BTIG Projects Rising Twitter User Numbers, Strong EBITDA

Twitter Inc TWTR reported top- and bottom-line fourth-quarter beats last week to close out the 2018 fiscal year.

Between that and a 10-percent increase in monetizable daily active users, or mDAUs, the social media platform has analyst hearts aflutter.

The Analyst 

BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield maintained a Buy rating on Twitter and raised the price target from $30 to $42.

The Thesis

The social media company far exceeded BTIG’s annual estimates.

“When we moved our price target to $30 last year, we forecasted $2.8 billion of 2018 revenue and Twitter ended up exceeding $3 billion,” Greenfield said in a Tuesday note. 

For the next year, the analyst anticipates strong earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization.

“The key driver of our confidence in Twitter's upside over the coming year is based on its product offering continuing to get better and better,” Greenfield said. “Twitter is iterating the product faster than at any time in its history, making the service more useful to users.”

BTIG expects DAU improvement as Twitter enhances its searchability and news feed relevance. Metric growth should keep advertisers happy, the analyst said. 

“More daily users who are increasingly engaged around content that interests them leads to an attractive platform for advertisers, driving ROI on campaigns." 

Price Action

Twitter shares were trading 2.63-percent higher at $31.18 at the time of publication Wednesday. 

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