Hilliard Lyons Initiates Coverage On Facebook

Stephen Turner of Hilliard Lyons initiated coverage of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) on Tuesday with a Long-Term Buy rating and $92 price target.

“We believe Facebook has an industry leading advertising position due to the network effect of the company's social networking site's 1.35 billion users and other recently acquired company-owned brands,” Turner wrote.

Turner notes that that Facebook will continue to realize further “monetization improvements” coming from video advertising and from Atlas, Facebook's cross-device and offline sales tracking advertising platform and measurement service.

Turner also expects Facebook's Audience Network to “substantially” improve the number of ads it serves which will help the company achieve “above average profitability” despite higher spending plans in 2015.

Looking forward to the full fiscal year 2014, Turner expects Facebook to earn $1.65 per share on revenue of $12.4 billion. In fiscal 2015, the analyst expects Facebook to earn $1.73 per share on revenue of $17.24 billion.