UPDATED 06:18 EDT / APRIL 29 2015

NEWS

Twitter stock hammered after missing Q1 market expectations and revising down projections

Sunshine and lollipops were in short supply Tuesday at Twitter Inc., with the microblogging platform taking a hammering on the New York Stock Exchange after revealing disappointing first quarter figures, and revising its future revenue forecast downwards.

Twitter’s Q1 revenue came in at $436 million, up 74 percent over the same quarter in 2014, but below forecasts of a number in the range of $440 million to $450 million.

Advertising revenue came in at $388 million, up 72 percent, with mobile advertising making up 89 percent of that figure. Data licensing and other revenue totaled $48 million, an increase of 95% year-over-year.

Data licensing, where companies pay for access to the Twitter firehose came in at $48 million, up 95 percent compared to Q1 2014.

International revenue totaled $147 million, an increase of 109 percent versus the same period last year, with the figure now representing 34 percent of total revenue.

Twitter reported a net loss of $162 million, higher than its loss of $132.4 million in Q1 2014.

Monthly active users were up 18 percent to 302 million, from 288 million in Q4 2014,

“While we exceeded our EBITDA target for the first quarter, revenue growth fell slightly short of our expectations due to lower-than-expected contribution from some of our newer direct response products,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in a statement. “It is still early days for these products, and we have a strong pipeline that we believe will drive increased value for direct response advertisers in the future. We remain confident in our strategy and in Twitter’s long-term opportunity, and our focus remains on creating sustainable shareholder value by executing against our three priorities: strengthening the core, reducing barriers to consumption and delivering new apps and services.”

Where Twitter came under serious fire from investors was with forward projections, with the company downgrading its revenue forecast for the year down to between $2.17 billion to $2.27 billion, down from the previous range of $2.3 billion to $2.35 billion.

Shares in Twitter dropped by up to 20% in trading Tuesday before closing the day down 18.18 percent at $42.27.

photo credit: Red-throated Blue Bird — [Explore Front Page] via photopin (license)

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