Mobile, Earnings | featured news

Taiwan's HTC expects its second-quarter revenue and operating margin to rise from the first quarter, as sales of the new HTC One smartphone pick up.

Facebook was once a darling of investors, then a turnoff. Now, a year after going public, the social network seems to have settled into a more stable relationship with Wall Street. But the company has still been taking pains to prove that it can make more money from its base of more than a billion users, especially from those using Facebook on mobile devices.

Quick Take Facebook will release its Q1 2013 earnings on May 1. We expect healthy advertising revenue growth driven by improved mobile monetization and a growing user base. Margins will shrink due to higher headcount related costs and infrastructure investments. We’ll also look for any color on the success of Graph Search, which could be one of the key features of Facebook going forward. Facebook will report its Q1 2013 earnings on May 1. We expect to see mobile advertising results improve driven by the company’s efforts to integrate ads into its mobile platform.

Fresh off its partnership announcement with Facebook last week on the Android-based Facebook Home, HTC had news of a more troubling nature to share with investors Monday — its quarterly earnings report. The company, reported profits had fallen 98 percent from the same period last year to $2.83 million. The Associated Press reported this was the firm’s lowest quarterly profit on record.

Facebook Inc doubled its mobile advertising from the previous quarter as the world's No. 1 social network expanded its business aggressively onto handheld devices.

Facebook has faced a few controversies in the past few months, including controversies over privacy policies on its own site and on its photo-sharing site, Instagram. Still, the company has bolstered investor confidence with a series of moves that seem to lay the groundwork for Facebook to make more advertising dollars, particularly in the all-important mobile space.

Samsung sold more than 97 million mobile phones in the third quarter, besting Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone by more than 74 million units. According to Gartner (NYSE: IT), nearly 428 million mobile phones were sold during the quarter. Approximately 23.5 million of those phones were manufactured by Apple — 97.9 million were made by Samsung.

Facebook lost $59 million in the third quarter, but the newly publicly traded social networking site saw its shares soar on Wall Street early Wednesday. Facebook shares gained $4.35, or 22%, to $23.85 in early trading, after the company reported gains from mobile advertising.

Research In Motion shares rise in after-hours trading as the maker of the Blackberry posts a smaller-than-expected quarterly loss.

Motorola Mobility this afternoon posted better-than-expected Q1 results. For the quarter, the company reported revenue of $3 billion and a non-GAAP loss of 8 cents a share; the Street had expected $2.84 billion and a loss of 12 cents a share. The company said it sold 9.3 million mobile devices in the quarter, including 4.1 million smart phones, and more than 250,000 tablets. Revenues were up 22% from a year ago.