Twitter on Thursday announced ambitious goals to double both the user base and revenue over the next two years, milestones its chief financial officer said he believes the company is more than capable of meeting.
The social media company said it wants to increase its daily active users to 315 million, from 152 million by the end of 2019, and reach $ 7.5 billion on the front line, compared to $ 3.7 billion by the end of 2020. of 2023.
Twitter shares rose to new highs after the announcement, rising more than 3% despite the broader technology sector suffering the worst trading day since October.
After the close, Twitter chief financial officer Ned Segal told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the forecast reflects the company’s optimism about its future performance.
“We can give big goals like that because we have a lot of confidence in our strategy,” he said in an interview with “Mad Money”. “We’ve been running a lot faster and we have a clear path ahead with a lot of people not yet using Twitter and more than $ 150 billion marketable addressable for digital ads that can reach Twitter.”
Targets are aggressive in coming out of the coronavirus pandemic. To meet them, Segal said Twitter will focus on accelerating the launch of new products and features, helping to attract new users and even developing a new subscription model. The company recently announced the acquisition of the Revue newsletter platform to allow creators to publish and earn revenue with editorial newsletters.
Twitter, valued as a $ 59.5 billion company, held an analyst on Thursday earlier to reveal its new prospects and products. The management also sparked new features, some of which already exist elsewhere in the world of social media, which are expected to be developed in the future.
Features being tested include subscriptions to Super Follow, where followers can pay for access to exclusive content; Micro-communities, where groups can be formed around a topic, and a new security mode to automatically block and silence abusive or incomplete accounts.
Following the growing success of the Clubhouse Audio Chat Rooms app, Twitter also launched its own feature called Spaces.
“This seems like a natural extension to where we started with texts. We’ve added images, we’ve added video, live video, audio tweets and now you can come in … and create a space and chat. Other people can join you to you and others can hear them, ”Segal said. “People can tweet next door. This is going to be a fantastic experience.”
While the closures and restrictions on the coronavirus business were especially tough for brick-and-mortar manufacturing companies, the Twitter service, which is a heavy advertising business, also saw sales decline.
Twitter recorded average one-digit growth in 2020, which followed years of double-digit sales growth. The company reported $ 3.7 billion in revenue that year, 7.4% more than the $ 3.46 billion in 2019. As costs and expenses increased last year, Twitter also reported a loss. of $ 1.14 billion, its first annual loss since 2017.
For the current quarter, Twitter expects to increase revenue in double digits from the previous quarter. The company provided revenue guidance of between $ 940 and $ 1 billion.