With Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s stock opening at $77 a share in trading today, it pushed its market capitalization over $200 billion joining other tech giants in this rarefied air. That is an effective doubling of the company’s market cap from when it went public in May of 2012 and nearly four times its low after it lost nearly half its market capitalization following the IPO that sent the stock tumbling.
Over the past twelve months, the stock has gained around 84%. With the lion’s share of this gain coming after the stock crushed analysis expectations for the second quarter. In addition to beating consensus numbers with revenue for Q2 coming in just under $3 billion, which represented a gain of over 60% year-over-year following a well played shift to mobile.
Now that Facebook has joined the $200 billion club, it now trading at about 12 times consensus estimates for 2015 sales. While no one expects a repeat of Q2 2014, the company still expects revenue growth of about 35% in Q2 2015.
Oh the company it now keeps
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), with its new $200 billion capitalization puts it higher than IBM’s $192 billion,; nearly $45 billion more than Amazon’s $158 though it still trails a number of tech giants by a long ways. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) still has a market capitalization of $370, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s $397 billion, and Apple’s mammoth $605 billion. It does put them in very good company though.
Notable in Facebook’s joining this $200 billion club is the fact that analysts still expect great things from Facebook’s efforts to monetize Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, something the company has promised to take slowly.
Facebook’s search for other tech revenue
Additionally, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is looking at other areas to find revenue streams not unlike Google. The company’s decision to purchase Oculus early this year shows this. Recently the company purchase no less that 100 patents from other companies in fields ranging from speech translation, peer-to-pee printing, virtual reality to video. These purchases were made from January 2013 to the present according to a new report by Envision IP, a New York-based research firm specializing in intellectual property, analyzes patent purchases.
