Twitter Stock Plunges After Quarterly Earnings Are Leaked — On Twitter
Twitter stock dropped nearly 20 percent on Tuesday afternoon following a tweet by financial data aggregator Selerity that revealed the social media company’s fiscal shortcomings.
After floating its stocks on the market last year, Twitter has been facing intense pressure from investors as it has struggled to keep up with the financial strength of other social media sites such as Facebook. CNBC reports that Twitter only held 1.6 percent of the digital advertising market last year, far behind Facebook, who held around 10.4 percent. This furthers the pressures put on the Twitter board by investors.
Selerity posted this tweet regarding Twitter’s quarterly revenue.
#BREAKING: Twitter $TWTR Q1 Revenue misses estimates, $436M vs. $456.52M expected
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015
Selerity released this information at 3:07 p.m., but Twitter’s official earnings report was set to be released at the end of the trading day at 4 p.m E.T. The news that Twitter’s actual first-quarter revenue fell $20 million short of the expected first-quarter revenue of $456.2 million caused Twitter’s stock to drop around 18 percent in today’s trading.
Once Twitter discovered the leak, they immediately called a press conference and cancelled trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Although Twitter’s revenue was up by 72 percent compared to last year, it still fell short of all predictions.
We asked @nyse to halt trading once we discovered our Q1 earnings numbers had leaked, and published our results as soon as possible. (1/2)
— Twitter Investor Relations (@TwitterIR) April 28, 2015
To add further woes to Twitter’s day, CNBC reports that their outlook for second-quarter revenue will be far below Wall Street expectations. Twitter’s second-quarter outlook has reportedly fallen to approximately $480 million compared to the Wall Street forecast of $538 million.
However, not all was bad news for Twitter, as Time reports that their average monthly active users (MAU) hit 300 million for the first time, which is inline with most predictions. Though, Twitter’s Mobile MAU’s have (once again) dropped below Wall Street’s expectations. Time was also able to report that the company posted a first quarter loss of $162 million, a much larger loss compared to the $132 million loss they made at the same point last year.
Although Twitter have officially stated they are “investigating the source of the leak,” Selerity have insisted that there is no foul play, claiming that they got all of their information from Twitter’s official investor relations website.
Today’s $TWTR earnings release was sourced from Twitter’s Investor Relations website https://t.co/QD6138euja. No leak. No hack.
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015
Chris Sacca, an early investor in Twitter, doesn’t seem to be worried about these revelations.
“This is a company that is still experimenting with parts of monetization across many different fronts. I think these are still very, very early days”
Twitter’s largest rivals, Facebook, do not seem to be struggling in the stock market, with an expected 6 percent move in either direction, according to this Inquisitr report.
[Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images]
