Facebook shares (NASDAQ:FB) have already been on the rise for the past few months, which makes today’s performance even more impressive — shares opened at $62.12, sixteen percent above yesterday’s closing price of $53.53 a share.
In other words, Facebook’s market capitalization gained more than $20 billion in a single night. It now sits at $151 billion.
The two reasons why Facebook shares have been doing so well are quarterly earnings and a new app announcement. Despite reaching saturation in the U.S. and Canada and a potential slowdown in youth usage, the company reported better-than-expected numbers on both revenue and earnings per share.
Another important milestone, for the first time mobile ad revenue was greater than desktop ad revenue. It now accounts for 53 percent of total ad revenue. Many analysts didn’t expect Facebook to become a mobile company so quickly, that’s why shares were trading so low after its IPO.
In after-hours trading yesterday, shares traded above $60 for the first time ever.
It could have slowed down in the morning, but the company made another announcement: Paper. Paper is a brand new curated news reader for the iPhone. It’s a separate app, an experiment and a sign that Facebook is willing to change its core user experience again. While the app isn’t available before February 3rd (and no word on Android just yet), the company wanted to make the announcement right away.
Maybe it didn’t expect to present good numbers for its quarterly earnings and wanted to make another announcement to reassure the stock market. Either way, adding these two things together has sent Facebook share prices through the roof.
