Twitter Inc. reported higher-than-anticipated revenue for its first quarter 2019 on Tuesday morning. The social media giant also announced a surprise increase in the number of monthly active users (MAUs), though this is the last quarter for which the company is disclosing this metric.
Shares of the California-based company gained 7.71% to $37.04 in premarket trade. The stock has rallied 20% since the beginning of the year, as of Monday’s close.
TWTR Earnings & Outlook
Twitter reported first quarter earnings of $191 million, or $0.25 per share, compared with $61 million, or $0.08 per share, in the same period last year. Adjusted for one-time items, earnings jumped to $0.37 per share from $0.16 per share in the prior-year quarter. On average, analysts surveyed by Refinitiv were expecting earnings of $0.15 per share.
Total revenue, the company said, was $784 million up 18% from $665 million in the first quarter of the previous year. The number of monthly active users (MAUs) came to 330 million, an increase of 9 million from a year earlier.
Analysts had predicted 318.8 million MAUs, a loss of 2.2 million users based on figures compiled by Refinitiv. Twitter will not reveal the MAU metric in its future earnings reports and will instead announce the number of monetizable daily active users, or mDAUs.
Looking ahead, Twitter hopes to report second quarter revenue of between $770 million to $830 million. Analysts expect the firm to come out with revenue of $818 million for the quarter. The company will announce its second quarter financial results before the opening bell on July 26, 2019.
Twitter CEO Comments
Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorey said Twitter is “taking a more proactive approach to reducing abuse and its effects” on the platform.
“We are reducing the burden on victims and, where possible, taking action before abuse is reported. For example, we are now removing 2.5x more Tweets that share personal information and ~38% of abusive Tweets that are taken down every week are being proactively detected by machine learning models. We’re also continuing our work to make Twitter more conversational via the launch of our public prototype app (twttr), with the end goal of making conversation on Twitter feel faster, more fluid, and more fun,” said Mr. Dorsey.
Twitter Inc. Profile
Twitter is an open distribution platform for and a conversational platform around short-form text (a maximum of 140 characters), image, and video content. Its users can create different social networks based on their interests, thereby creating an interest graph.
Many prominent celebrities and public figures have Twitter accounts. Twitter generates revenue from advertising (90%) and licensing the user data that it compiles (10%).
