Twitter Q1 revenue and EPS beat expectations as user numbers grow
Twitter reported growth in first-quarter earnings and revenue on Tuesday as its active user numbers increased.
Twitter Inc
$53.70
11:00 08/03/24
In the three months to the end of March 2019, revenue jumped 18% on the year to $787m, net income came in at $191m, or diluted earnings per share of 25 cents, up from $61m or 8 cents. Meanwhile, adjusted earnings per share rose to 37 cents from 16 cents in 2018.
Analysts had pencilled in revenue of about $776m and adjusted EPS of 15 cents.
Advertising revenue was up 18% on the year to $679m and data licensing and other revenue came in at $107m, up 20%. US revenue rose 25% to $432m and international revenue was 11% higher at $355m.
Monthly active users (MAUs) grew by 9m from the previous quarter to 330m, but were down from 336m in the same quarter of the previous year. Average monetizable daily active users (mDAU) came in at 134m in the first quarter compared to 120m in Q1 2018 and 126m in the previous quarter.
Chief financial officer Ned Segal said the 18% increase in ad revenue demonstrates "Twitter’s unique value proposition for advertisers as the best place to launch something new or connect with what’s happening".
"We’ve never been more confident in our strategy and execution and see a great opportunity to grow our audience and deliver even more value for advertisers," he added.
Chief executive officer Jack Dorsey said: "We are taking a more proactive approach to reducing abuse and its effects on Twitter. 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 about 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."
For the second quarter, the company expects total revenue of between $770m and $830m and operating income of $35m to $70m.
At 1240 BST, the shares were up 8.3% at $37.24 in pre-market trade.
Neil Wilson, chief market analyst at Markets.com, said: "Efforts to clean out the bots and the junk are paying off for Twitter. The company is growing the user base faster than expected and revenues are on the march higher."
He said that the "now key metric of monetizable daily users" was roughly 4m above expectations. He also said that Q2 revenue guidance seems to be at the lower end of expectations.