Facebook Has Tons Of Cash On Hand As Yearly Profits Soar

Facebook may not yet be a publicly traded company but that hasn’t stopped the company from amassing an impressive amount of money.

A source close to the company’s finances told Gawker on Thursday taht Facebook is currently sitting on nearly $1 billion in profits which year with a total cash-in-hand equivalent of $3.5 billion as of September 2011.

While that number is far less than the likes of Apple and Google it’s comparable to other big companies including 3M, Yahoo and eBay.

What might be more impressive is Facebook’s ever increasing profiles which have doubled since 2010 and quadrupled since 2009.

While the company’s cash reserves are impressive Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson reveals that the company’s $2.5 billion in revenues through the first three quarters of 2011 is falling short of industry expectations.

“Facebook was supposed to generate about $4 billion in revenue this year and make $2 billion in EBIDTA,” Carlson writes. “Through three quarters, Facebook’s revenues – according to this source – only came in at $2.5 billion.”

Then again Facebook revenue numbers are not revealed to the public since they are not required to do so as a privately held company.

It may have seemed obvious that Facebook’s massive userbase would be generating massive profits however other social networking websites have proven that the simple formula of users equal profits doesn’t necessarily exist, despite hundreds of millions of users Myspace was never able to generate the massive cash flow it needed to expand and compete against Facebook.

Do you think Facebook is worth the type of massive revenue they are generating as a privately held company?