Twitter on Thursday announced ambitious goals to double its user base and revenue over the next two years, milestones that its chief financial officer said he thought the company was more than capable of meeting.
The social media company said it expects to increase its daily active users to 315 million, from 152 million at the end of 2019, and reach $ 7.5 billion in revenue, up from $ 3.7 billion in 2020 at the end of 2023.
Twitter shares reached new highs after the announcement, rising more than 3%, despite the broader tech sector experiencing its worst trading day since October.
After closing, Twitter CFO Ned Segal told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the forecast reflects the company’s optimism about its future performance.
“We can score big goals like that because we have a lot of confidence in our strategy,” he said in an “Mad Money” interview. “We are running much faster and have a clear path ahead of us, with tons of people not yet using Twitter and more than $ 150 billion of the addressable market for digital ads that can reach Twitter.”
The objectives are aggressive emerging from the coronavirus pandemic. To serve them, Segal said that Twitter will focus on accelerating the launch of new products and features, helping to bring in new users and even develop a new subscription model. The company recently announced the acquisition of the Revue newsletter platform to allow creators to publish and monetize editorial newsletters.
Twitter, valued as a $ 59.5 billion company, conducted an analyst on Thursday to reveal its new perspectives and products. The administration also introduced new features, some of which already exist in other parts of the social media world, which are expected to be launched in the future.
The features under test include Super Follow subscriptions, where followers can pay for access to exclusive content; Microcommunities, where groups can be formed around a topic, and a new security mode to allow automatic blocking and silencing abusive or incomplete accounts.
In the wake of the growing success of the Clubhouse audio chat application, Twitter has also launched its own feature called Spaces.
“This to us seems like a natural extension of where we started with the texts. We added images, we added video, live video, audio tweets and now you can come in … and create a space and talk. Other people can join you and others can hear, “said Segal. “People can tweet along with him. This will be an incredible experience.”
Although the closings and restrictions on coronavirus business have been especially tough for physical companies, the Twitter service, which is a heavy advertising business, has also seen sales slow down.
Twitter recorded half-digit growth in 2020, which followed consecutive years of double-digit sales growth. The company posted revenue of $ 3.7 billion that year, an increase of 7.4% from $ 3.46 billion in 2019. As costs and expenses increased last year, Twitter also recorded a loss of $ 1.14 billion, its first annual loss since 2017
With respect to the current quarter, Twitter expects to increase double-digit revenue over the previous year’s quarter. The company provided revenue guidance between $ 940 million and $ 1 billion.