Many people have heard of Twitter. Not enough of them are signing up to use it.
Twitter’s role as a megaphone for US President Donald Trump, countless celebrities and businesses has not attracted regular people to the service — not in the way Facebook has, or even Instagram and Snapchat.
The San Francisco company’s latest earnings report and dismal forecast suggest that this is unlikely to change any time soon.
Photo: Bloomberg
Chief executive officer Jack Dorsey acknowledged long ago that Twitter needs to do more to convince people why it is useful.
“The whole world is watching Twitter. While we may not be meeting everyone’s growth expectations, there’s one thing that continues to grow and outpace our peers: Twitter’s influence and impact,” Dorsey said in a conference call with analysts on Thursday. “You don’t go a day without hearing about Twitter.”
However, that does not amount to much if Twitter cannot translate influence into boosting its user base, advertising and revenue.
While Dorsey and Twitter have taken major steps recently to address some of users’ biggest concerns, including clamping down on hate speech and abuse, this has yet to make a notable difference in drawing new users. For the final three months of last year, Twitter averaged 319 million monthly users, up just 4 percent from a year ago.
Meanwhile, Twitter has yet to address other issues, including simple ones such as the ability to edit tweets.
Twitter’s revenue growth has stalled for more than two years, and the company is cutting costs and shuffling executives.
Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder who rejoined the company in late 2015 with hopes of reviving it, called last year “a transformative year as we reset and focused on why people use Twitter: It’s the fastest way to see what’s happening and what everyone’s talking about.”
Even before the election, Trump used Twitter like no other US presidential candidate, firing out broadsides and accolades in rapid succession and generating headline after headline with 140-character missives.
His election has created a more active landscape for Twitter. Average daily active usage rose 11 percent compared with the same time last year.
However, Trump’s tweets have not inspired people to sign up for the service en masse. The increased usage is mostly among existing users.
Facebook’s base of 1.86 billion monthly users is about six times that of Twitter, while Instagram attracts 600 million monthly users who want to share photographs and videos with friends or the broader world.
Snapchat, best known for disappearing photographs and messages and quirky facial filters, is a favorite among millennials. It has 158 million daily users. The company does not disclose monthly users, as rivals do.
In a charged political and social environment, Twitter is trying to balance its position as a platform for free speech while curtailing hate speech and bullying.
However, what matters most to Wall Street is making a profit — something Twitter has yet to do in its 11-year existence. Losses for Twitter swelled to US$167 million in the fourth quarter of last year, from US$90.2 million a year earlier, as revenue inched up 1 percent to US$717 million.
Excluding special items, such as expenses for stock compensation, per-share earnings of US$0.16 was US$0.04 better than expected, but that was overshadowed by its outlook.
A lean profit outlook for this quarter sent Twitter shares plunging more than 12 percent, or US$2.31, to close on Thursday at US$16.41.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained