Chinese social media giant Weibo Corp posts upbeat Q3 2018 earnings

Chinese microblogging giant Weibo Corp (WB) posted upbeat third-quarter earnings of $165.3 million or $0.73 per share, up 63% year-on-year. Revenue surged 44% to $460.2 million.

The social media giant, which the market expected to earn $0.71 a share on revenue of $456.4 million, posted these results before the opening bell on Wednesday, Nov. 28.

For the quarter, advertising and marketing revenues surged 48% to $409.3 million, while value-added service revenues grew 18% to $50.9 million.

Monthly active users saw a net addition of about 70 million users year over year and reached 446 million in September 2018. Mobile MAUs represented 93% of MAUs.

About 30 million users were added year over year, with average daily active users hitting 195 million in September 2018.

Weibo has been going through a rough patch, with its stock price getting battered heavily since the first quarter. It hit $140 in February, but then has fallen 62% to as low as $53.11 recently.

Last year, Weibo earned $0.51 per share. Its metrics have continued to be pretty robust even in the latest reported quarter. However, investors seemed to want to get rid of the stock early this month in what is a selling frenzy that has brought the shares down to the $50s.

Since it’s not just Weibo that is facing the heat, it can be assumed that the effect is a byproduct of the tech rout. Back home, both Facebook and Twitter have been under fire. Right after the privacy uproar and related hearing, 2018 saw a huge FAANG slump.

The Nasdaq-100 Index, which houses FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) and similar stocks, shed over $1 trillion in value in a month. While bouts of a selloff and bearish sentiment usually get corrected in the successive quarters, this latest is a more significant dent than that could be corrected in the near term.