Twitter Soars Past Q1 Expectations — What Comes Next?

Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) released its first-quarter financial results before the markets opened on Tuesday. The social media giant said that it had $0.37 in earnings per share (EPS) and $787 million in revenue, which compares with consensus estimates of $0.15 in EPS and $775.23 million in revenue. The same period of last year reportedly had EPS of $0.16 on $664.87 million in revenue.

In the latest quarter, total revenues increased 18% year over year, or 20% on a constant currency basis. At the same time, costs and expenses totaled $693 million, an increase of 18% year over year.

Average monetizable daily active users (mDAU) totaled 134 million for the first quarter, compared to 120 million in the same period of the previous year and to 126 million in the previous quarter.

Average monthly active users (MAU) were pegged at 330 million for the quarter, compared with 336 million in the same period of the previous year and 321 million in the previous quarter.

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Looking ahead to the second quarter, the company expects to see total revenue in the range of $770 million to $830 million, with operating income of $35 million to $70 million. Consensus estimates call for $0.18 in EPS and $819.27 million in revenue.

CEO Jack Dorsey commented:

We are taking a more proactive approach to reducing abuse and its effects on Twitter. We are reducing the burden on victims and, where possible, taking action before abuse is reported. For example, we are now removing 2.5x more Tweets that share personal information and ~38% of abusive Tweets that are taken down every week are being proactively detected by machine learning models. We’re also continuing our work to make Twitter more conversational via the launch of our public prototype app (twttr), with the end goal of making conversation on Twitter feel faster, more fluid, and more fun.

Shares of Twitter traded up about 13% early Tuesday, at $38.35 in a 52-week range of $26.19 to $47.79. The consensus analyst price target was last seen at $33.56.
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