They're also consistently losing money. Even if you strip out half their capital expenditure or 3/4 of their R&D from their FY 2014 numbers, they would still lose money.
Let's say they can eventually run a 20% net income margin. This would turn their 2014 revenues into $280MM of earnings. Using the S&P 500's 21x P/E ratio, this values the business at $6bn. That's 70% less than their current market cap. And they don't appear close to running a positive margin, let alone 20%, on their 2014 numbers.
Twitter could be very profitable. They're running the business extraordinarily poorly. They have 36% of the head count of Facebook, with 12% the revenue.
They're at $1.77b in sales the last four quarters. At the clip they're growing sales, they could certainly get to $3.5 billion in two years. If they ran the business properly, instead of pretending they're Facebook, they could generate $700 to $800 million in profit (purely in my opinion) two years from now. They'd get a rich valuation (Facebook is currently 90 times earnings); even half the valuation of Facebook would get them to $30 billion in market value two years from now, backed with real earnings.
They're also consistently losing money. Even if you strip out half their capital expenditure or 3/4 of their R&D from their FY 2014 numbers, they would still lose money.
Let's say they can eventually run a 20% net income margin. This would turn their 2014 revenues into $280MM of earnings. Using the S&P 500's 21x P/E ratio, this values the business at $6bn. That's 70% less than their current market cap. And they don't appear close to running a positive margin, let alone 20%, on their 2014 numbers.