Alphabet: Twitter resists better than expected from coronavirus, already bounces in Asia

Twitter on Thursday posted higher-than-expected revenue and less pronounced loss than expected in the first quarter, while growth in the number of users who can view ads has also been stronger than expected. analysts.

The messaging network is thus the latest enterprise in the new technologies sector to report an impact ultimately less heavy than expected from the coronavirus pandemic on its activities.

Like Facebook, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and Snap, owner of Snapchat messaging, Twitter has also already shown signs of a recovery in its advertising sales in Asia after the plunge caused at the beginning of the year by the health crisis.

The action jumped 11% in foreign exchange before the opening Wall Street.

Twitter sales in the first quarter rose $ 808 million (744 million euros), up 3% from a year ago, while analysts monitored by Refinitiv expected an average of 776 million.

The loss stood at $ 8 million, or one cent per share against a consensus of analysts two hundred.

The number of daily users likely to see ads jumped 24% 166 million, about two million more than analysts’ estimates, as Twitter served as the source of information on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The network has provided neither forecast on its sales for the current quarter, contrary to its habits, nor comment on a possible recovery of its advertising revenues in the United States.

Twitter derives approximately 84% of its revenues from advertisements placed on its messaging and other applications and these sales fell by 27% over a year during the last three weeks of March. However, they rebounded in Asia towards the end of March as containment measures began to lift in the region, the company said, without providing figures.

Twitter has said it is accelerating its efforts to develop tools to attract advertisers, including game and mobile application developers seeking to gain market share from users who are trapped in their homes.

(Paresh Dave and Elizabeth Culliford; French version Bertrand Boucey, said by Jean-Stphane Brosse)