Twitter Inc. plans to lay off a few hundred employees, mostly in sales and marketing, and shut down its Vine video app as the social media service strives to produce an annual profit for the first time next year.
Initiatives such as streaming live video of NFL games are helping ad sales at Twitter, but not quickly enough to justify what investors and analysts have complained is a bloated workforce out of sync with the company's prospects. Several other firms, including Salesforce.com Inc. and Walt Disney Co., have considered and then rejected the opportunity to acquire Twitter in recent weeks.
The once fast-growing San Francisco company has produced nine straight quarters of slowing revenue growth compared with the prior-year quarter. And monthly active users, the company's key usage measurement, has stagnated for the past year.
The cuts to the 3,910-person workforce, announced early Thursday alongside Twitter's latest quarterly financial results, acknowledge the difficulties.
"Once a company gets to our scale and growth, it's important to drive toward margins and profitability," Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto said during a call with analysts. "It's an important milestone to reach for investor appeal."
The belt-tightening targets some departments beyond sales. Hours after the earnings announcement Thursday, Twitter said it would shut down its Vine video app "in the coming months." Twitter acquired the six-second looping video app months after its founding in 2012. It developed a loyal following, but demand sank as users slowly found more intriguing tools and financial incentives on other social media apps.
Twitter said it would help users preserve existing posts on Vine, but stopping further development could free employees to work on live-video technology.
Since returning a year ago to the helm of the company he co-founded, Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey has focused the company on adjusting the user interface in hopes of encouraging more activity. Some of the changes, such as automatically surfacing the most interesting posts users might have missed between visits to the app, have been welcomed by users.
Although 700 million accounts have been active on Twitter over the past year, just 317 million are active each month and a much smaller number each day. Rival gateways to news and entertainment -- chiefly Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook -- are outpacing it. For example, Facebook has added 319 million monthly users since the end of 2014.
Twitter said the design changes over the past year have made it more attractive to advertisers. And it said restructuring its sales teams to merge those that now separately focus on larger and midsized clients will lower expenses -- after an initial hit of $10 million to $20 million in severance costs. SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst Robert Peck estimated layoffs could produce as much as $100 million in annual savings.
Financial analysts remain skeptical about the ad business, saying the 50 percent decline in Twitter's share price since summer 2015 suggests investors have significantly ratcheted down expectations.
Twitter shares rose 11 cents to close Thursday at $17.40, well below the initial issue price of $26 when the company went public nearly three years ago.
Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at advertising industry research firm eMarketer, said Twitter remains well-positioned to net some of the soaring spending on mobile video ads.
"Twitter's embrace of video advertising is smart," she said.
The company reported third-quarter revenue of $616 million, up 8 percent over the same period last year, and a quarterly loss of $103 million.
"If current trends continue, we think [merging or being acquired] is inevitable, albeit potentially at lower prices and not until 2017," Peck wrote recently.
Dorsey declined to address the acquisition discussions beyond saying the company's board of directors is committed to maximizing long-term value.
Business on 10/28/2016