In the post-IPO market, Twitter is sucking air. At least it isn’t alone. Alibaba also set a record low today. After repeated quarterly reports detailing slowing, anemic user growth, shares in Twitter today reached a new nadir: the firm’s IPO price.
Twitter went public at $26 per share. It skyrocketed from that dollar point, eventually managing a $39.93 billion market capitalization in the closing days of 2013.
Since then, the company has struggled to prove to the investing community that it can grow its core audience at a respectable pace. While Twitter has generally performed well on financial metrics, it has struggled on the front lines, and the manner in which it might grow its user base more rapidly has long been a parlor game in Silicon Valley.
Closing at $26, Twitter traded below its IPO price during the day. The $30 mark for Twitter equity is generally seen as a trigger point, perhaps both internally and externally. If you are familiar with the annals of public share prices, the $30 mark is Twitter’s Microsoft $40, in other words.
Twitter’s all-time high was $73.71 per share, nearly three times its current value. Its shares have fallen more than 25 percent in recent months, and the company’s public equity is down over 46 percent from its 52-week high of $55.99, a record set in October of 2014.
Today’s selloff followed the announcement of a major overhaul for Twitter’s mobile advertising platform which it has rebranded as the “Twitter Audience Platform.” The revamp aims to make it easier for advertisers to push users toward their video content through custom Promoted Tweets.
The social firm was not alone in taking a hard one to the chin today, as it was a tough day for tech stocks more broadly: Netflix plunged 7.8 percent; Facebook fell 5 percent; and LinkedIn dropped 4.3 percent. On the upper-end, Apple, Google and Microsoft each fell around 2 percent.
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