Twitter Inc. reported strong user growth but experienced lingering impacts from the coronavirus pandemic in its latest quarter, as the company navigates a rocky advertising climate and the fallout from a major security breach.
The Wall Street Journal reports the San Francisco social media company said its daily user base rose 12% to 186 million in the three months ended June 30 from the quarter before, a stronger increase than analysts polled by FactSet had expected.
Twitter’s revenue fell 19% in the second quarter from a year earlier to $683 million, missing the consensus estimate from analysts of $702 million, according to FactSet. In the previous quarter, Twitter declined to provide forecasts for revenue or operating income, citing virus-related economic uncertainty and rapidly shifting market conditions. For the same reasons, the company didn’t provide guidance for those metrics in its latest earnings report.
The company swung to a loss of $1.23 billion, noting that its results were impacted by a reversal of a more than $1 billion tax benefit recorded in 2019. Excluding the tax item, Twitter’s loss was steeper than analysts had forecast.
“Our number one priority is making sure our road map is strong and moving fast,” Chief Executive Jack Dorsey told analysts on an earnings call. “This quarter is a great example where you saw a lot of under-the-hood work.”
Global spending on advertising plummeted as coronavirus case counts rose earlier this year, hurting companies including Twitter. Some businesses also paused spending for a few weeks following protests sparked by the police killing of Minneapolis man George Floyd, Twitter said.
But Twitter said it has seen signs of recovery in the ad market. In the last three weeks of June, “advertisers began to adapt and we saw things open up a little bit,” said Twitter’s finance chief, Ned D. Segal.
No comments:
Post a Comment