Twitter's India chief exit adds to company's growth woes

Twitter's India chief exit adds to company's growth woes
The San Francisco based company had once upon a time boasted of its 320 million global user base which had declined in the last three months of 2015 to 305 million active users. Image Source: Reuters
Updated: Tue, Nov 01, 2016
03:31 pm
Mumbai, ZeeBiz WebDesk
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Twitter's one of the most important markets--India--has added to its woes with its chief Rishi Jaitly deciding to leave the NYSE listed social network platform.

Rishi Jaitly, Twitter's India head has resigned to follow a different career path. This has come after the company cut down its workforce by 9% last week. It has consistently failed to increase its user addition growth rate. Moreover, Twitter's bid to find a buyer came a cropper with Disney backing out last month. 

The San Francisco based company had once upon a time boasted of its 320 million global user base which had declined in the last three months of 2015 to 305 million active users, a report by Recode said.

It had not added any new users in that quarter either which was certainly a first for the company since its inception, the report added.

Twitter's current user-base stands at 323 million. 

Statista estimated its user base to drop to 11.1% this year from 14.3% in the previous year and only decline further in the coming years.

Statistic: Annual Twitter user growth rate worldwide from 2014 to 2019 | Statista
Find more statistics at Statista

But Twitter was hopeful and invested in one of its biggest markets –India that constituted 23.2 million diverse users out of its current user-base. 

Despite efforts, Twitter was forced to look out for buyers and had received intentions of bidding from top technology companies like Google, Salesforce, Apple and Disney.

However none of them followed through.

In early October, Walt Disney withdrew its bids partly because of the fear of damaging its brand over ‘uncivil forms of communication’ on the site, a report by Bloomberg said.

With a platform that breeds anonymity, Twitter faced criticism over abusive comments being thrown around on the site. People are at liberty not to use their real names and so racist, sexist and anti-Semitic internet “trolls” have thrived on the platform.

The company has pledged to become more serious about the issue in the last year, working on solutions such as letting people block keywords but still lost out on users due to its late approach to technological solutions to harassment.

Just last month, Salesforce, a provider of cloud computing software for businesses, withdrew its bid of buying the micro-blogging platform. 

Last week, Twitter decided to shut down 'Vine’-- a six second video platform after more than half of its top 1% users stopped posting, Business Insider said.

The company posted revenues of $616 million for the third quarter (calendar year), which was 8% higher from a year ago period.

Twitter was listed in 2013 on the New York Stock Exchange at $26 per share and went on to reach a high of $74 within a month of trading, but since then the value has steadily plunged. 

Twitter's current stock price is $17.95 per share, up 1.64% on NYSE.

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