It’s been a wild ride for Facebook’s stock in 2018. It was punished by “Cambridge Analytica” in April but had a big ramp up from May-July resulting in an all-time high market cap of ~$630 billion dollars.
But that changed when Facebook released its earnings last week. The stock dropped over 20% and the current market cap is closer to $500 billion. Wall Street is spooked about Facebook’s guidance for slowing growth.
Our total revenue growth rates will continue to decelerate in the second half of 2018, and we expect our revenue growth rates to decline by high-single digit percentages from prior quarters sequentially in both Q3 and Q4.
– Facebook CFO Dave Wehner
Is the market acting rationally? Was the earnings report “abysmal” like many hot takes have labeled it?
Financial Fundamentals
In Q1, FB’s revenue grew 49% yoy. In Q2, FB’s revenue grew 42% yoy. This new guidance puts FB’s Q3 growth greater than 32% and Q4 growth greater than 22%. Although this guidance is lower this is incredible growth for a company of Facebook’s size. Apple, Google, and the all mighty Amazon have all averaged growth under 30% yoy the last decade. Even with Facebook’s revised guidance, it is ahead of the pace of its peers. With its P/E at 23, this gives FB a PE/Growth (PEG) of well over 1. According to value investor Peter Lynch, Facebook is cheap from a fundamental perspective.
It seems difficult to label this earnings call as abysmal. The fundamentals are strong with few attacks on its current business model. But does this make Facebook a value stock instead of a growth stock?
#DeleteFacebook
The height of #DeleteFacebook was in April and any ramifications were reported in the earnings last week. US & Canada were flat with both DAUs and MAUs, which means few followed through with deleting their account. European users saw a decrease in DAUs which Facebook is attributing to GDPR rollout, not towards #deleteFacebook.
The good news from the earnings report is that there is no mass user exodus. All “Peak Facebook” predictions have fallen flat. That being said, user growth of Facebook.com may move closer to internet growth in general. But should Facebook’s growth potential be evaluated based on Facebook.com’s user growth? Or should Wall Street start paying attention to the new number rolled out these earnings –
For the first time today, we’re also releasing how many people use at least one of our apps, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger, and that’s 2.5 billion people each month.
-Mark Zuckerberg
WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger can all continue to grow for years to come. Since Facebook provides a way for advertisers to target users on any of their apps, it doesn’t quite matter which of these apps the eyeballs are on. Therefore, revenue growth is no longer as tied to Facebook.com’s user growth as it has been in the past.
Areas of Growth Opportunity
Stories
The biggest place Facebook has work to do is in monetizing Stories. After paying $22 billion dollars for WhatsApp in 2014, Facebook finally has an opportunity to make some of that dough back. WhatsApp has 450mm DAUs on WhatsApp Status (their stories format). Add another 400mm for Instagram stories and 150mm on Facebook stories and you have a lot of eyeballs to monetize.
Like the mobile monetization before it, I expect Facebook to easily capture value with Stories. In Facebook’s early days as a public company, many doubted its ability to advertise effectively on mobile. Today, it accounts for 91% of Facebook’s advertising revenue
Mobile ad revenue was $11.9 billion, a 50% increase year-over-year, making up approximately 91% of total ad revenue.
Similar doubts exist about Facebook’s ability to monetize Stories. These doubts will go unfounded as time goes on. The uncertainty around monetizing mobile ads were more founded than Stories since no other mobile app was monetizing ads at scale when Facebook started that journey. But with Stories, Facebook (and Wall Street) has Snap to use as a model. Snap is pulling in ~$1.20 per quarter per user from Stories monetization (and growing 35% yoy). With over 1 billion DAU Stories users, Facebook can easily make another $1 billion per quarter from these ads (and I expect much more as time goes on).
Marketplace, Workplace, and Occulus
Like Google before it, Facebook continues to attempt to diversify its revenue streams but so far all attempts are dwarfed by the mega success of their advertising products.
“Payments and other fees” brought in $193mm, which is 1.5% of total revenue. This means that Marketplace, Workplace, and Occulus are not producing significant revenue. Although this is an area of opportunity this is also an area to keep expenses down. Facebook remains more focused than Google and Amazon, but can Facebook make the tough decisions? Can/will Facebook shut down a major effort if it underperforms?
Based on its low PEG, you can make an argument that Facebook is a value stock. But its growth days aren’t over as last quarter has shown. When you consider the revenue growth and user growth potential of products under the Facebook umbrella, it becomes clear that Facebook is a growth stock with fundamentals that appeal to a value stock investor.
FB will reach a new all-time high before 2018 is over. The $1 trillion market cap is still less than five years away. Facebook’s growth isn’t over yet.
Disclaimer – I own $FB and am biased AF