As the world biggest tech companies release their first quarterly figures of this year, we're going to look at who the winners and losers were in the first three months of 2016.
Facebook was the big winner this quarter, with figures showing high growth levels of a 52% annual hike in earnings, in Quarter 1. This amounts to around 5.4 billion US dollars, with 82% of that coming from the company's mobile advertising. The site's monthly active users have jumped up as well, with a 21% year-on-year increase to what is now a staggering 1.65 billion users per month. Mark Zuckerberg commented on the success by stating that the good start to the year was because Facebook is focussed on a “10-year roadmap to give everyone in the world the power to share anything they want, with anyone."
Internet retailer Amazon also shared good news, by vastly exceeding its quarterly estimates, taking 2 billion US dollars over its forecast turnover. With a net income for the first quarter of 513 billion dollars, and a revenue of over 29 billion dollars, the new figures for this year compare with 22.7 billion dollars in revenue in the first quarter of 2015. This news confirms that Amazon have now had four straight quarters of positive earnings, which will answer questions as to whether the company can remain profitable, despite spending on new ventures such as Amazon Logistics.
Other companies that performed well included LinkedIn, whose revenue has grown by 35% compared to the same period in 2015, to 828.5 million dollars.
Search engines Baidu and Yandex also performed very well, with Chinese Baidu reporting a 31.2% year-on-year increase, pulling in 2.45 billion US dollars since the start of this year.
Similarly, Russian search engine Yandex performed even better with a 34% growth in revenue, bringing its total for this quarter up to 243.7 million dollars.
However, amongst all the news of increased earnings for a handful of some of the biggest companies in the world, others had less to celebrate. To find out who the biggest losers of the quarter were, click the subscribe button below.
