DHAKA: Once again demonstrating its mastery of the mobile computing wave, Facebook dazzled Wall Street on Wednesday by posting significant growth in revenue and profits for the second quarter, driven largely by ads shown in the news feeds of a billion Facebook users checking the service on their mobile phones.

Shareholders celebrated, sending the stock of the company to a record high in after-hours trading, reports nytimes.com.

But Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wasn’t basking in what he modestly described as a ‘good quarter’. Instead, he was looking ahead to the next wave.

In a conference call with investors, Zuckerberg warned that the company would be spending heavily for years on newer services like private messaging, virtual reality and Facebook search without any near-term prospects of making money from them.

‘We think it is going to be years of work before those are huge businesses for us,’ he said.

‘I really can’t underscore this enough that we have a lot of work to do. We could take the cheap and easy approach and put ads in and do payments and make money in the short-term, but we’re not going to do that.’

Facebook, based in Menlo Park, Calif., said it had about 1.32 billion monthly users around the world in June, with more than a billion of those people using the service at least partly on mobile devices.

Revenue was $2.91 billion, up 61 percent from $1.81 billion during the same period last year. Net income was $791 million, or 30 cents a share, compared with $333 million, or 13 cents a share, a year ago.

The company’s operating profit margin hit a record 48 percent in the second quarter, reflecting increased cost efficiencies.

Mobile devices accounted for nearly two-thirds of Facebook’s revenue, which at this point mostly comes from ads shown on the Facebook website and apps.

However, the company is beginning to supplement that with ads on other sites.

BDST: 1810 HRS, JUL 24, 2014