Investors Shrug At Weibo's 161% Jump In Q1 Sales, Instead Focus On Q2 Outlook

Shares of Weibo WB have tumbled more than eight percent in Wednesday's after-hours trading session as the company's first-quarter bottom-line figure beat but guidance looked light. The stock last traded at $19.07, down about six percent from the close. The company said quarterly net revenue surged a jaw-dropping 161 percent year over year to $67.5 million. Analysts had been expecting sales to come in around $67.45 million. Weibo noted sales from the Advertising and Marketing segment were up 176 percent to $51.9 million. The GAAP loss totaled $0.31 per share while the adjusted (non-GAAP) loss totaled $0.03 per share. A consensus of analyst's estimates suggested Weibo would report a quarterly loss of $0.05 per share. The company's CEO Gaofei Wang said, "We are delighted to report robust traffic and revenue growth in the first quarter of 2014. During the first quarter, we leveraged the chains of media events and fine-tuned our operations and products to improve social information distribution and discovery, resulting in Weibo's MAU growing 11% sequentially and further solidifying Weibo as a leading social media in China." Weibo gave a look into the second quarter in its press release: sales should be in the range of $74 to $76 million, below the current analyst estimate of $77.85 million.