Twitter Rallies as User Count and Sales Impress Wall Street

Twitter topped first-quarter sales projections and reported strong user growth, bolstered by changes to its service that are drawing a wider audience, according to Bloomberg. The shares jumped the most in almost six months.

The company reported $787 million in revenue, an 18 percent increase from the year-earlier period. Analysts, on average, estimated $775 million. The microblogging site also posted an increase in monetizable daily active users to 134 million, beating analyst predictions for about 128.4 million. That compares with 126 million in the fourth quarter.

Monthly active users were 330 million in the first quarter, Twitter said. That was up from 321 million in the previous quarter, but marked a decline from the 336 million in the year-earlier period. That number has been decreasing year over year for several quarters, and Twitter told investors in 2018 that the metric would likely continue to drop for some time as it removes spam and suspicious accounts. Twitter said this is the last time that it will disclose monthly active users.

Net income in the first quarter rose to $190.8 million, or 25 cents a share, from $61 million, or 8 cents, a year earlier. Profit excluding certain items was 37 cents a share, compared with the average analyst estimate of 15 cents. In last year’s first quarter, revenue was $665 million.

Twitter’s stock is up 20 percent so far this year, outperforming the broader market but lagging behind social media peers. The company said it expects second-quarter revenue to be $770 million to $830 million, a wide forecast range with a midpoint of $800 million, lower than analysts’ average sales estimate of $819.2 million.