Has Facebook found the Holy Grail of mobile advertising? The social networking giant posted stronger first-quarter sales and profits yesterday as its mobile advertising business reported solid growth to comprise 30 per cent of total ad revenue.

The company said it earned $ 219 million in the quarter, up from $ 205 million a year earlier. Revenue increased to 1.46 billion dollars from 1.06 billion dollars.

The Company’s advertising revenue jumped 43 per cent compared with the same quarter last year to $ 1.25 billion.

“We’ve made a lot of progress in the first few months of the year,” founder Mark Zuckerberg said, pointing to a variety of new features the firm has introduced in recent months. “We have seen strong growth and engagement across our community and launched several exciting products.” These include a new search feature and newsfeed as well as Facebook Home, an app for Android smartphones that integrates Facebook deeply into many popular phone functions. However, the app, which was introduced to great fanfare in early April, has fizzled and been downloaded by fewer than 15,000 users, according to Google’s online Play store.

The new products have come at significant cost, as spending on infrastructure and personnel sent first-quarter expenses 60 per cent higher to $ 1.08 billion.

Facebook’s stock has plunged since its initial public offering in May 2012, when it debuted at $ 45 a share. The stock closed Wednesday at $ 27.43.

Investors have been concerned that as users increasingly use the site on mobile devices where advertising is harder to monetize, Facebook will struggle to justify its high valuation.

Facebook said its monthly active users now total 1.1 billion, up 23 per cent from the year-ago period, while its monthly mobile active users now total 751 million, up 54 per cent.

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