"Say what you will about Facebook , the company is not solely to blame for the fact that its stock keeps getting hammered," said CNBC's Jim Cramer.
“The truth is, the astounding decline in Facebook shares – the stock had declined 53% at the time of writing - can’t possibly be caused by the company’s execution alone,” insisted the Mad Money host.
Instead, Cramer said Facebook is suffering from a a tectonic shift, a so called sea change, that’s crushing revenues and earnings not only at Facebook but at all companies that rely on traffic from a desktop computer.
In the case of Facebook, Cramer believes the company and the stock are caught up in something he calls a ‘super-migration,’ that is, the transition underway in which more people use mobile devices to surf the Web rather than desktop computers.
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And Cramer believes ‘super-migration’ will be every bit as transformative as it was for print media as the world shifted from getting news from daily newspaper to getting it online.
“We used to hear about how print analogue dollars were being trumped by digital dimes. Now those desktop digital dimes are being usurped by mobile pennies, and Facebook’s caught right in the crosshairs of this huge secular sea-change.”
That, according to Cramer is the ‘real’ reason why Facebook shares can’t rally.
However, just like the migration to digital gave rise to a whole new platform for advertising, Cramer said the migration from desk top to mobile would again present the same kind of opportunity.
The bottom line: “Facebook has a worth,” said Cramer.
“It makes money. It will eventually figure out some way to better monetize its 900 million users as they shift en masse to mobile.”
“But for the moment it has to be valued as an enterprise with a down-shifting revenue estimate, one that can’t be predicted, which means it must be valued at a lower multiple than it currently gets. “
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