Facebook sellers misunderstand this: Munster
The prospect of Facebook (FB)'s growth slowing later this year has spooked investors, but they may be overreacting to comments from the company's chief financial officer during the conference call, analyst Gene Munster said Thursday.
Facebook CFO David Wehner warned investors the company expects its ad revenue growth to decelerate in coming quarters. But Piper Jaffray's Munster told CNBC that Wall Street had already accounted for growth of 40 percent and 38 percent in the third and fourth quarters, respectively.
The social media giant reported revenue growth of 43 percent in the second quarter.
Read More Facebook quarterly results beat on most metrics
"I think [Wehner] was just trying to temper some expectations," Munster said in a "Squawk Box" interview.
Facebook on Wednesday reported adjusted second-quarter earnings of 50 cents per share on $4.04 billion in revenue, compared with Wall Street expectations of 47 cents per share on $3.99 billion.
Despite the earnings beat, share prices were down in premarket trading Thursday. (Click here for the latest price. (FB))
Munster said investors should not expect Facebook to quickly ramp up revenue from its Instagram photo-sharing business and its messaging apps. The company will likely focus on making money from Instagram next year and possibly do the same with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp in 2017 or beyond, he said.
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The product Munster said he's passionate about is Oculus Rift. Facebook purchased the company that makes the virtual reality headset last year for $2 billion.
"It's going to be a profound shift in terms of how I think investors think about Facebook, as crazy as that is, but we're big believers on this whole virtual reality theme," Munster said.
James Cakmak, analyst at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., told "Squawk Box" that investors should focus on Facebook's 50 percent constant currency revenue growth and 55 percent foreign-exchange-neutral advertising gain.
"No other company in the ad space is posting these kinds of growth off of this kind of base," he said.
The company said it saw monthly active users (MAUs) of 1.49 billion for June, with 1.31 billion MAUs on mobile. Mobile advertising revenue represented about 76 percent of its total ad revenue for the quarter.
"They have more growth levers than I think any other company in the Internet space aside from Amazon (AMZN)," Cakmak said. "They're going after Twitter (TWTR) with real-time [content]. They're going after YouTube (GOOGL) with video. They're going after commerce ... so the sky's the limit."
-CNBC's Everett Rosenfeld contributed to this story.
Disclosure: Neither of the analysts nor their families owns shares of Facebook. Their firms do not own greater than a 1 percent share of the stock and do not provide investment banking services to Facebook.
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