total revenue during the first quarter of 2012, up from 42pc during the same period last year.

Facebook had US$381m in operating income and US$205m in net income.

The amended filing also referred to its recent Instagram acquisition. It paid 23m shares at US$30.89 per share, as well as US$300m to acquire the photo-sharing app. This made up a total of US$1.01bn. If government authorities do not approve of the acquisition, Facebook will pay Instagram a US$200m termination fee.

Facebook now has 901m monthly active members and sees 3.2bn ‘Likes’ and comments per day.

Some 300m photos are uploaded to Facebook each day and it says there are 125bn friendships recorded on the site.