Tag Archive | "earnings"

Rackspace Share Price Down 25% As Cloud Price Wars Take Their Toll

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Rackspace will open trading this morning on the New York Stock Exchange with a share price that dropped nearly 25% on Thursday. The stock fell after the company missed its earnings, raising concerns the cloud price wars with giants like Amazon Web Services are taking its toll.

The stock dropped about 12 points, ending trading at $39.36 per share. That puts the share price near its 52-week low of $38.30 per share.

On Wednesday, Rackspace reported 19 cents earnings per share (EPS). Analysts had expected Rackspace to report 20 cents EPS. The company had revenues of $362 million for the quarter, compared to $367 million that analysts had expected.

Rackspace executives cited its across the board drop in cloud pricing that it put into effect in February for the missed earnings. At the time, Rackspace provided a detailed picture of the price decrease, going into detail about its justification for the price drop.

But it was not enough for Rackspace to make a difference in a market that has seen successive price drops by AWS, Windows Azure. Additionally  its OpenStack public cloud is growing but not enough to make a difference in the earnings.

Rackspace cannot compete on price with AWS. The company does not have the scale to absorb the drop in revenues. More so, it’s evident that Rackspace needs a different way to get ahead. I am hearing experts say that should be a big data play of some sort that can leverage its distributed infrastructure.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn Stock Dips 10% On Q2 Forecast Of Slowing Growth, Even As It Beats Q1 Estimates On Sales of $324.7M; EPS $0.45

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LinkedIn has just reported Q1 earnings of $324.7 million, up 72% year-on-year, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.45, both soundly beating analysts’ estimates (via First Call) of $317 million and EPS of $0.31; as well as LinkedIn’s own guidance from last quarter, when it said it expected between $305 million and $310 million in revenues. Net income for Q1 was $22.6 million a big rise on the $5.0 million in earnings last year. Nevertheless, shares of the work-focused social network, however, are down nearly 11% in after-hours trading on news that next quarter won’t be quite as rosy.

First Call had estimated revenues of Q2 of $359 million, but today LinkedIn issued guidance that it expects sales of between $342 million and $347 million. That’s up between 50% and 52% on the same quarter a year ago, and is a sign of how growth is slowing.

The company says it now has 225 million users, up from 200 million last quarter. Judging by some of the product launches in the last few weeks it may have been that LinkedIn is laying the groundwork for how it will better monetize the users it has longer term as other revenue streams and customer acquisition decelerate. The new launches have included upgraded, more media-enhanced profiles; a Contacts update to add in more “personal assistant” life organizing features; new iPhone and Android apps; an expanded search engine; @mentions in status updates; Klout-style endorsements; and a Recruiter homepage redesign for the site’s most dedicated user vertical.

Here is how different divisions of the company have performed this past quarter:

Talent Solutions revenue was $184.3 million, up 80% over last year. Talent Solutions revenue was 57% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2013, versus 54% last year.

Marketing Solutions revenue was $74.8 million, up 56% compared to the first quarter of 2012. Marketing Solutions revenue declined by 2 percentage points to make up 23% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2013.

Premium Subscriptions products revenue was $65.6 million, up 73% compared to the first quarter of 2012. It remained level at 20% of total revenue for Q1.

The U.S. remains the biggest market for the company, with $201.4 million in revenue, 62% of the total. International markets sales were $123.3 million.

LinkedIn continues to have a heavy amount of its sales coming from its “field sales channel”: $184 million compared to $140.7 million online. Field sales, involving actual people, are more costly for LinkedIn and so the company will likely be trying to increase its online sales in quarters ahead to improve earnings as growth slows.

We’re just about to listen to the call and will update with details from there.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon Just Beats Estimates As Q1 Sales Rise 22 Percent To $16B, While Net Income Drops 37 Percent To $82M

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Last quarter, Amazon, which has been a freight train and Wall Street darling over the last year, surprised analysts by reporting lower-than-expected earnings. Expectations were high considering the holiday shopping season, but Amazon saw net income drop 45 percent to $97 million in Q4, compared to $177 million in 2011, although on the bright side, net sales continued to increase (by 22 percent) to $21.2 billion.

Today, Amazon continued the trend, still finding itself in a bit of a hangover after missing expectations in Q4. The eCommerce giant reported earnings from Q1 after the market closed this afternoon, in which it saw cash flow increase 39 percent to $4.25 billion, compared to $3 billion for the prior year, while net sales increased 22 percent to $16.07 billion in Q1, compared to $13.18 billion in first quarter 2012.

