Twitter reports $116-million loss

Twitter Inc. lost $116.5 million in the second quarter and failed to grow its monthly user base from the first quarter, the company said Thursday.

Its stock price dropped after the announcement, closing down $2.77, or 14%, at $16.84.

On a per-share basis, the San Francisco company said it had a second-quarter loss of 16 cents. Twitter has never had a profitable quarter. Earnings, adjusted for one-time gains and costs, came to 8 cents a share.

The results for the April-through-June quarter beat Wall Street expectations. Beginning with that quarter, Twitter changed the way it calculated adjusted earnings. Under the old method, it would have been 12 cents a share. The average estimate of 12 analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of 5 cents a share.

The social media platform posted revenue of $573.9 million in the period, also beating forecasts. Ten analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $536.8 million.

Twitter said its monthly average user base in the quarter grew 5% from a year earlier to 328 million, but it was unchanged from the previous quarter.

“With what Trump is doing, you would think more users would be there out of morbid curiosity,” said Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter, referring to President Trump’s habit of using the platform to make surprising announcements and to trash opponents and allies.

One development last quarter was the introduction of Twitter Lite, which Twitter launched in April to reach more international users. Twitter Lite uses less data, loads quickly on slow connections and is “resilient on unreliable mobile networks,” Twitter said when it first announced Twitter Lite.

“It’s way too soon to assess the [Twitter Lite] usage trends, but our initial results look really positive,” Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said Thursday on a call with investors.