Micro-Blogging Site Twitter Posts First-Ever Quarterly Revenue of $1bn

Twitter on Thursday posted first-ever quarterly revenue of $1.01 billion, up 11 per cent, riding on strong performance across most major geographies, with particular strength in US advertising.

However, in the fourth quarter of 2019, its operating income totalled $153 million, or 15 per cent of total revenue, compared to $207 million, or 23 per cent for the same period in 2018.

Its net income for the fourth quarter of 2019 went down to $119 million, with a diluted earnings per share of $0.15, compared to net income of $255 million with diluted EPS of $0.33 in the same period a year ago but its average monetizable daily active users (mDAU) grew 21 per cent to 152 million, primarily driven by product improvements.

"We continued to make progress on health. In Q4, we increased our efforts to protect the integrity of election-related conversations and proactively limit the visibility of unhealthy content on Twitter, resulting in a 27 per cent decline in bystander reports on Tweets that violate our terms of service," Twitter said.

Total advertising revenue in the quarter was $885 million, an increase of 12 per cent. Data
licensing and other revenue totaled $123 million, an increase of 5 per cent.

"We ended 2019 with more than 4,800 employees. We continue to attract and retain great people all over the world who believe in our purpose," Twitter said. Twitter stock was up as much as 9 per cent during premarket trading, CNBC reported. Twitter said it expects to grow headcount by 20 per cent or more in 2020, especially in engineering, product, design, and research.

"Given investment decisions made in previous years and anticipated 2020 headcount growth, we expect total costs and expenses (which include cost of revenue and all operating expenses) to grow approximately 20 per cent in 2020, ramping in absolute dollars over the course of the year," Twitter said.

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"Our investments also include building out a new data center in 2020 to add capacity to support audience and revenue growth. While the timing of these investments will be variable and spread out over multiple quarters, we expect capital expenditures to be weighted toward the second half of the year," it added. (IANS)