14 DAY TRIAL // As everyone was eagerly waiting for Twitter’s quarterly results to be published by the company, Selerity revealed the report before the market closed, causing a major drop of about 20 percent in the company's shares.
Although people believed that the data platform had obtained the results through suspicious means, it seems that its ways were perfectly legal as it had merely found the announcement on the company’s investor relations website.
They even posted a tweet letting people know that it was neither a leak nor a hack, but claiming instead that it had been Twitter’s mistake for posting the results almost an hour before the New York Stock Market closed.
However, Twitter still calls it a leak and expresses its intention to investigate the source of it, after previously asking the stock market to suspend the trading of its shares. The company put the blame for the premature release on Nasdaq, which was in charge of handling their investors site.
Brendan Gilmartin, a Selerity sales executive, tells The Verge that his assumption is that Twitter had inadvertently released the results.
Either way, the microblogging site was a victim of its own weapon, given that the release of its quarterly results was done in a series of tweets.
The quarterly results are not very promising
The release of the data almost an hour earlier than planned and which led to a significant decline in its stock shares was just one of Twitter’s misses.
The figures from the report were not very satisfying either as Twitter reported revenues of $436 million (€397 million), which is about $20 million (€18 million) less than what analyst were expecting.
The company revealed that the reason it missed expectations was the recent acquisition of TellApart, a marketing technology company which is prone to attract more advertisers.
The good news for Twitter is the increase in the number of active users, just as Wall Street analysts had predicted, as the company added 14 million more users to the 288 million it already had. However, although the numbers met analyst’s expectations, the users growth rate is still pretty slow.
The report also announces a grim future given that things are not expected to improve by the end of the year, as revealed by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, " We anticipate the factors that affected our first-quarter results will also affect our 2015 guidance, CNBC reports.