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Another Super Bearish Facebook Analyst Has Changed His Mind (FB)

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/another-super-bearish-facebook-analyst-has-changed-his-mind-2012-11

Facebook has managed to get two bearish analysts to change their mind.

Carlos Kirjner at Bernstein Research and Rich Greenfield at BTIG have both upgraded the stock this morning. We’ve written up Greenfield’s note here, if you want to read it. (In short, he thinks Facebook’s plan to stuff ads in the mobile news feed is going help it beat Q4 estimates.)

As for Kirjner, he’s rating the stock “outperform,” and has a $33 price target.

Here’s why in a nutshell:

We think consensus is underestimating Facebook’s revenue growth potential over the next 12-24 months. We think Facebook is on path to beat consensus revenues over the next 12-24 months, delivering $6,976 million in 2013, 9% higher than consensus’ $6,388 million, and $8,650 million in 2014, or 7% higher than consensus’ $8,078 million. Further monetization of (mobile) Newsfeed inventory will be the main driver of growth, as we believe that for the next 18-24 months Facebook probably can increase the number of ad impressions per user per day with limited chance of seeing material deterioration in user experience. We also believe that at this point and for the near-to-medium term, its revenue growth trajectory will be the main driver of Facebook’s stock performance. In addition to mobile, further monetization of the PC Newsfeed and the positive impact of the Facebook Exchange on right-hand-side column CPMs will help drive growth.

Beyond this, Kirjner believes Facebook’s social advertising initiatives can work:

Social, new businesses opportunities and the platform remain options fo! r furthe r upside for the next two years and beyond. The successful monetization of Newsfeed inventory and introduction of the Facebook Exchange have given Facebook an 18-24 month runway to develop new revenue streams from new formats (e.g., gifts), to work with advertisers and third parties such as Datalogix and Nielsen to improve (online brand) advertising ROI and its measurement, which would enhance its long-term pricing, and to continue pushing adoption of social across the Web with its platform play, based on Facebook Connect and the Open Graph Protocol. In other words, we still think of Facebook as a distinctive display advertising business, but mobile and the exchange make it better and larger, and extend the time horizon Facebook has to realize the potential of new business opportunities and of social advertising.

The bottom line here is that Facebook has shown it’s willing to build a big business, something analysts didn’t think would happen. And now they’re upgrading the stock. They are still cautious about how it all plays out, but overall there is reason to be positive about the stock for the first time since it became publicly traded.

Don’t Miss: Facebook’s IPO Was One Of The Biggest Tech Flops Of The Year

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The Policy Center’s vice-president reports “”The general consensus of the panel today was that we are not prepared to deal with these kinds of attacks.”

The nightmarish scenario that unfolded represented a worst-case example. As former secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff noted, many cyberattacks can be stopped if individual cell phone or Internet users simply follow the best practices and use the right tools. Similarly, another participant pointed out that private Internet companies would not sit idly by as a virus ran amok.

A collapse of power across the U.S. also only took place when the simulation brought in factors such as high demand during the summer, a hurricane that had damaged power supply lines, and coordinated bombings that accompanied the cyberattack and subsequent failure of the Internet.

Still, the war game highlighted crucial issues about the government’s own reliance upon communications that might go down during a real-life scenario. One of the biggest problems was how the President ought to respond to a situation that caused damage like warfare but lacked an immediately identifiable foreign adversary. Smaller-scale cyberattacks have already complicated real-world diplomacy, such as the alleged Chinese cyberattacks on Google and other U.S. companies.

Ares Defense Blog questioned a curious missing element from the simulation, in that there was no mention of what happened to phone or Internet service in the rest of the world. Surely a nation that decided to launch cyberattacks against the U.S. would take safeguards to protect its own crucial communication services, which would possibly help U.S. officials narrow down the list of suspects.

Another question seemed more mundane but equally important — how would the government activate the National Guard with cell phone service down?

The Pentagon’s DARPA science lab recently pushed for a “Cyber Genome Program” that could trace digital fingerprints to cyberattack culprits. But identifying whether a cyber attack came from individual civilians, shadowy hacker associations or government cyber-warriors has proven tricky in the meantime.

[via Ares Defense Blog]

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