Twitter beats Wall Street on revenue and profit, but is still losing monthly users at a rapid clip

Shona Ghosh

April 23, 2019 11:44 AM

Twitter reported its first-quarter earnings Tuesday before the opening bell.

Jack Dorsey

The company reported net income of $191 million, and earnings per share of $0.25.
Revenue was up 18% year on year to $787 million.
Twitter is still losing users at a rapid clip, with average monthly users for the quarter at 330 million, a decrease of 6 million year on year.
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Twitter's stock price soared 7% in pre-market trading, as the firm reported beat analyst expectations on revenue and earnings per share for the first three months of 2019.

Here are the key numbers from its first-quarter financials:

Revenue: Up 18% from Q1 2018 to $787 million. Analysts had expected an average of $775.23 million.
Earnings per share: $0.25. Analysts had expected $0.18 per share.
Average monthly users: 330 million, down from 336 million last year.
Q2 guidance: Revenue between $770 million to $830 million.

The declining monthly users will be a sore point in the earnings, and this is the last quarter Twitter will disclose its monthly active users.

From next quarter, Twitter will only disclose its daily users, a figure that will probably make the firm look a little healthier. The firm has been losing users for several quarters in a row now.

To that end, Twitter revealed its daily active users globally for the quarter as 134 million, up from 120 million from 2018.

The company said in its filing: "Twitter defines monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads."

Twitter also warned that its capital expenditure would be likely to grow in 2019, thanks to the firm's efforts to fight abuse and harassment on its platform. The company predicts operating expenses to rise 20% for the year.

CEO 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."

Dorsey said the firm was removing more than twice as many posts that share people's personal information, after complaints of doxxing , where a person's home address and other information is made public. He said around 38% of abusive tweets that were removed were detected by Twitter's automated systems, rather than humans.

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