Twitter surges back after positive financial results

Three months ago the Twitter share price fell off a cliff thanks to a worrisome earnings call, but bad performance does not necessarily mean a bad company.

The latest financial report demonstrated this. Revenues for the fourth quarter of 2019 were $1.01 billion, an 11% year-on-year increase, while Average monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAU) were 152 million for Q4, compared to 126 million in the same period of 2018.

The third quarter financials could now be viewed as a blot on the landscape as share price shot up 16% during the early hours of trading on Thursday February 6. This is still considerably down on the high of $45.85 in September, but momentum might well shift back in favour of one of Silicon Valley’s earliest successes.

“We reached a new milestone in Q4 with quarterly revenue in excess of $1 billion, reflecting steady progress on revenue product and solid performance across most major geographies, with particular strength in US advertising,” said Ned Segal, Twitter CFO.

“We continue to see tremendous opportunity to get the whole world to use Twitter and provide a more personalized experience across both organic and promoted content, delivering increasing value for both consumers and advertisers.”

Despite being one of the most successful social media companies in terms of adoption, Twitter is one of the Silicon Valley residents who has struggled to make a meaningful impact on the promised fortunes of the digital economy. Over the last 12-18 months, this painful equation has seemingly been balanced, but the Q3 results threw a spanner in the works.

Over the last 12-18 months, Twitter has been sorting out its house. It started offering more comprehensive products for advertisers to target and engage customers, as well as more insightful features on the reporting features. There were some minor glitches to these features during Q3, which impacted results, as did retiring legacy products.

Another factor to consider is what actually happened during 2018. In a sentence, not a lot. This meant AmDAU’s were down during the period, and therefore advertising revenues were also. All of these factors combined resulted in the poor performance during the third quarter, but they were all issues which could be fixed. This is the basis of the turnaround during the fourth quarter.

This is the first quarter the business has exceeded $1 billion in revenue and there could be more to come. With the Olympics in Tokyo, the UEFA European Championships and the US Presidential Election all taking place over the next twelve months, there certainly could be more active users on the platform, therefore more opportunity to advertise and, finally, more revenue for Twitter.

2020 could be a very good year for the company, especially with new video products and a much more comprehensive approach to advertisers.