Facebook has never been stronger since IPO, Sandberg says

 

 

 

A year after Facebook Inc's fumbled IPO, Wall Street remains slow to recognize what Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg argues has been an across-the-board improvement in its business.

 

 

Facebook's ability to deliver ads to mobile phones, improvements in measuring the effectiveness of its ads and increasing user engagement have all put the world's largest social network in a better position than before the IPO, Sandberg told the Global Technology Summit on Wednesday.

"When I look back at the last year since we went public, I believe we are unequivocally a much stronger company today than we were on literally any metric I can think of," Sandberg said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Wednesday.

Facebook became the first US technology company to debut with a value of more than $100 billion, in May 2012.

 

Its shares have lost almost 40 percent of their value since.

"I can't speak to the stock price but I do feel strongly that we are a better positioned, stronger company than we were a year ago," she said.

With 1.1 billion users, Facebook is one of the Web's most popular destinations for consumers and advertisers.

 

But growth in the company's revenue has slowed sharply from two years ago and some investors fret that a new crop of mobile apps aimed at younger users could chip away at Facebook's hold on consumers.

 

Analysts also wonder if the company's depressed share price could dampen morale and hamper its ability to attract talent in Silicon Valley's ultra-competitive talent arena.

 

"I don't think it's actually had a huge impact," the ex-Google Inc executive said, adding that while there had been some worries in the company about it, she was less worried as she had been through it before.

 

The cool investor reception to Facebook and other recent consumer dotcom debutantes from Groupon to Zynga has helped chill the Silicon Valley IPO train.