Twitter reported its third quarter earning today, and the figures appear to be disappointing in terms of both sales and earnings per share. While EPS stands at $0.05, the revenue stands at $824 million, showing a gain of 9% year-over-year, but, the figures are far less that what analysts expected.
It was anticipated that the EPs would be 20 cents per share and revenue would be somewhere between $874.03 million to 883 million. The stocks have witnessed a downfall of 20% in pre-market trading.
Twitter blamed its performance on the revenue product issues which kept decreasing year-over-year by “approximately 3 or more percentage points.” Twitter admitted that it took steps to irradiate the bugs which affected its legacy Mobile Application Promotion (MAP) product which adversely impacted its ability to “target ads and share data with measurement and ad partners.” It further said that the poor numbers were the result of slow summer and lack of launches which were prevalent last year.
It is noticeable that the the count of monetizable users rose to 145 million against 139 million count of Q2 and 124 million last year. That is 14% growth on what analysts have been expecting, fetching the net income at $37 million.
Jack Dorsey said;
We drove strong growth in monetizable DAU (mDAU), up 17% year-over-year, driven by ongoing product improvements. We’re continuing to improve relevance while testing ways to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for on Twitter. We also continue to make progress on health, improving our ability to proactively identify and remove abusive content, with more than 50% of the Tweets removed for abusive content in Q3 taken down without a bystander or first person report.
CFO Ned Segal said;
Despite its challenges, this quarter validates our strategy of investing to drive long-term growth. More work remains to deliver improved revenue products. We’ll continue to prioritize our ad products along with health and our investments to drive ongoing growth in mDAU. We remain confident that focusing on our most important priorities, and delivering higher performing, better ad formats will deliver better outcomes for all of our stakeholders for years to come.
Ad revenue comprised $702 million with 8% rise year-over-year. Data licensing and other revenue amounted to $121 million, showing an increase of 12%
Last quarter, Twitter reported a revenue of $841 million with EPS of $0.20, which was still once cent short of the earnings reported last year with $0.21 and revenue of $758 million. The company really needs to pick up its pace. The Wall Street is not known to be kind to companies who keep falling short of analyst expectations.
