Twitter said fourth quarter revenues jumped 48 percent from the year before to USD 710 million. Excluding negative forex effects, revenues would have risen 53 percent.
Twitter also announced it will be changing its organisational structure to ensure more disciplined execution. It has moved all of Engineering, Design, and Consumer Product under CTO Adam Messinger. The moves shows how the company will take an engineering and design-led approach to making its service faster and more intuitive. Twitter moved Revenue product, its Media team, and Human Resources to COO Adam Bain. It promoted Kayvon Beykpour, the lead for Periscope, to its executive team and added Leslie Berland to its executive team as CMO. The company will this year also seek to recruit top leadership who will bring a fresh and creative perspective.
Back to quarterly results, advertising revenue advanced 48 percent to USD 461 million, with mobile ad revenue making up 86 percent of the total. The net loss narrowed to USD 90.2 million or a loss per share of USD 0.13, from a loss the year earlier of 125.3 million or 0.20 per share. The adjusted net profit went higher to USD 114.6 million or USD 0.16 per share from 79.3 million or 0.12. The adjusted EBITDA rose 35 percent to USD 191 million, with a margin at 27 percent.
The number of active advertisers lifted almost 90 percent to 130,000. The company noted a decline in monthly active usage but January monthly active users has already bounced back to third-quarter levels, it said. Twitter believes it will be able to keep this trend with disciplined execution.
Twitter’s user base grew 99 percent to 320 million monthly active users, with mobile accounting for 80 percent of users. MAUs, excluding SMS Fast Followers, grew 6 percent to 305 million, but were down on a sequential basis from 307 million in Q3. Twitter noted that from this quarter, reported total MAUs will no longer include SMS Fast Follower.
The company ended the year with USD 3.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents, with 2015 marking the first full year of positive free cash flow. Twitter expects to generate significantly more free cash flow in 2016.
For Q1, the company is guiding for revenues of USD 595-610 million and adjusted EBITDA of USD 150-160 million. For the full year, capex is expected at USD 300-425 million and the adjusted EBITDA margin at 25-27 percent.
Looking forward, the company stated five priorities for this year, namely the refinement of its core service, plus attention on live streaming video, creators and influencers, safety, and developers.
