Cloud communications firm Twilio topped revenue expectations for the fourth quarter, reporting $204 million in total revenue for the quarter, and reported non-GAAP income of 4 cents a share. Shares were down in after-hours trading. Twilio (TWLO) - Get Report shares were down roughly 3.3% at $111.50 in after-hours trading after the company topped fourth-quarter revenue estimates but fell flat on earnings. The cloud communications firm reported total revenue of $204.3 million for the December quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of 77%. It had previously guided for total revenue between $183 million and $185 million. Twilio reported non-GAAP income per share of 4 cents, while analysts polled by FactSet had been expecting earnings per share between 3 cents and 10 cents a share. "The power of our platform model was evident in our results once again, as Q4's exceptional results capped off an incredible 2018," said Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson in a press release. Twilio builds communication-as-a-service APIs and other tools, which help businesses combine various communication and customer services, including phone, videoconference and SMS, into one system. This month, Twilio closed its acquisition of SendGrid, an email delivery service, which brings email into its portfolio. The company's fourth quarter results continue a trend of strong revenue growth at Twilio: Its total revenue for the full year 2018 was $650.1 million, up 63% from the previous year. Among the critiques of Twilio's stock, however, is that its revenue is too reliant on certain marquee customers like Uber, which at one point made up 20% of its revenue. In an interview on Tuesday with Real Money, TheStreet's premium site for active investors, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson and COO George Hu discussed Twilio's recent progress in breaking out of a tech and app-heavy customer base. ""We've talked a lot about engaging new customers and diversifying our customer base...we now have customers like E*Trade (ETFC) - Get Report , U-Haul and more," Hu said. Bullish analysts point to Twilio's positioning in the growing cloud services market as a predictor of future growth in the stock. For the March quarter, Twilio guided for total revenue between $222 million and $225 million. For the full year 2019, it guided for revenue between $1.065 billion and $1.077 billion, and non-GAAP net income per share between $.08 and $.11. "They're really the foundation that are enabling real time communication between both the business, customers, and clients," said AAP portfolio analyst Jeff Marks on a call with investors in January. Twilio's stock is up roughly 33% since the beginning of this year. It closed at $115.29 a share ahead of the report.<doc-sep>Twilio (NYSE:TWLO) Q4 2018 Earnings Conference Call Feb. 12, 2019 5:00 p.m. ET Contents: Prepared Remarks Questions and Answers Call Participants See all our earnings call transcripts . Prepared Remarks: Operator Good afternoon, and welcome to Twilio's Q4 2018 earnings conference call. My name is Gigi, and I will be your operator for today's call. [Operator instructions] I would now turn the call over to Greg Kleiner, vice president of investor relations and treasurer. Mr. Kleiner, you may begin. Greg Kleiner -- Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Twilio's fourth-quarter and year-end 2018 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Jeff Lawson, our co-founder and CEO; Sameer Dholakia; the CEO of our Twilio SendGrid unit; George Hu, our COO; and Khozema Shipchandler, our CFO. The primary purpose of today's call is to provide you with information regarding our 2018 fourth-quarter and full-year performance in addition to our financial outlook for our 2019 first quarter and full year. Some of our discussions and responses to your questions may contain forward-looking statements, including but not limited to, statements regarding our future performance, including our financial outlook, which includes SendGrid with the closing date of February 1st onwards; the potential benefits of our acquisition of SendGrid; impacts and expected results from changes in our relationship with our larger customers; our market opportunity and market trends; the growth of our customer base; customer adoption of our products; our momentum; the benefits of our business model; our delivery of new products or product features; and our ability to execute on our vision. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Should any of these risks or uncertainties materialize or should any of our assumptions, as outlined in our earnings release and the documents referred to in that release, prove to be incorrect, actual company results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements. A discussion of the risks and uncertainties related to our business is contained in our most recent Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on November 8, 2018 and our remarks during today's discussion should be considered to incorporate this information by reference. Forward-looking statements represent our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during this call to reflect events or circumstances after today or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events except as required by law. Also during this call, we may present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are available in our earnings release, which we issued a short time ago. We encourage you to read our earnings release as it contains important information about GAAP and non-GAAP results, as well as the reasons why we present guidance for our non-GAAP financial measures of income from operations and net income per share but not the comparable GAAP measures. The earnings release is available on the Investor Relations page of our website and as part of a Form 8-K furnished to the SEC. Finally, at times in our prepared comments or in response to your questions, we may offer incremental metrics to provide greater insight into the dynamics of our business or our quarterly or annual results. Please be advised that this additional detail may be one-time in nature and we may or may not provide an update in the future on these metrics. I encourage you to visit our Investor Relations website at investors.twilio.com to access our earnings release, periodic SEC reports, a webcast replay of today's call or to learn more about Twilio. I'll now turn the call over to Jeff. Jeff Lawson -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Thank you, Greg. Welcome, everybody, to this quarter's call. I'd like to start by welcoming all of