Twitter成本会计阴云越变越浓

    Twitter的“不利因素”正在变得越来越不利。

    大约十年前科技股火热、市场泡沫不断膨胀的时候，很多公司开始发明创造，搞出了一些公布利润的新方式。一些评论人士将这些精心选择的、算不上净利润的数字称为“剔除一切不利因素的收益”（EBBS）。其他人调侃称，“不利因素”很好地总结了这一数据。

    这样的嘲讽并没有让这种做法消失，最近似乎反而有卷土重来之势。上周二下午公布业绩的Twitter公司表示，它今年前三个月经调整息税折摊前利润（即该公司的“剔除一切不利因素的收益”）为3,700万美元。这个数字较2013年同期的1,170万美元有大幅增加。

    但上年同期，据官方会计准则计算的Twitter亏损额为2,700万美元，与当期经调整息税折摊前利润的差额略低于4,000万美元。今年第一季度，Twitter公布的收益数字与它引导投资者予以认可的、经调整收益数字之间的差距已增长至1.68亿美元。

    发布经调整收益数据的理由是，这些数字剔除了一次性和非现金支出。各家公司表示，这些支出并不是真实或常规成本，如果你想知道公司“真正”赚了多少钱，这些成本应当忽略不计。

    Twitter告诉投资者称，2013年第一季度需要投资者忽略的成本约占总成本的三分之一。但这个比例最近一直在增长。其中有些增长是预料之中的。Twitter的“经调整息税折摊前利润”剔除了股票期权成本。Twitter去年11月上市产生了4.33亿美元的一大笔一次性费用，用于支付上市前发行的股票期权。因此，Twitter的2013年第四季度“不利因素”（即公司一直告诉投资者应予以忽略的那些成本）已经增长至总成本的近四分之三。

    不过，Twitter的遗留股票期权费用在2014年第一季度有所下降。但Twitter从经调整息税折摊前利润中剔除的成本占比基本没有下降，剔除的成本包括折旧、利息和“其他成本”。今年第一季度，Twitter希望投资者将这个利润数字视为它的真实利润，剔除成本比例高达68%。

    2014年第一季度，Twitter的收入仅较上年同期增长了3%。如此微小的增长幅度令投资者大失所望，Twitter股价也因此出现了下跌。但如果你相信Twitter的会计数据，真实支出较前一季度下降近60%。因此，若按照这家公司推荐的利润指标，它的利润将飙升216%。投资者本应欢呼雀跃。令人欣慰的是，投资者没有这么做。

    “如果投资者将所有这些费用都视为是现金支出，投资者本应欢呼，”专业期刊《分析师会计观察》（The Analyst's Accounting Observer）的出版人杰克•切谢尔斯基说。“这是经营业务的固定成本，但他们试图让你忽略这些。”只要可能，它们会继续这么做，但这不是好的经济算法。”

    投资者或许也已经开始得出相同的结论。（财富中文网）

    The bad stuff at Twitter is getting worse.

    About a decade ago, when tech companies were hot and the bubble was expanding, a number of companies started to invent new ways to report profits. Some commentators dubbed those cherry-picked not-so-bottom-lines "earnings before bad stuff," or EBBS. Others snickered that the last two letters of that acronym pretty much summed the figures up.

    That derision didn't make the practice go away and, recently, it has staged a comeback. Twitter (TWTR), which reported results on Tuesday afternoon, said it generated $37 million in adjusted Ebitda -- its version of EBBS -- in the first three months of this year. That was up from $11.7 million in the same period in 2013.

    A year ago, though, the spread between what Twitter lost under the official accounting rules -- $27 million -- and adjusted Ebitda, was just under $40 million. In this year's first quarter, the gap between its reported results and its adjusted number it has been steering investors to grew to $168 million.

    The justification for reporting adjusted earnings numbers is that they exclude one-time and non-cash expenses. Companies say these are not real, or regular, costs and should be ignored if you want to know how much the company really made.

    For the first quarter of 2013, Twitter told investors to ignore about a third of its total costs. But that percentage has been growing recently. Some of the jump was expected. Twitter's adjusted Ebitda excludes the cost of stock options. Twitter went public last November, which triggered a large one-time expense -- $433 million -- to pay for stock options that it had issued before it went public. As a result, in the fourth quarter of 2013, Twitter's bad stuff, the costs it was telling investors they should ignore, had grown to nearly three-quarters of its total expenses.

    Twitter's legacy stock options expense, though, shrunk in the first quarter of 2014. But the percentage of costs that Twitter is excluding from its preferred measure of earnings, which also includes depreciation, interest, and "other costs," has barely dropped. In the first quarter of this year, the bottom line number that Twitter wanted investors to view as its true profits excluded 68% of its costs.

    Twitter's revenue rose just 3% in the first quarter from the last three months of the year. That small increase disappointed investors, and Twitter's stock fell. But if you believe Twitter's accounting, its real expenses dropped by nearly 60% from the quarter before. And as a result the company's preferred measure of profits soared, up 216%. Investors should have rejoiced. Admirably, they didn't.

    "If Twitter was reporting all that stuff as a cash expense, people would scream about it," says Jack Ciesielski, the publisher of The Analyst's Accounting Observer. "It's a fixed cost of doing business, and they are trying to tell you to ignore it. And they are going to do it as long as they can, but it's not good economics."

    Investors may be starting to reach the same conclusion.