Facebook earnings beat Wall Street’s expectations

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook’s growth picked up more momentum on Wednesday with the tech firm reporting second-quarter sales and earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations.

Driven by mobile ad sales, Facebook raked in $6.4 billion in the second quarter, up 59 percent from the same period last year. That’s better than the $6 billion in revenue analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected from April to June.

The tech firm had a profit of $2 billion during that time period and earned 71 cents per share. Analysts expected Facebook to post earnings of about 57 cents per share. Excluding certain expenses, the company earned 97 cents per share, topping analysts’ estimates of 82 cents per share.

“We’re particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO.

The social media giant, which owns virtual company Oculus, messaging apps and Instagram, has been attracting more people to its website and other apps it owns. As of June, Facebook grew its number of monthly active users to 1.7 billion.

Facebook Messenger recently hit 1 billion users and Instagram has more than 500 million users.