Twitter Should Give Its Cash Back to Investors

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Nothing focuses the mind of management as much as when it faces few financial resources to support losses. Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) bleeds money because it can. At the end of the last quarter, Twitter had a net loss of $137 million, and adjusted Adjusted-GAAP EBITDA of $120 million. The company had cash and short term investments of $3,5 billion, It ought to give that to long-suffering investors, so that they at least have a modest return on their money, and management has a reason to improve the Twitter’s margins.

One indication of how little Twitter actually needs all the cash and short term investments it carries on it balance sheet is the figures the company uses to manage results and budgets:

Twitter’s outlook for the third quarter of 2015 is as follows:
• Revenue is projected to be in the range of $545 million to $560 million.
• Adjusted EBITDA is projected to be in the range of $110 million to $115 million.
• Stock-based compensation expense is projected to be in the range of $190 million to $200 million,
excluding the impact of equity awards that may be granted in connection with potential future
acquisitions.

Management only needs to be modestly frugal enough so that operations do not cause a drop in the case balance. If management cannot do that, it will confirm what Wall St. already believes which is that the executives running Twitter are entirely ineffective.

Twitter has a market cap of $19 billion, which has been halved since its shares were at their 52-week high. The return of $3 billion would not come close to making some of these investors whole, or even coming  close to that,  but distribution which would cut their losses.

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Typically, case distributions are done by companies which have huge balances of excess cash. Twitter’s cash balance cannot be called “excess”, but reducing it can be called a way to press management toward profitability

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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