Twitter Stock Tanks on Stagnant User Growth, Lowered Expectations

Twitter’s user growth has clearly started to slow down, and that continues to hurt the business. The company lowered its expectations for the current quarter, sending its stock down as much as 12 percent in after-hours trading.

The Q3 financials were on target, showing a profit of 10 cents a share on $569 million in revenue for the period, up more than 58 percent over the same period last year. Analysts were looking for profit of five cents a share on roughly $559 million in revenue.

But the company lowered revenue projections for Q4, from the $740 million analysts estimated to between $695 million and $710 million.

User growth is clearly an issue. Twitter now has 320 million monthly active users, up just four million over the last quarter. This number includes both traditional active users as well as what Twitter calls “SMS fast followers,” or people who receive tweets via text message (often in emerging markets like India). RBC Capital’s Mark Mahaney projected the company would add seven million new users over last quarter, jumping to 323 million.

We’ll take a closer look at the filing and update with other interesting tidbits that we find. CEO Jack Dorsey, who is scheduled to conduct his first earnings call as Twitter’s permanent CEO at 2 pm PT, isn’t speaking to members of the media today as he did last quarter. Twitter also canceled an all-hands meeting set for this afternoon to discuss the earnings, according to a source.

Still, we’ll be covering the call closely. Newly appointed COO Adam Bain, who runs all of Twitter’s revenue efforts, will also be on the call, according to a tweet earlier today from Dorsey. This will be Bain’s first earnings call.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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