San Francisco Amid billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover attempt, Twitter has presented weak business figures. Revenue fell one percent year-on-year to $1.18 billion. Analysts had expected a good $1.3 billion.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal skipped the usual Q&A session with analysts to present the business figures. Instead, in a statement, he blamed the “uncertainty” surrounding Elon Musk’s takeover plans, among other things, for the decline in sales.
Musk announced in April that he would buy Twitter for about $44 billion. A few weeks later, he unilaterally declared the deal suspended and finally withdrew at the beginning of July. Twitter wants to reach a verdict that will oblige Musk to complete the acquisition at the agreed price of $ 54.20 per share.
The bottom line is that Twitter ended the second quarter with a loss of $270 million – down from just under $66 million in the black a year earlier.
The Twitter management also said that the shrinking revenues are partly due to challenges with its advertising business caused by problems in the economy as a whole – for example, due to concerns about an impending recession.
Sales slump: loss “not as bad as feared”
The number of daily active users that Twitter can reach with its advertising because they use the in-house app or the web version rose from 229 million to 237.8 million within three months. In the first quarter, the service had gained a good 14 million users.
Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said the Twitter numbers weren’t as bad as feared. “A comparison with Snap’s nightmare quarter shows that digital advertising spending is not falling off a cliff as feared,” Ives said.
The valuation of Twitter rival Snap had meanwhile slumped by more than 30 percent on the stock market after the company announced a higher loss and weaker user growth than expected.