And by mixed results, we mean that Amazon blew away earnings-per-share expectations at $0.18 in Q1 on revenue of $16 billion. Leading up to today’s announcement, Wall Street expectations were much lower for EPS, with analysts expecting $0.08 EPS for the quarter. In turn, the Street expected Amazon to report sales of $16.2 billion, which the company just missed with $16.07 billion in sales.

In spite of the mixed results, as the market has been wont to do over the last year, Amazon’s stock was trending up, closing at $274.70 per share, on rumors that the company could be launching its own TV set-top box this fall, bringing more of the company’s hardware into your living room.

Tellingly, in today’s announcement, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t touch on the numbers or falling profits, instead plugging the company’s efforts to take on Netflix with some original programming of its own for Instant Video customers. Last week, the company launched 14 new comedy and kids pilots on Instant Video, which quickly became the “most watched TV shows on Instant Video,” the company said Monday.

“Amazon Studios is working on a new way to greenlight TV shows. The pilots are out in the open where everyone can have a say,” Bezos said in today’s earnings release. “I have my personal picks and so do members of the Amazon Studios team, but the exciting thing about our approach is that our opinions don’t matter. Our customers will determine what goes into full-season production. We hope Amazon Originals can become yet another way for us to create value for Prime members.”

Other points of interest: Amazon’s free cash flow fell 85 percent to $177 million year-over-year, compared to $1.15 billion in the year prior, due in part to dishing out $1.4 billion to purchase new office space in Seattle. Operating income decreased 6 percent to $181 million in Q1, compared to $192 million in the same quarter last year, while net income fell 37 percent to $82 million from $132 million in Q1 2012.

The upside for Amazon continues to rise, thanks to its move into original programming and the expansion of its selection for Prime Instant Video, which is in part due to new licensing agreements with A+E, CBS, FX, PBS And Scripps. This means that shows like Downton Abbey, Justified and Under The Dome, as well as content from Food Network, the Cooking Channel, the Travel Channel and HGTV will all be headed to Amazon. The company said that Prime Instant Video now has 38,000 movies and TV episodes in its collecton.

In addition, Amazon touted the launch of its new MP3 store for Safari, which allow iPhone and iPod touch users to discover and purchase digital music from the company’s catalog. This comes on the heels of reports today that the influence of the company’s Appstore is growing and shows high revenue potential. Amazon also announced its Cloud Player for iPad and iPad Mini this quarter, extended AutoRip to vinyl records and announced the launch of Kindle Fire HD 8.9″.

Good news also came for authors and readers, as Amazon announced that it will start paying its authors their royalties monthly, ahead of the twice-a-year industry standard, along with the acquisition of popular book recommendation hub, Goodreads.

All in all, it was a busy quarter for Amazon, especially for AWS, which launched a slew of new products over the last few months and again lowered its prices. The company said in its announcement today that AWS “has lowered prices 31 times since it launched in 2006, including 7 price reductions so far in 2013.”

Looking forward, Amazon is lowering expectations, however, as it said today that it expects sales to come in between $14.5 billion and $16.2 billion next quarter — equivalent to a 13 to 26 percent increase from Q2 2012. In turn, it expects operating income to be between -$340 million and +$10 million. In other words, a potential loss.

For more, find Amazon’s Q1 earnings announcement here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

IBM’s Q1 2013 Misses On Revenue Of $23.4B, EPS Of $3.00, As Service Revenue Suffers

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IBM announced its Q1 2013 earnings today, reporting net revenues of $23.4 billion and earnings per share of $3.00. EPS was an improvement over last year’s numbers (of 8 percent), while revenue was down 5 percent, or 3 percent adjusting for currency. Flat software revenue and down service revenue is what led to the overall shortfall in terms of analyst expectations.

Since IBM divested itself of its PC business in a sale to Lenovo back in 2004, it’s been able to focus on service offerings and build that into a strong business, which continues to prove to have been an almost prescient decision in the wake of the PC market’s continued softness. A report last year from The Verge indicated that IBM’s choice of buyer for its hardware division, Lenovo, was due mostly to the company trying to curry favor with the Chinese government. That, too seems to have paid off well for Lenovo, which has beat estimates for five consecutive quarters. Still, those normally strong areas of services and software were either flat or down compared to last year’s numbers.

Lenovo’s software revenue was $5.6 billion for the year, flat year over year, and service revenue was down 4 percent annually for a total of $9.6 billion. Systems and technology, which represent its remaining hardware assets, were $3.1 billion, down year over year a significant 17 percent as the PC market continues to suffer. Total operating profit margin for the quarter was 46.7 percent non-GAAP, with net income up 3 percent to $3.4 billion.

