26thJanuary 2016

Twitter has been in a precarious situation for some time. Although it is still valued at a very healthy $16 billion, this has plummeted from last year when this figure was upwards of $35 billion. The microblogging site has struggled over the years despite it's staggering popularity and famously has found difficulty in turning a profit. Things have just gone from bad to worse, however; five of their top executives left overnight. Are dark clouds forming in the twittersphere?

It was late on Sunday night that Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, confirmed that four of the company's top executives were on their way out of the company. On top of this, the head of Vine (Twitter's video sharing service) is also leaving to rejoin Google to work on VR. The four executives leaving Twitter are Kevin Weil (head of product); Katie Jacobs Stanton (head of media); Alex Roetter (head of engineering); and Skip Schipper (head of HR).

In the blog post detailing these resignations, Dorsey stated that the four will be taking some 'well-deserved time off', but the actual reasons for the departures were left quite unclear although there is speculation that some were asked to leave and some left of their own accord. However, it is hard to look past the tumbling share price as the key reason here - Twitter is currently trading at roughly half of its IPO.

This dramatic fall in share price has been attributed to sluggish global growth. The site, which has over 300 million users, had its slowest ever user growth in 2015 and was recently overtaken by Instagram which surged past 400 million users worldwide last year. This faltering in the markets has not been for lack of trying, since taking over as CEO of Twitter in mid-2015 Dorsey implemented a number of ideas intended to boost investor confidence. Last October the CEO fired around 8 percent of Twitter's workforce and brought in new features like Twitter Moments in an attempt to stimulate user growth.

Even with Twitter faltering on the market and its stagnating user growth, the sheer size and popularity of the service itself makes it extremely unlikely it will simply shut up shop like so many tech startups before it. It was only last summer that murmurs of a takeover began to materialise and, as Re/Code report - the rumours are circling once more. What happens next is anyone's guess.

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Interquest Group plc issued this content on 26 January 2016 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 26 January 2016 11:39:10 UTC

Original Document: http://www.interquestgroup.com/corporate/news/the-great-twitter-exodus-of-2016