By now, it should be routine: Investors go into Twitter’s earnings with modest expectations, the company manages to miss the lowered bar, and shares sink after hours.
Well, here we are again. Reporting its second-quarter earnings, Twitter fell short of expectations with a $107 million net loss on $602 million in sales. At a 20% gain year-over-year, this is Twitter’s slowest quarter of revenue growth since it went public. Shares dropped by 10% in after-hours trading.
The company’s revenue guidance for the current quarter isn’t reassuring anybody either. It’s pretty much flat from its guidance the last two quarters: a range of $590 million to $610 million. Investors were forecasting $682 million in sales for the third quarter.
There was at least one bright spot in today’s report: Twitter added 3 million new users, above the 2 million projected by analysts. The company ended the first half of the year with 313 million monthly active users. It’s not astounding growth, but at least it’s in the positive territory.