Today was not a good day for tech stocks.
Universally, tech stocks crashed today alongside everything else, erasing billions in value across the board, as part of a bad day overall for the market. There’s not a whole lot of confidence throughout the market, but tech — even bellwethers like Apple — weren’t safe today. That being said, some stocks got particularly hammered as part of a continued downward trend — like Fitbit, which is trying to get into the smartwatch market, and GoPro, which just laid off a ton of people.
This is not a good sign for technology companies, which need their stocks to perform well if they’re going to continue attracting talent with compensation packages that also include shares and keep activist investors off their backs. For some of the companies seeing poor performance lately, a continuously dropping stock price — like in the case of Twitter or Fitbit — can make those companies attractive acquisition targets.
Here’s how a couple of stocks fared:
- Square: Down 5.08%
- GoPro: Down 8.17%
- Box: Down 4.95%
- Fitbit: Down 4.77%
- Atlassian: Down 6.15%
- Twitter: Down 5.58%
- Facebook: Down 3.44%
- Apple: Down 2.48%
- Alphabet: Down 2.84%
And that’s just to name a few. But the standout here is clearly Twitter, which has had a continued march south for the past month or so, bringing it to continuous all-time lows. Twitter is facing a lot of challenges with its core business. While its revenue growth doesn’t seem to be a massive problem for the company, it has to grow its user base in order to continue expanding its business — something it’s had serious problems with for some time.
[graphiq id=”fWdCYt77t8F” title=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 30 Days” width=”600″ height=”490″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/fWdCYt77t8F” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/445483/Twitter-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 30 Days | FindTheCompany”]
Does this make Twitter look like a healthy target for a larger company to snap up? Perhaps. Any larger company, by buying Twitter, would be picking a relatively healthy advertising business and a large platform with a huge reach beyond monthly active users.
For all of these companies, fluctuations with the rest of the market can be a common occurrence. But that doesn’t make it any less significant for the employees at those companies carefully paying attention to how their net worth — a chunk of which is often locked up in shares — flows (this time south) with their employer’s worth in the public market’s eyes.