Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Not Build a Smartphone

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the social network firm will not build a smartphone.

"People keep on asking if we're going to build a phone. We're not going to build a phone," he said during the social network's Q4 earnings call. "It's not the right strategy for us to build one integrated system... Let's say we sell 10 million units -- that would be 1 percent of users. Who cares for us?"

"We have a billion people using our products, and we need to make Facebook really good across all the devices that they use," he added. "Rather than just building an app that's a version of the functionality that you have today, I think making it so that we can just go deeper and deeper is going to be a big focus for us."

"More people are starting to understand that mobile is a great opportunity for us. It allows us to reach more people. We have more engagements from the people who we reach, and I think we'll also be able to make more money for each minute people spend with us on their mobile devices."

Facebook's fourth quarter 2012 earnings revealed that the social network now boasts 1.06 billion monthly active users and 680 million monthly mobile users. The latter figure represents the first time daily active mobile users exceeded the social network's web DAUs.

Before an event that saw the announcement of Graph Search, Facebook, which is used on 86 percent of iOS devices, was rumored to be preparing an unveil for its first smartphone. The HTC Opera UL was believed to be the first device powered by the social network.

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