Twitter UK reported pre-tax profit of £2.55m for 2017, down 4% year on year, according to its latest financial disclosure published yesterday.
Reported post-tax profit for the year ending 31 December 2017 was £150,000, down 92% from £1.84m in 2016, while turnover was down by 2.5% year on year to £77.42m.
Staff in the UK fell to 174 (from 187 in 2016), while its wage bill shrank by just under £1m to £17.36m last year. This followed Twitter’s global cost-cutting drive, in which the UK division ran up restructuring costs of £1.4m in 2016 (down to zero in 2017).
Twitter did not disclose ad revenue by geographical market because, it said, this would “be seriously prejudicial to the interests of the company”.
The platform also suffered last year from a lack of big, live events that have become important to its commercial performance. In 2016, these included the Olympic Games and the Euro 2016 football tournament.
The social media company’s global revenue fell for the first time in its 10-year history last year to $2.44bn (£1.88bn). Twitter has struggled to grow its user base in recent years, while Google and Facebook have taken the lion’s share of digital ad growth.
The vast majority of Twitter’s turnover is from ad revenue, but it also makes money from “design, development and support services”.
Twitter’s shares fell by more than 20% in July, when it reported a decline in monthly active users during its second-quarter earnings call. This was despite reporting a 23% year-in-year increase in ad revenue to $601m for the second quarter, following similar gains for the first quarter.
