With the Facebook stock continuing its free-fall and shareholders filing a lawsuit against him, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his company could really use a positive story. However, instead of good news, a prominent financial analyst recently predicted that Facebook will “disappear” in the near future. Eric Jackson, the founder of Ironfire Capital, said the following on CNBC:
“In five to eight years they (Facebook) are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared. Yahoo is still making money, it’s still profitable, still has 13,000 employees working for it, but it’s 10 percent of the value that it was at the height of 2000. For all intents and purposes, it’s disappeared.”
In the same interview, Jackson indicated that Facebook has an uphill battle transitioning into the mobile space, monetizing their mobile app, and predicts the next generation will turn to another social network instead of Facebook:
“When you look over these three generations, no matter how successful you are in one generation, you don’t seem to be able to translate that into success in the second generation, no matter how much money you have in the bank, no matter how many smart PhDs you have working for you. Look at how Google has struggled moving into social, and I think Facebook is going to have the same kind of challenges moving into mobile.”
While Jackson makes several valid points and the Facebook stock has been hammered in the weeks following the highly-anticipated IPO, Facebook is undoubtedly the current leader in the social media space. While it is possible that a new company will displace Facebook from its position of market dominance, the combination of a user-base well over 800 million, Facebook’s nearly unlimited cash-on-hand, the strategic advantage of market preeminence, the ability to acquire potential competitors long before they become a viable threat, and many other factors all point to Facebook continuing to “exist” for the foreseeable future.
Sources Include: CNBC
Image used under Creative Commons from niallkennedy
