Twitter Inc.

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Twitter Inc.

logo
legal form Corporation
ISIN US90184L1026
founding 2006
Seat San Francisco , California , United States
United StatesUnited States 
management Omid Kordestani ( Chairman )
Jack Dorsey ( CEO )
Number of employees 3,638 (2014)
sales $ 1.403 billion (2014)
Branch Software development
Website twitter.com

Twitter Inc. , based in San Francisco, is the listed operator of the micro- blogging service Twitter .

history

Twitter headquarters in San Francisco (2011)

Twitter was originally an internal communication research and development project for employees at the San Francisco podcasting company Odeo, founded in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey , Biz Stone and Evan Williams . It later became known that with Noah Glass, another person was instrumental in founding Twitter. It was Glass who suggested the name "Twitter".

Initially, the technique of Twitter services running on the IBM ThinkPad - Laptop Glass. At that time, when the project was still called Twttr , co-developer was the German contract developer Florian Weber.

In 2006 Twitter became an Obvious product. The service gained popularity very quickly. In March 2007 it won the South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Dorsey, the man behind the concept of Twitter, gave the following humorous speech at the South by Southwest Web Award ceremony: “We would like to say thank you with 140 characters or less. What we have done with this! "

In April 2007, Obvious spun off Twitter as an independent company. Dorsey was CEO until he was replaced by Williams in 2008. In November 2009, during an event at Oxford University, Biz Stone said that going public is being viewed as a way to grow Twitter into a company that will be around for a long time. In October 2010, Williams announced that he was leaving his post as CEO and will be succeeded by Dick Costolo .

It was only in 2011 that Williams emphasized the important role of co-founder Noah Glass, which Glass had during the early product development phase of Twitter together with idea generator Jack Dorsey. Due to disagreements with Noah Glass, Williams had not taken him back into the team after the company was spun off from Odeo under the new company Obvious.

“It's true that @Noah never got enough credit for his early role at Twitter. Also, he came up with the name, which was brilliant. "

- Evan Williams

As of 2012, Twitter had a branch in Berlin. The first head of Germany was Rowan Barnett, who was previously head of the social media department at bild.de, and the former Google manager Thomas de Buhr has been Germany 's head since spring 2014 . In the summer of 2014, a second branch was opened in Hamburg, which, after the Berlin office was closed at the end of 2016, serves as the only German company headquarters.

rating

At the beginning of March 2011, investors offered USD 34.50 per Twitter share at an auction for SharesPost. With just under 224 million shares, this results in a total value of US $ 7.7 billion. In December 2010, on the occasion of a financial injection, experts estimated the company value at around half of this value. At the end of 2011, an investment by the Saudi Arabian billionaire Al-Walid ibn Talal in the short message service became known. The prince provided the Internet company with $ 300 million through his Kingdom Holding and in return received a 3.8 percent stake in a company value now estimated at $ 8 billion.

BlackRock invested $ 80 million in Twitter in January 2013 (making the service about seven percent more valuable than it was in late 2011). Overall, Twitter is now valued at nine billion dollars, write the news agency Reuters and the British "Financial Times", citing insiders.

On November 7, 2013, Twitter Inc. went public. With an issue price of $ 26 per share and a total of 545 million shares, the calculated enterprise value on the issue date was $ 14.17 billion. However, only 12.84% of the shares were issued, for a total of 70 million. The demand was far higher. On the first day of trading, the price rose by over 90 percent and finally closed at 73 percent. The stock closed trading at just under $ 45 and the company value soared to $ 24.59 billion. Compared to Facebook's IPO , the Twitter IPO was a complete success. Facebook had made the mistake of artificially increasing the share value and suffered a significant price drop on the first day of trading.

financing

Twitter Inc. generates sales almost exclusively through advertising. Revenues are particularly high in the US, with 2013 advertising revenues of $ 2.89 per US user, while outside the United States only 34 cents per user was achieved. About 22% of Twitter users are at home in the USA. From 2012 to 2013 sales doubled from $ 316 to $ 665 million. In the overall balance, however, the internet service showed significant losses up to 2013.

The company was initially financed by investors, including Facebook Inc. and the Russian investment company Mail.Ru Group . In early November 2013, the company went public, with proceeds of $ 1.82 billion.