Watching how the stock performs after market is a strong indicator of the S&P 500′s general progress, analyst firm Bespoke Investment Group notes, so many will be watching to see how the market reacts to this underwhelming earnings picture.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Verizon’s Q1 2013 Sees Revenues Miss At $29.4B, EPS Beat At $0.68, Now Has 98.9M Total Wireless Customers

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Verizon reported its Q1 2013 earnings today, including revenue for the quarter of $29.4B and EPS of $0.68. The results were mixed, topping expectations in terms of earnings per share, and falling slightly below prediction in terms of revenue estimates, according to Yahoo!’s analyst consensus.

Total revenues were up 4.2 percent from last year, where it reported $18.3 billion in the first fiscal quarter. EPS was up 15.3 percent from last year, when ti reported $0.59 per share. Verizon added 720,000 wireless customers during the first quarter of the year, for a total of 98.9 million customers, up from 98.2 million sequentially.

Verizon dedicated resources to launching Redbox Instant, which was in a beta trial period for most of the quarter before its launch in March. That likely put pressure on margins, while on the wireless side decreased subsidies on some mobile phones seem to have helped it improve the picture there. Wireline ARPU increased to $107.15 in Q1 2013 and wireless ARPA grew to $150.27 per month, up 6.9 percent year over year, and profit totalled $4.8 billion overall for the quarter.

A recent report suggested that Verizon recently made a bid for Clearwire spectrum leases of $1.5 billion, in an attempt to help it continue to push out its network expansion. Originally reported by the Wall Street Journal April 15, this is unlikely to have impacted the carrier’s earnings today, but could have a big future material impact on the business, as Verizon continues to snap up spectrum as it did in its deal with cable companies last year worth $3.9 billion.

FiOS continues to more than offset DSL subscriber losses in Verizon’s wireline business, the company said, and is looking to bring as many as 300,000 customers over to its fiber network away from legacy copper-based networks by the end of 2013. FiOS now reaches 17.8 million customers, reaching 38.2 percent of potential subscribers within reach of Verizon’s current network.

In its wireless business, Verizon reported a total of 7.2 million activations for smartphones during Q1, with 28 percent new customers. 5.9 million were LTE-capable devices, down from 7.3 million during the previous quarter. It’s a sequential drop-off, but one that’s in line with a quarter following the normally very busy holiday sales period.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BlackBerry Posts Promising Q4 Results After BB10 Launch: EPS Of $0.22, Revenue Of $2.7B, ~1M Z10s Shipped

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For the past year BlackBerry has been trying to prove to the world that it’s not a mobile has-been just yet, and that all came to a head earlier this year when the company finally released the BlackBerry 10 mobile OS to the masses. While the company’s future is still unclear, BlackBerry released its fiscal Q4 2013 earnings early this morning and they’re more impressive than you would expect for a company going through some major upheavals.

BlackBerry reported earnings of $0.22 per share on $2.7 billion in revenue — that works out to an adjusted net income of $114 million. That may not seem great at first glance, but bear in mind the rough patch that the company has been going through (not to mention the lowered forecasts that come with it). Wall Street’s expectations for the ailing Canadian company were pretty grim — the consensus according to Bloomberg Businessweek forecasted a loss of $0.28 per share on revenues of $2.8 billion. In case you haven’t been keeping track, that’s still down significantly from the $0.80 EPS and $4.6 billion in revenue that BlackBerry (still RIM at the time) reported in the year-ago quarter but BlackBerry handily beat those low expectations and then some.

As such, it’s not much of a surprise to see that BlackBerry’s stock price is up roughly 5% in pre-market trading at time of writing, and BlackBerry is eagerly stoking that enthusiasm by noting that the company will “approach breakeven financial results” next quarter.

Perhaps more importantly, this earnings release gives us our first real glimpse at how the company’s new BlackBerry 10 smartphone is faring after its launch earlier this year. According to BlackBerry, the company has shipped a total of 6 million smartphones this past quarter with roughly 1 million of those being newer, higher-margin Z10 units.

