SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter Inc beat Wall Street`s revenue target in the fourth quarter but the pace of its user growth weakened, adding pressure on embattled Chief Executive Dick Costolo.
Shares of Twitter, which initially slipped after the release of the financial results on Thursday, recovered and were roughly flat from their closing price of $41.26 in after hours trading.
Twitter said it ended 2014 with 288 million monthly users, up 1.4 percent from Sept. 30. The pace of user growth was Twitter`s slowest in several quarters.
Twitter said revenue in the three months ended Dec. 31 totaled $479 million, compared to $243 million in the year-ago period. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S were looking for revenue of $453.1 million.
Twitter posted a net loss of $125 million in the fourth quarter, or 20 cents per share. Excluding certain items, Twitter said it earned 12 cents per share, surpassing analysts` average estimate of 6 cents a share.
Twitter, which allows users to broadcast 140-character messages, is among the world`s best known social media services, used by politicians, celebrities and activists. But the company has struggled to enlarge its audience, raising questions about whether it can achieve the scale of Facebook, the world`s No.1 social network with 1.39 billion users.
Instagram, the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook, recently surpassed Twitter`s audience size and announced it had 300 million monthly users.
The San Francisco company has also experienced a string of departures in its upper ranks in the past six months, and CEO Costolo is facing mounting criticism on Wall Street. One prominent analyst predicted in December that Costolo would not last another year on the job.
Twitter has rolled out a string of new features and improvements designed to make its service easier to use and to entice people to spend more time with it. And the company has taken steps to expand its reach with a new program to distribute its ads to other websites.
Twitter projected that revenue in the first quarter would range from $440 million to $450 million. Analysts were looking for first-quarter revenue of $449.7 million.
Shares of Twitter have rallied roughly 10 percent during the past several days following news of a string of partnerships and new products, but the stock remains nearly 30 below its 52-week high of $58.98.