On November 13, 2014, the rating agency Standard & Poor’s Twitter rated it BB-. The company's liabilities were thus classified as a speculative investment (defaults are to be expected if the situation deteriorates) in the so-called junk area.

Shareholders

The largest institutional shareholder of Twitter Inc. is (as of 2015) Fidelity Management , the largest individual shareholders are Evan Williams , Al-Walid ibn Talal (or his Kingdom Holding ), Steve Ballmer (since October 2015) and Jack Dorsey .

Acquisitions

In the course of its global expansion, Twitter Inc. has repeatedly bought smaller companies whose products were integrated into Twitter in a timely manner or which are complementary to the previous strategy:

  • On July 15, 2008, Twitter acquired Summize and integrated it into its website under the subdomain search.twitter.com . Summize was an Internet startup that used the Twitter XMPP stream to allow users to browse Twitter conversations in near real time. At the time of the sale, Summize had six employees, five of whom switched to Twitter. The CEO Jay Verday switched to another project.
  • TweetDeck has been a Twitter subsidiary since May 2012 . The company offers apps for mobile devices that can be used to efficiently manage multiple Twitter profiles. Integration of Facebook is also possible. With the takeover, Twitter strengthens the spread of its platform on mobile devices and prevents the takeover of the popular software by a competitor. TweetDeck has since continued as an independent app alongside the official Twitter apps.
  • BackType , which was bought in July 2011, specialized in evaluating tweets in real time. The company offered a service that provided information about the target group and reach of messages and profiles in social networks. The provider's customers included the New York Times , WordPress and SlideShare . BackType was discontinued after the acquisition by Twitter Inc. and the functions of the platform were incorporated into Twitter's advertising platform for medium and large companies.
  • In January 2012, Summify , based in Vancouver, was acquired. The platform of the same name aggregates news from social networks, similar to Flipboard . In the course of the takeover, the functionality of Summify was reduced to a minimum, the developers of the offer are moving to the headquarters of Twitter Inc. in San Francisco.
  • The blog platform Posterous was bought in March 2012. According to experts, Twitter was primarily targeting the employees of the popular service. In the course of the takeover, it was announced that, regardless of the takeover, Posterous would be retained and further developed as an independent platform. On February 15, 2013, it was announced that the service will end on April 30th.
  • In October 2012, Twitter took over the video portal Vine , even before publication. Short videos, no longer than six seconds, can be shared on Twitter via Vine. Vine came onto the market in January 2013 and initially offered an integration into Facebook , which was later resolved by the operator.
  • On April 11, 2013, the Californian music service We Are Hunted announced on its website that the company had been acquired by Twitter at an unspecified price. On We Are Hunted users could stream newly released songs. The service also created charts, the algorithm partly based on tweets. Just a few days after the takeover, Twitter presented its own offer called #music , which is largely identical to the functionality of We Are Hunted.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c SEC filings - annual report 2015. Twitter Inc., accessed October 6, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Mark Glaser: " Twitter Founders Thrive on Micro-Blogging Constraints " (English) , Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). May 17, 2007. Retrieved November 5, 2008. 
  3. ^ Biz Stone July 13, 2006. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on September 2, 2011 ; accessed on August 26, 2011 (English).
  4. ↑ Nicholas Carlson: " The Real History Of Twitter " (English) , Business Insider, Inc .. April 13, 2011. 
  5. ↑ Evan Williams: Twitter, Inc. ( English ) Obvious. April 16, 2007. Archived from the original on July 29, 2009. Retrieved on May 7, 2008.