To be clear, BlackBerry isn’t out of the woods yet. This time around, the company reported that its subscriber base was holding steady at 76 million, down from the 79 million reported last December. There’s no official reason given, but a dearth of new BlackBerry 7 hardware in the months leading up to the BlackBerry 10 launch is a likely culprit — those lower-cost devices are still the bread and butter of BlackBerry’s business, and a shift in focus towards more expensive BB10 units probably stymied growth. BlackBerry needs to figure out how to bring BlackBerry 10 to the masses in a big way, lest it yield its hard-fought position to a sea of cheap Android phones. Shipments are down 38% year-over-year, as is the company’s research and development spending.

The bigger question at play here is about how much stock we should be putting in this particular release. After all, the thing to remember here is that BlackBerry is right smack in the middle of a tremendous transition period. Since the company’s last earnings release BlackBerry has been awfully busy launching its next generation mobile OS and the smartphone that runs it in markets across the globe. Its going to be the next few earnings release that paint a better picture of BlackBerry’s odds of survival in the long term, but hey — this isn’t a bad start.

This earnings release also marks the end of an era — former RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has announced that he will step down as Vice Chair and Director of the company, presumably to spend more time managing his $100 quantum computing venture capital fund. His longtime partner Jim Balsillie finally severed his own ties by dumping his stake in BlackBerry this past February.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Adobe Loses CTO But Beats Q1 Estimates: $1.01B Revenue, $0.35 Non-GAAP EPS, 479K Paying Creative Cloud Subscribers

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Adobe just announced its Q1 2013 earnings, which generally beat analyst estimates. Overall revenue for the first quarter was $1.01 billion and GAAP earnings per share of $0.12 and non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS) of $0.35, ahead of the analyst consensus of $0.31 non-GAAP EPS on revenue of $986 million. Overall operating income was $240.7 million and net income was $177.9 million on a non-GAAP basis.

Kevin Lynch Leaves Adobe (For Apple?)

Just as the company released its earnings, however, an SEC filing also revealed that it’s long-term CTO Kevin Lynch is leaving the company on March 22 “to pursue other opportunities.” Rumor has it that he is leaving for Apple, which would be an interesting move for somebody who long defended Flash against Apple and once likened Apple’s walled-garden approach to 19th-century railroads.

Almost 500K Creative Cloud Subscribers

Maybe the most important metric of today’s earnings, however, wasn’t about the financial details but the face that the company’s Creative Cloud offering now has more than 479,000 paying subscribers, an increase of 153,000 compared to the end of the last quarter. Adobe also announced that it now has 2 million free and trial subscribers to its Creative Cloud.

“We exited the quarter with 479 thousand paid subscriptions, and recently we crossed the half-million mark. With this momentum, we are on track to reach our goal of 1.25 million paid subscriptions by the end of this fiscal year,” Adobe CEP Shantanu Narayen said in a prepared statement (PDF) during the company’s earnings call today.

The Adobe Marketing Cloud, another cornerstone of the company’s product line, achieved quarterly revenue of $215.4 million, a 20% year-over-year increase. For the whole year, Adobe expects its Marketing Cloud revenue to increase 25%.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zillow Q4 Beats Analysts With $34.3M Revenue, Mobile Visits Topped 50% Of Dec. Total

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Real estate site Zillow came in ahead of analyst estimates in its just-released fourth quarter earnings report, with $34.3 million in revenue and net income of $0.5 million.

The revenue number is a record for the company, and it’s also up 73 percent year-over-year. Of the total, $26.8 million came from the marketplace and $7.5 million came from display advertising.

Zillow also reported earnings per share of 2 cents. Analysts had predicted revenue of $31.47 million and earnings of 0 cents per share. This continues Zillow’s pattern of coming in a bit ahead of analyst estimates.

The numbers involved here aren’t exactly overwhelming, so the growth in the company’s mobile traffic may be more interesting than the earnings win. In December, apparently more than 50 percent of Zillow visits came from mobile. The company says that on weekends, mobile accounts for 60 percent of traffic. Overall, Zillow averaged 34.5 million unique monthly visitors for the quarter.

“The quarter capped off a pivotal year of tremendous growth and we’re looking forward to 2013 as we focus on three core priorities: attracting more users with great products and services; growing our Premier Agent business with unmatched value and tools; and accelerating our emerging mortgage, rental and home improvement marketplaces,” said CEO Spencer Rascoff in the earnings release.

In that vein, the release also notes that Zillow recently launched Digs, a Pinterest-style home improvement site, and that in the fourth quarter, it completed the acquisitions of mortgage software maker Mortech, rental site HotPads, and collaborative shopping platform Buyfolio.

Total revenue for 2012 was $116.9 million (up 77 percent) and total net income was $5.9 million (compared to $1.1 million in 2011).

Yesterday, newly public competitor Trulia released an earnings report that also beat estimates.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

AOL Q4 2012 Beats The Street On Sales Of $600M, Showing Its First Revenue Growth In 8 Years

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AOL (owner of TechCrunch) has just reported earnings for Q4 2012: revenues came in at $599.5 million on earnings of 41 cents per share. That matches analysts expectations on EPS but beats on revenues of $573.1 million. The figures show that after years of decline, the company continues to get back on track with revenue growth.

Within that, advertising — the largest portion of AOL’s revenue — grew by 13% to $410.6 million. Within that, display, at $169.8 million, was essentially flat on a year ago, while search ads — which it offers in partnership with Google — were up by 17% to $103.6 million. Ad revenues from third-party networks — AOL works with sites like parenting.com to provide advertising alongside their content — brought in revenues of $137.2 million — a rise of 31%.

Subscriptions, which essentially refers to AOL’s legacy dial-up Internet access business, brought in $174.2 million, a decline of 10%.

Still, when it comes down to how different divisions are pulling in revenues, AOL still attributes the most revenues on its balance sheet to its Membership group, which includes AOL Mail, subscription services, AIM and related items. These were at $231 million, a decline of 9%. Second in line was the Brand group, which includes properties like the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, whose revenues were up by 4% to $213 million.

As a point of comparison, last quarter AOL reported flat revenues of $531.7 million, although that in itself was an achievement, since it was the first time in seven years that AOL had not reported a sales decline. Earnings per share in Q3 were 22 cents. With those results beating expectations, AOL’s stock jumped by some 22% after the news, although it did drop back down and before the market opened today were trading at $31.41.

In Q4 a year ago, AOL reported revenues of $577 million, on an EPS of 23 cents per share.

Full-year revenues, also reported today, were up by 8% to $1.4 billion. Free-cash flow for the quarter was down by 36% to $46.3 million, but up for the full year by 49% to $245.1 million. Part of the decline in cash flow in the quarter, AOL says, was because of a special year-end bonus paid to employees as a result of the company’s $1.1 billion patent sale to Microsoft (which worked out to bonuses of $1,056 ). AOL says that it had $466.6 million of cash and cash equivalents at December 31, 2012.

AOL, which first started life in the 1980s providing early online interactivity for Atari and Commodore consoles, pivoted in 1988 into a business as one of the first big Internet service providers, and saw growth skyrocket. Fast forward more than two decades past a merger/demerger with Time Warner and another pivot, AOL has spent years refocusing itself as an online media company, running advertising across its own network of online properties as well as those of third parties. Still, it continues to make a good portion of its revenues from its old dial-up business, although that continues to shrink.

So, to show that it continues to focus itself as a media content business built around advertising, AOL has been trimming, rebranding and growing assets. This week, in the lead up to today’s earnings. Two businesses that did not fit into its bigger strategic idea are now gone: About.me was spun out as a separate business and Hipster.com was closed down. Advertising.com — which includes the Advertising.com display ad network that runs across AOL properties, AOL On video network, the goviral content distributor, the Adtech management platform and Pictela for content-based advertising – was renamed AOL Networks. And it is reportedly buying Gdgt, a tech blog started by two of the people who used to run Engadget (another AOL property).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn Blows Past Expectations; Revenue Soars 81 Percent To $304M, Net Income Up 66 Percent To $11.5M

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The business-focused networking site of record, LinkedIn, rode a wave of growth through 2012, turning itself into a Wall Street darling in the process. The race to win the professional networking market isn’t really “a race” anymore, as LinkedIn dominates online networking for the world’s working professionals, now over 200 million users-strong. Oh, and it’s adding an average of two users per second.

With growth continuing, LinkedIn has consistently outperformed expectations over the last three quarters, so this time around, expectations are high. The consensus estimate for revenues in the fourth quarter has been $280 million, up 68 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, adjusted earnings has been forecast at 19 cents per share, compared to 12 cents for Q4 2011.

As such, the consensus has been that it would be a tall order for LinkedIn to beat the Street again. But the company managed to blow away expectations yet again, reporting non-GAAP EPS for the fourth quarter of $0.35 and revenue of $303.6 million, an increase of 81 percent compared to $167.7 million in Q4 2011.

Net income, too, increased for the quarter to $11.5 million from $6.9 million in Q4 2011. Non-GAAP net income for Q4 was $40.2 million compared to $13.3 million in 2011. Meanwhile, adjusted EBITDA for Q4 was $78.6 million — 26 percent of revenue — compared to $34.4 million in Q4 2011, which was 21 percent of revenue.

