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It would be all too easy to say that Facebook’s market meltdown is coming to

游客2024-04-25  24
问题     It would be all too easy to say that Facebook’s market meltdown is coming to an end. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network burned as much as $ 50 billion of shareholders’ wealth in just a couple months. To put that in context, since its debut(初次登台)on NASDAQ in May, Facebook has lost value nearly equal to Yahoo, AOL, Zynga, Yelp, Pandora, OpenTable, Groupon, LinkedIn, and Angie’s List combined, plus that of the bulk of the publicly traded newspaper industry.
    As shocking as this utter failure may be to the nearly 1 billion faithful Facebook users around the world, it’s no surprise to anyone who read the initial public offering(IPO)prospectus(首次公开募股说明书). Worse still, all the crises that emerged when the company debuted—overpriced shares, poor corporate governance, huge challenges to the core business, and a damaged brand—remain today. Facebook looks like a prime example of what Wall Street calls a falling knife—that is, one that can cost investors their fingers if they try to catch it.
    Start with the valuation(估值). To justify a stock price close to the lower end of the projected range in the IPO, say $ 28 a share, Facebook’s future growth would have needed to match that of Google seven years earlier. That would have required increasing revenue by some 80 percent annually and maintaining high profit margins all the while.
    That’s not happening. In the first half of 2012, Facebook reported revenue of $2. 24 billion, up 38 percent from the same period in 2011. At the same time, the company’s costs surged to $2.6 billion in the six-month period.
    This so-so performance reflects the Achilles’ heel of Facebook’s business model, which the company clearly stated in a list of risk factors associated with its IPO: it hasn’t yet figured out how to advertise effectively on mobile devices. The number of Facebook users accessing the site on their phones surged by 67 percent to 543 million in the last quarter, or more than half its customer base.
    Numbers are only part of the problem. The mounting pile of failure creates a negative feedback loop that threatens Facebook’s future in other ways. Indeed, the more Facebook’s disappointment in the market is catalogued, the worse Facebook’s image becomes. Not only does that threaten to rub off on users, it’s bad for recruitment and retention of talented hackers, who are the lifeblood of Zuckerberg’s creation.
    Yet the brilliant CEO can ignore the sadness and complaints of his shareholders thanks to the super-voting stock he holds. This arrangement also was fully disclosed at the time of the offering. It’s a pity so few investors apparently bothered to do their homework. [br] What effect will Facebook’s failure in the market have?
选项 A、Its users’ benefits will be threatened.
B、Talented hackers will take down the website.
C、The CEO will hold the super-voting stock.
D、The company’s innovation strength will be damaged.
答案 D
解析 推理判断题。由定位句可知，脸谱网在市场上的失意不仅会影响到用户，还会影响招募和挽留天才黑客，而这些人正是扎克伯格创造力的命脉。由此推知，脸谱网的创新力会因其市场失意而受到损害，故答案为D)。A)“会威胁用户的利益”，定位句中的run off on users意指“影响用户数量”，故排除；B)“天才黑客们会攻击其网站”原文未提及，故排除；C)“执行总裁会持有带超级投票权的股票”是最后一段提到的一个事实，而非脸谱网市场失意带来的影响，故排除。
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