Twitter Inc on Thursday reported its first-ever quarterly profit, a key milestone that sent the social network’ shares soaring after they had lagged behind fast-growing rivals for years.
The San Francisco-based one-to-many microblogging service said it earned US$91 million in the fourth quarter, the first positive net income since going public in 2013.
Twitter shares rallied 12 percent to close at US$30.18, their highest levels in more than a year, after intraday gains of as much as 26 percent, despite brutal declines on the main US stock indices.
Photo: Bloomberg
Revenue increased 2 percent from a year earlier to a better-than-expected US$732 million.
The number of monthly active users was 330 million, unchanged from the previous quarter, but up 4 percent from a year earlier.
Profitability is an important achievement for Twitter, which has lost money consistently since its public offering, sparking speculation on whether it needed to sell itself to keep operating.
While Twitter has built a solid core base of celebrities, politicians and journalists, it has failed to match the broader appeal of Facebook Inc and other social media platforms, hurting its ability to bring in ad revenue.
Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey welcomed “a strong finish to the year,” adding: “I’m proud of the steady progress we made in 2017 and confident in our path ahead.”
The network has stepped up efforts to boost its user base and engagement, adding streaming video partnerships, doubling the character limit on tweets to 280 and making it easier to create “tweetstorms.”
Dorsey told a conference call that by relaxing the limits “it minimizes some of the complexities” of using the platform and “more importantly it is enabling people to be more expressive about what’s on their minds.”
Twitter’s monthly user base of 330 million is far behind the 2 billion of Facebook, but Twitter said its daily active user base — for which it has not offered a specific number — grew by a double-digit percentage.
Both Twitter and Facebook have stepped up efforts to crack down on “bots” and other efforts to manipulate their platforms, to deflect criticism about the spread of misinformation.
“We are committed to making Twitter safer, and we are clarifying our policies, improving our enforcement, and communicating more clearly,” Twitter said in a tweet.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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