Twitter Inc. headquartered in San Francisco is a popular micro-blogging site, was founded by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass in the year 2006. The micro-blogging site is one of the most visited website around the world with 500 million registered users by the end of July, 2014. Also known as ‘SMS service of the internet’, the users of this micro-blogging website are allowed to receive and sent short messages of upto 140 characters known as Tweets. The company filed its legal documents for its Initial Public Offering with Security and Exchange Commission on September 12th, 2013 through its underwriting company, Goldman Sachs Inc. The company unlike the speculation of being listed on NASDAQ, began its trading on New York Stock Exchange on November 7th, 2013 with 70 million shares at the price of $26. At present, the company has a total market capitalization of $25.71 billion.
The stock of the company, at present, is trading at $41.13 with 52 week range of $29.51-$74.73. Hence, considering the 52 week price range and current stock price, we can infer that the stock of the company has been witnessing tidal trends. Referring to the graph below, we can witness that while the stock price was at peak during November-December time period of 2013, with stock price hitting the level of $73.31 on December 26th, 2013. Post that, the stock price slumped and it was only after July, 2014, the stock saw an appreciation in its price level.
The major source of revenue of the company is the advertisements which now also includes video ads and ads inside other company’s mobile application. By the end of 2013, the total revenue of the company amounted $664 Million.
The executive officers of the company works at the discretion of the board of directors and following the ethical code of conduct of corporate governance, no executive or the director have any family relationship. Below is the list of Board of Directors and Executive Officers of the company:
Board of Directors
- Jack Dorsey, Chairman and Co-Founder
- Dick Costolo, CEO, Twitter
- Peter Chernin, Founder and Chairman, Chernin Entertainment and The Chernin Group
- Peter Currie, President, Currie Capital
- Peter Fenton, General Partner, Benchmark Capital
- David Rosenblatt, CEO, 1stdibs.com, Inc.
- Evan Williams, CEO, Medium; CEO, Obvious Corp.
- Marjorie Scardino, Chairman, MacArthur Foundation
Executive Committee
- Richard Costolo, Chief Executive Officer
- Adam Bain, President of Global Revenue
- Alex Roetter, Vice President of Engineering
- Anthony Noto, Chief Financial Officer
- Kevin Weil, Vice President of Product
- Luca Baratta, Vice President of Finance
- Vijaya Gadde, General Counsel and Secretary
- Adam Messinger, Chief Technology Officer
- Colin Crowell, Vice President of Global Public Policy
- Gabriel Stricker, Chief Communications Officer
- Mike Gupta, Senior Vice President of Strategic Investments
- Brian "Skip" Schipper, Vice President of Human Resources
The company faces tough competition from other social networking sites such as Facebook and Linked In. While the former company is primarily based on building social network among the friends and acquaintances, the latter is more focused on building professional network of individuals from various fields. At present, Twitter Inc. lacks significantly behind its competitor both in terms of market capitalization.
Apart from growing competition, market analyst and social networking pundits also have sourced the lack of innovation by Twitter as the primary reason for its decreased active usage and signups as the primary threat to the growth of the company. In an article published in New York Times, the company, despite of its renovations like active tweets on football world cup and national leagues was not able to provide much yield so as to initiate new signups or to bring veteran users frequently. The company in their latest financial report declared that during the third quarter of 2014, 281 million users used their account once a month, indicating a surge of 4.8% in comparison to the second quarter. However, the actual number of log-in by the tweeters is decreasing rapidly as regular users on Twitter are decreasing their twitter feeds and even the company declared that their tweets have decreased in their top 20 markets.
Works Cited
Directors. <https://investor.twitterinc.com/directors.cfm>.
Management-Twitter Inc. 28 November 2014 <https://investor.twitterinc.com/management.cfm>.
Twitter Inc. 28 November 2014 <https://in.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR>.
"Twitter Revenue Sharply, Usage Stalls." New York Times 27 October 2014: 1-3.
