Facebook isn’t pressing the panic button as its stock price dipped below $30 this week, but investors are not showing much love for the company.
They want to know soon whether the honeymooning Mark Zuckerberg can turn Facebook’s massive pool of personal data, and billions of user interactions per day, into a super-profitable business, like Google or Apple.
Zuckerberg seems to have a different near-term agenda, following Jeff Bezos’ Amazon school of management — attain dominant market share before profits. The formula is to focus on creating an extraordinary customer experience and sign up a few billion users, constructing a moat that competitors can’t easily cross.
As Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to prospective shareholders about his company’s culture, “Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
Facebook has the moat, given its lead in audience and time spent on the site versus competitors. With more than 900 million members, and nearly 60 percent visiting at least once a day, Facebook is the Internet’s megalopolis. The planetary colonization continues, with accelerating growth in India, Brazil, Indonesia and other countries.