For the full year, revenue increased 86 percent to $972.3 million from $522.2 million, while non-GAAP diluted EPS increased to $0.89 from $0.35 and adjusted EBITDA jumped to $223 million from $98.7 million.

In the preceding paragraphs, you’ll notice the frequent appearance of the word “increased” in relation to LinkedIn’s fourth quarter earnings. “Fell” or “dropped” were nowhere to be found. “2012 was a transformative year for LinkedIn,” LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in today in a statement. “We exited 2011 having successfully revamped our underlying development infrastructure. Based on that investment, we said that 2012 would be a year of accelerated product innovation, and it was. The products we delivered throughout the year drove member engagement and financial results to record levels in the fourth quarter.”

So, what were those product innovations and Q4 highlights? As mentioned above, LinkedIn passed 200 million members this quarter, ending the year with just over 202 million, which adds up to cumulative membership growth of 39 percent year-over-year. Another stat worth noting: At present, over 64 percent of LinkedIn members hail from international markets.

Additionally, LinkedIn rolled out a totally revamped profile last fall, which intended to make it easier for users to build their professional brands online — not just their online resumes — discover new connections and business opportunities and engage their networks. To that point, the company said that the average number of members who updated their profiles doubled from Q4 2011. The company also debuted LinkedIn Influencers in an attempt to develop its potential as a professional publishing platform, which the company said “helped drive an eight-fold increase” in traffic over the last year.

This makes its blockbuster fourth quarter performance all the more impressive, especially considering the fact that LinkedIn has continued to invest heavily in its business, launching a new API to make it easier for advertisers to run large-scale social marketing campaigns and for developers to build customized tools for those campaigns. It followed the massive overhaul of its core product (Profiles) with big upgrades for its mobile apps, the addition of notification features, among others.

The performance of LinkedIn’s growing suite of B2B products and services continued to accelerate in the fourth quarter, led by what has become its flagship product: Talent Solutions. The company said that revenue from Talent Solutions increased 90 percent over Q4 2011 to $161 million. In fact, the service represented 53 percent of the company’s total revenue in the fourth quarter.

Following Talent Solutions was LinkedIn’s marketing service, which saw revenue increase 68 percent to $83.2 million in Q4, representing 27 percent of LinkedIn’s total revenue. In turn, premium subscription revenue increased 79 percent to $59.4 million, comprising 20 percent of the company’s total revenue in the fourth quarter.

“Continued investment in our talent and technology infrastructure drove momentum in both product and monetization, resulting in record revenue, profitability, and cash flow,” LinkedIn CFO Steve Sordello said. “As we look forward to 2013, we remain excited about the value LinkedIn will create for members and customers in the coming year.”

Of course, in spite of its executives beating the drums, it’s not all smooth sailing for LinkedIn. Depending on whom you ask, Facebook Graph Search could potentially be a big threat to LinkedIn by stealing users from its “LinkedIn Answers,” for example. Some even went so far as to declare it “the future of social recruiting,” in that it can allow recruiters to uncover more details about potential leads and setting the stage for more referral opportunities.

Forbes provides a somewhat alternative angle, sharing results of a Bullhorn survey that found LinkedIn still dominating mindshare for job searchers and recruiters. However, once Graph Search goes mainstream, Bullhorn CEO Art Papas says, Facebook could very easily start to eat into a market that LinkedIn has “essentially had to itself.”

Just how much of an affect on LinkedIn’s core business Facebook can have remains to be seen, and, in the near term, the company expects growth to continue. The company posted a strong Q1 2013 guidance, expecting revenue to range between $305 and $310 million, with adjusted EBITDA ranging between $67 and $69 million. For the year, LinkedIn forecasts between $1.41 and $1.44 billion in revenue and adjusted EBITDA in the range for $315 to $330 million.

Thanks to its impressive performance in Q4, LinkedIn’s stock jumped 10 percent in after-hours trading. But, going forward, questions remain about whether or not LinkedIn will be able to continue to bring users to its content, an important source of ad revenue for the company — and continue to grow the mobile side of its business. LinkedIn wants to encourage readers to come to the site (and stay) to read news and engage with its content, but growing the publishing and content side of its business will be a much tougher uphill battle than adding value to its recruiting services.

Mobile stats were missing from its Q4 earnings release, but we hope to learn more in this afternoon’s investor call. Stay tuned.

For more, find LinkedIn’s fourth quarter earnings report here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

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