Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), the popular micro blogging company is expected to report its fourth quarter and full year 2013 financial results on Wednesday, February 5. This is the first financial report of the company since it went public in November last year.
Wall Street analysts expect Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) to deliver an average of $-0.02 losses per share on $217.82 million revenue based on data compiled by Yahoo! Finance.
Majority of analysts covering the stock will focus on the mobile advertising growth of the microblogging company.
Analysts’ expectations
Cantor Fitzgerald analyst, Youssef Squali and his colleagues expect Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) to report a positive surprise on its financial performance. The analysts are anticipating that its total revenue will increase 100% and advertising revenue to climb 115%.
The analysts projected that the company will generate $-0.2 losses per share, in line with the consensus estimate of the Street, but they think it will generate $228.3 million revenue, higher than the consensus.
Squali and his fellow analysts expect that the monthly active users (MAUs) of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) will increase to $253 million, an increase of 36% year-over-year. In addition, the analysts anticipated that the company’s timeline views per MAU will go up by 8.9% to 692, and the total timeline views will be approximately 173.4 billion. Its ad revenue per 1,000 timeline views is expected to increase 44.4% to $1.22 year-over-year.
However, the analysts maintained their Sell rating for the shares of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) with a $32 price target citing that its valuation is too high, and the expiration of shares lockups are approaching. The lockup on 9.9 million shares will expire on February 15, and the lockup on another 454.3 million shares will expire on May 7.
On the other hand, Mark Mahaney, analyst at RBC Capital Markets expects Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) to post $-0.01 loss per share and 235 million revenue.
According to Mahaney, the results of the Ad Age survey of advertising professionals show that the advertising platform of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is improving as 40% of respondents increased their advertising budget and seen better ROI over the past 6 months.
Mahaney added that the survey showed Twitter’s advertising spend will likely increase as 60% of the company’s advertisers are expected to allocate more budget next year. Furthermore, Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is seen to report significant advertising growth. “We think the read-through from FB’s Q4 results was broadly positive for Twitter, especially in terms of highlighting monetization growth,” according to the analyst.
Mahaney predicted that Twitter Inc’s (NYSE:TWTR) ad growth will be 121% while its MAUs will climb 38%. He believes that the microblogging company will continue to close its monetization gap with Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB). He maintained his Outperform rating for the shares of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) with a $60 price target.
The stock price of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) gained 1.64% to $66.32 per share on Tuesday. Over the past 51-week range, the stock climbed from $38.80 to $74.73 per share.
