Twitter (TWTR, $27.54) Posts Higher-than-Expected Earnings, Amidst Deletion of Suspicious Accounts

Twitter beat earnings and revenues expectations in Q3, even with  monthly active users lower than the previous quarter.

The social networking platform generated a $789 million profit, including one-time gains, compared to a net loss of $21 million in the year-ago period. Excluding one-time gains from tax and asset valuation adjustments items, profits were $163 million for the quarter. Per-share-earnings of $0.21 per share was higher than analysts' average estimate of $0.14 per share, according to Bloomberg.

Twitter's total revenues increased +29% to $758 million (vs. an expected $701 million according to Bloomberg), including those from advertising which surged +29% over the past year to $650 million.

The number of average monthly active users declined to 326 million in Q3, from 335 million in the previous quarter. Twitter claims the drop is due to its cleaning up the platform by removal of abusive users and fake accounts.

Its daily users however was up +9% in the past quarter, according to Twitter.

Contributor

Sergey Savastiouk|Expert

Sergey Savastiouk, Ph.D. has a degree in Applied Mathematics from Moscow University and has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, investor, manager, and mathematician. His professional expertise is in applied mathematics, mathematical modeling, system and pattern analysis, and software and hardware system integration. He has served as the CEO of several hi-tech start-up companies and nonprofit organizations, which has given him proven capabilities in business strategy for high-tech start-up companies, market assessment, company formation, team building, product development, marketing, and sales. He has published numerous articles in journals and magazines on related fields. As a retail investor, he spent 15 years developing his proprietary trading and quantitative algorithms (now Tickeron’s A.I.), which brought him significant returns in trading the stock market. His current work and goal in founding Tickeron is to bring professional, sophisticated stock market analysis capabilities to retail investors via an easy-to-use interface.