Twitter CEO Gives Up Compensation, Board Member to Quit

Twitter, Inc.’s TWTR regulatory filing on Friday showed that co-founder and present CEO Jack Dorsey has again forfeited direct compensation from the company.

Dorsey followed the footsteps of Facebook, Inc. FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet Inc. GOOGL CEO Larry Page. Both of them took mere $1 as their salaries.

However, there has been a reduction in the total compensation of Dorsey. Per the regulatory filing, his total compensation, excluding salary, bonus and stock and option awards, was $56,551 in 2016, considerably lower than $68,506 in 2015.

Twitter, Inc. Price and Consensus

Twitter, Inc. Price and Consensus | Twitter, Inc. Quote

Notably, Anthony Noto, the current COO and CFO of the company received a compensation package of $23.8 million in 2016 compared with $401,281 in 2015. Noto’s additional responsibilities as COO have earned him a hefty compensation this year. After Adam Bain’s departure last year, Noto took on the additional role of the COO.

In a separate development, Peter Fenton, a board member since 2009, will not be contesting in re-elections and will leave Twitter in May after the company’s annual meet.

We note that Twitter has underperformed the Zacks Internet Software industry in the last one year. While the stock lost 13.4%, the industry witnessed a gain of 11%.

Sluggish user growth, declining revenue growth rate, profitability issues, exodus of top level employees and the trolling menace have caused bloodbath on the trading front. Steep competition from the likes of Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram is also concerning. Also, Twitter’s ad revenues are expected to decline from $1.36 billion in 2016 to $1.30 billion in 2017. The figure is expected to remain flat in 2018 and increase slightly to $1.31 billion in 2019. Twitter’s mobile ad revenue market share is anticipated to decline from 2.6% in 2016 to 1.4% in 2019. In comparison, Snap’s share will increase rapidly from 0.6% to 2.7% in the same period.

Focus on live and user-friendly changes to the platform, though headed in the right direction, have not yet yielded the desired results. 

Twitter currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Key Picks

A better-ranked stock in the broader technology space is Square, Inc. SQ, sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Notably, Square’s projected long-term growth rate is 22.5%.

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