Facebook managed to grow its year-over-year revenue by 18 percent in the first quarter of 2020, the company reported [1]Wednesday, even after the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a "significant reduction in the demand for advertising" in the last three weeks of the quarter. While demand dropped in March, Facebook said it saw "signs of stability reflected in the first three weeks of April."
Facebook's Q1 net income came to $4.9 billion, with earnings of $1.71 per diluted share. Revenue came to $17.74 billion, up 18 percent year-over-year.
Analysts were expecting earnings of $1.74 on revenue of $17.48 billion.
Due to the uncertainty created by the pandemic, Facebook is not providing revenue guidance for Q2 or for the full year 2020. However, it noted that advertising revenue in the first three weeks of April was approximately flat compared to the same period a year prior.
"The April trends reflect weakness across all of our user geographies as most of our major countries have had some sort of shelter-in-place guidelines in effect," Facebook said in a release.
Facebook warned[2] last month that the COVID-19 pandemic[3] had been adversely affecting its ad business, even as it spurred increased user engagement on Facebook products.
Facebook's daily active users were 1.73 billion on average for March 2020, an increase of 11 percent year-over-year. Its monthly active users totaled 2.6 billion as of March 31, an increase of 10 percent year-over-year.
The number of people active daily on at least one of Facebook's products -- including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp -- was 2.36 billion on average for March, an increase of 12 percent year-over-year. Monthly active people for Facebook products was 2.99 billion as of March 31, an increase of 11 percent year-over-year.
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