  6. ↑ Biz Stone: We Won ( English ) Twitter. March 14, 2007. Retrieved May 7, 2008.
  7. ↑ Adario Strange: " Flickr Document Reveals Origin Of Twitter " (English) . In: Wired News , CondéNet, April 20, 2007. Retrieved November 5, 2008. 
  8. ↑ English “We'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did! "
  9. ↑ http://blog.twitter.com/2007/04incorporating-twitter.html (link not available)
  10. ↑ Claire Cain Miller: Popularity or Income? Two sites Fight It Out (English) , The New York Times. October 20, 2008. Retrieved November 5, 2008. 
  11. ^ Change of boss on Twitter in: Frankfurter Rundschau from October 5, 2010
  12. ↑ Twitter blog: #newtwitterceo . Twitter blog. Retrieved October 6, 2010.
  13. ↑ http://twitter.com/ev/status/58275072011542529
  14. ↑ derwesten.de: Twitter gets its new Germany boss from Bild.de , March 26, 2012, accessed on May 12, 2012
  15. ↑ dpa: Google manager is the new head of Twitter Germany. In: FAZ. April 22, 2014, accessed January 30, 2017 .
  16. ↑ Hanna Grabbe: Twitter now lives in HafenCity. In: The time. August 24, 2014, accessed January 30, 2017 .
  17. ^ Anne-Katrin Schade: Twitter leaves Berlin. In: Gründerszene. March 10, 2017, accessed March 10, 2017 .
  18. ↑ NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung: Twitter worth an estimated $ 7.7 billion , March 5, 2011
  19. ↑ FAZ.NET with Reuters, Bloomberg: Saudi Prince invests in Twitter. In: FAZ.net . December 19, 2011, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  20. ↑ Blackrock entry: Investor values ​​Twitter at nine billion dollars. In: Spiegel Online . January 26, 2013, accessed June 9, 2018 .
  21. ↑ http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/01/25/us-blackrock-twitter-deal-idUKBRE90O18920130125
  22. ↑ NYSE trades Twitter shares for the first time , Andre Borbe, silicon.de, November 7, 2013
  23. ↑ Twitter starts happily - what now?
  24. ↑ 2.3 billion for the IPO of the hotel chain Hilton , Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, December 12, 2013
  25. ↑ https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Ratingagentur-Standard-Poor-s-stuft-Twitter-als-Ramsch-ein-2456957.html
  26. ↑ http://www.wsj.com/articles/steve-ballmer-is-now-one-of-twitters-biggest-shareholders-1445019499
  27. ↑ Michael Arrington: Confirmed: Twitter Acquires Summize Search Engine ( English ) TechCrunch. July 15, 2008. Retrieved November 17, 2008.
  28. ↑ Jens Ihlenfeld: Twitter buys Tweetdeck. In: Golem. May 25, 2011. Retrieved July 26, 2012 .
  29. ↑ Marcel Seer: Twitter wants to buy TweetDeck for 50 million dollars preventively. In: t3n. April 19, 2011, archived from the original on December 4, 2011 ; Retrieved July 26, 2012 .
  30. ↑ Twitter takes over BackType. In: heise Developer. July 6, 2011, accessed July 26, 2012 .
  31. ↑ Sebastien Bonset: Twitter takes over social analytics startup BackType. In: t3n. July 6, 2011, archived from the original on July 31, 2012 ; Retrieved July 26, 2012 .
  32. ↑ Dennie Beneke: Twitter continues to buy its ecosystem: Summify taken over. In: t3n. January 20, 2012, archived from the original on July 31, 2012 ; Retrieved July 26, 2012 .
  33. ↑ Luca Caracciolo: Twitter buys Posterous blogging platform. In: t3n. March 13, 2012, archived from the original on July 17, 2012 ; Retrieved August 12, 2012 .
  34. ↑ Richard Meusers: Twitter buys Posterous blog platform. In: Spiegel Online. March 13, 2012, accessed August 12, 2012 .
  35. ↑ Sachin Agarwal: Posterous will turn off on April 30. In: Posterous. February 15, 2013, archived from the original on February 17, 2013 ; Retrieved February 16, 2013 .
  36. ^ Vine: A new way to share video. In: Twitter Blog. Twitter Inc., January 24, 2013, accessed April 3, 2013 .
  37. ↑ Falk Hedemann: Facebook cuts integration in Twitter's new video app Vine. In: t3n magazine . January 25, 2013, archived from the original on March 6, 2013 ; Retrieved April 3, 2013 .
  38. ↑ Twitter takes over the Californian music service ( German ) heise online. April 12, 2013. Retrieved April 13, 2013.
  39. ↑ Andreas Floemer: Twitter Music starts today - including iOS app. In: t3n magazine . April 18, 2013, archived from the original on April 20, 2013 ; Retrieved April 18, 2013 .