SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t enjoyed seeing his company‘s stock get pummeled on Wall Street this summer, but he is relishing the opportunity to prove his critics wrong.

“I would rather be in a cycle where people underestimate us because I’d rather be underestimated,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday. “I think it gives us the latitude to go out and make some big bets.”
 

Zuckerberg, 28, made his remarks before a standing-room-only audience at a tech conference in San Francisco in his first interview since Facebook Inc.‘s rocky initial public offering in May.

The social networking leader’s stock has lost nearly half its value since the IPO. More than $50 billion has been lopped off Facebook‘s market value as the company’s shares have fallen from $38 to Tuesday‘s closing price of $19.43.

No one has lost as much as Zuckerberg, who has seen the value of his Facebook holdings fall about more than $9 billion. That while hearing more skeptics second-guess his ability to lead the company that he founded eight years ago in his Harvard University dorm room.

Since speaking during Facebook’s first earnings conference call as a public company nearly seven weeks ago, Zuckerberg has remained largely out of the spotlight.

Wearing a gray T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, Zuckerberg looked at ease through his half-hour appearance. He smiled frequently and even chuckled a few times before a San Francisco audience composed largely of fellow geeks who, like him, tend to enjoy talking about computer coding and building cool products instead of discussing revenue growth and business strategies.

Yet Zuckerberg clearly was aiming many of his remarks at investors. He emphasized that Facebook cared about making money as well as pursuing his mission to make the world a “more open and connected place.” He also repeated his belief that the company would figure out numerous ways to profit from the growing number of its 955 million worldwide users who visit is online hangout through mobile applications instead of Web browsers on desktop computers.

Zuckerberg said the performance of Facebook‘s stock “has obviously been disappointing,” but he said it’s a great time to “double down” on the company‘s future.

“I think it is really easy to for folks to underestimate how really fundamentally good mobile is for us,” Zuckerberg told his interviewer, former blogger turned venture capitalist Michal Arrington, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

Zuckerberg shouldered some of the blame for the misperceptions about Facebook’s mobile prospects, saying he made a mistake by initially relying on a computer coding called HTML 5 so the company‘s applications could run on a multitude of different mobile operating systems without making a lot of changes. That resulted in sub-par experiences for many users, Zuckerberg acknowledged, prompting Facebook to use more customization tools to account for the differences in the software that run different devices such as the iPhone and Android phones.

Some investors evidently liked what Zuckerberg had to say. Facebook shares gained 66 cents, or 3.4 percent in Tuesday’s extended trading after he took the stage.

The ubiquity of smartphones has created problems for Facebook and other advertising-dependent Internet companies because the smaller screens on those devices have less space to show commercial messages around the main content.

One way Facebook will address that challenge is by inserting more ads into the mobile news feeds that highlight status updates and photos shared by users’ friends and families, according to Zuckerberg. He once again tried to shoot down recurring speculation that Facebook is developing its own smartphone like Apple and Google Inc.

“It is so clearly the wrong strategy for us,” Zuckerberg said. “It doesn’t move the needle for us.”

But that doesn‘t mean Zuckerberg doesn’t appreciate the power and allure of a sleek smartphone. He said he even used one to write a lengthy manifesto about his vision for Facebook that was included in the company‘s IPO documents.

Zuckerberg indicated Facebook is likely to intensify its rivalry with Google Inc. by developing more ways to search on its website. As it is, Facebook already processes about 1 billion search requests a day, Zuckerberg said, “and we basically are not even trying.”

That laid-back attitude toward search will eventually change, Zuckerberg said, although he wouldn’t provide specifics. A more robust search engine “would be one obvious, interesting thing for us to do in the future,” he said.

Google is already trying to maintain its dominance of its Internet search engine with an alternative social network called Plus that it launched last year largely to gain more insights about its users’ preferences.

Zuckerberg has signaled his faith in Facebook’s stock by pledging not to sell any of his more than 503 million shares for at least another year, even as some of the company‘s early investors and employees reduce their holdings.

Tuesday gave him an opportunity to deliver a reminder that Facebook has overcome past adversity when changes to its website’s design and privacy policies provoked strident objections from users who threatened to abandon the social network. Facebook overcame those protests to keep on growing.

“Facebook has not been an uncontroversial company,” Zuckerberg said. “It‘s not like this is the first up and down we have ever had.”
 
<관련 한글 기사>

저커버그 ‘페북 전화 개발 안할 것, 전략 실수 인정’

소셜네트워크서비스 업체인 페이스북 창업자 마크 저커버그는 11일(현지시간) 시장 일각에서 제기되고 있는 페이스북 자체 휴대전화 개발 계획설을 전면 부인했다.

인터넷 업계 등에서는 수익 모델 창출에 어려움을 겪고 있는 페이스북이 대만 휴대전화 제조업체인 HTC와 스마트폰을 공동 개발하고 있다는 등 추측이 계속 나오고 있다.

저커버그는 이날 온라인 미디어 테크크런치(TechCrunch)의 샌프란시스코 콘퍼런스에 참석, “휴대전화 개발 사업에 뛰어드는 것은 명백하게 잘못된 전략”이라고 밝혀 페이스북 자체 휴대전화 개발설을 일축했다.

페이스북은 약 10억명의 이용자 기반을 광고수익으로 연결하는데 어려움을 겪고 있다. 특히 스마트폰 시장이 급속하게 성장하면서 많은 이용자들이 인터넷이 아닌 휴대전화로 페이스북에 접속함에 따라 광고 공간이 제한돼 수익 창출에 대한 투자가들의 의구심이 확산하고 있다.

저커버그는 자체 휴대전화 개발설은 부인하면서도 “투자가들이 페이스북의 휴대전화 부문 성장 잠재력을 완전히 이해하지 못하고 있다”며 “페이스북은 종전의 컴퓨터 데스크톱 환경에서보다 휴대전화에서 더 많은 수익을 창출하게 될 것”이라고 강조했다.

그는 페이스북 기업공개(IPO) 이후의 주가 급락과 관련, “주가 하락에 실망하고 있고 주주 이익에도 신경을 쓰고 있다”면서 “최근의 주가 하락은 페이스북이 나아갈 방향을 제시해주고 있다”고 말했다.

페이스북이 지난 5월 기업공개를 한 뒤 저커버그가 대중 앞에 나서 입장을 밝힌 것은 이번이 처음이다. 페이스북은 기업공개 당시 공모가가 주당 38달러였지만 페이스북의 수익 창출 능력에 대한 의구심으로 주가가 현재 19.43달러까지 떨어져 반토막이 났다.

저커버그는 `전세계를 연결하고 개방적으로 만든다‘는 신념 아래 페이스북을 운영하고 있으나 투자가들은 페이스북의 사업 모델 창출에 더 많은 관심을 보이고 있다. 

저커버그는 IPO를 앞두고 투자가들에게 보낸 서한에서 “페이스북은 원래 회사를 설립하기 위해 만들어진 것이 아니다”고 언급하는 등 전세계를 자유롭게 연결하는데 초점을 두고 있다는 개인적 신념을 밝혔다. 그는 테크크런치 콘퍼런스에서도 “앞으로 10∼20년 뒤에 페이스북이 전세계인을 연결하고 그들의 희망을 공유할 수 있도록 한 것이 하나의 유산이 될 것”이라고 강조했다.

저커버그는 페이스북의 장기 사업 계획에 대한 질문에는 “즉흥적으로 말할 수 없다, 상세하게 발표할 만한 것이 없다”는 등의 말로 즉답을 피했다.

(연합뉴스)