the SendGrid folks, now full-fledged Twilions to the family. We're all incredibly excited to build a future together with all of you. We had an exceptional Q4 that capped off an incredible year for Twilio. I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the Twilions around the world for all of their incredible accomplishments in 2018, including our R&D teams, moving our innovation forward while scaling our services reliably, as well as our sales and marketing teams, who brought on so many new customers in the year and made our customers widely successful by consistently wearing our customers' shoes, and our G&A teams who helped support the rapid growth of our business; and of course, to all of the Twilions and SendGrid folks who helped make the largest acquisition in the history of our company possible. Thank you. All of your hard work showed again in Q4. Our core business continued to power strong revenue growth, amplified by a few one-time events, which Khozema will go into later. Both our core products, voice and messaging, continue to generate significant growth and drive our business. And our engagement platform strategy is working well. It's changing the types of conversations we're having with customers and producing early success with products like Flex. And we've proven our ability to augment our developer-led go-to-market model with a significant sales motion, driving deeper, more strategic relationships with our existing customers and successfully acquiring new customers. But we're just getting started. From our perspective, we're at the early stages of a complete transformation of communications from its legacy based on physical networks to its future based on software. And in that transition, we see the opportunity to help every company elevate their digital engagement strategy with their customers. Our developer-first go to market is an efficient way to reach this broad range of companies. And with our platform business model, we see opportunities to power a tremendous range of applications for our customers across almost every customer touch point. And as a platform, we get a front-row seat to learn the major business problems that customers are looking to solve. This view drives our product roadmap, resulting in products like Flex. That's why we plan to continue to invest across the company to support elevated growth over an extended period of time rather than taking profits in the short term. Our product priorities coming into 2019 remain consistent with what we've discussed last 2018 but updated to reflect the progress we've made throughout the last year. We are focused on elevating Twilio into the world's leading customer engagement platform and expanding our position as the developers' first choice for communications. Our engagement platform vision, backed up by the go-to-market team George's organization has been building, is up-leveling our interactions with customers and prospects alike. For those who are able to attend SIGNAL last year, I hope you noticed the changes from the customer logos to the discussions to the sessions and more. And from a product point of view, the launch of Flex was just the first step of this evolution. The customer reaction to Flex has been tremendous but our journey has just begun. Empowering developers to build a future has long been the foundation of Twilio, and we will continue our devotion to serving their needs. Obviously, adding email to the platform is heart of this strategy. But it's also expanding our efforts to meet developers where they are around the world, making further improvements for council and developer experience and launching a new version of TwilioQuest, our interactive learning system and more. There are well over four million registered developer accounts across the combined base of Twilio and SendGrid, and we look forward to powering their innovation in the future. To help drive our efforts to scale the company, we've added to our executive team recently by welcoming Chee Chew as our chief product officer. Chee has spent more than 25 years working at some of the world's leading technology companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Most recently, Chee was the vice president of Consumer Engagement at Amazon, responsible for its core shopping experience on the web and mobile apps. Prior to Amazon, Chee was the vice president of Engineering for Google, responsible for their real-time communications efforts, including Google Voice and Google Hangouts. His experience across the scope of customer engagement and software development will serve him well in his new role at Twilio. We also added Donna Dubinsky, a technology industry pioneer, to our board. Donna is a serial entrepreneur, best known for her role as CEO of both Palm and Handspring, innovators who created the first successful handheld computers and smartphones. Earlier in her career, Donna spent 10 years in sales, sales support and logistics at Apple and at Claris, an Apple software subsidiary. Donna is current the CEO of Numenta, where she is focus on reverse engineering the neocortex and applying that knowledge in the creation of machine intelligence. Her experience building leading technology companies will provide valuable insights to our board discussions. So to wrap up, we continue to put the right pieces in place to fulfill our mission to fuel the future of communications. As you can see by our results, voice and messaging remain incredibly vibrant markets, and we're thrilled now to add email to the picture. Between voice, messaging and now email, we have the full breadth of ubiquitously used channels for customer engagement. And the reaction from customers, prospects and developers since our announcement of the SendGrid acquisition has been great. Together, we have more than 140,000 customer accounts, giving us even more visibility into the big, unsolved problems that we can help our customers to solve. We feel that we have the opportunity to disrupt a massive market and are uniquely positioned to do so, collapsing the industry that has been fragmented between carriers, hardware, software and operators. Our platform of flexible building blocks is much more powerful to customers, allowing them to both reinvent existing use cases and create entirely new ones. Learning from our customers who are building on the core components of our platform, now including email as well, will help inform this future. This is just the beginning, and we are investing to accelerate our engagement platform vision for our customers. Now in addition to adding Chee and Donna to the leadership of Twilio, we also added another fantastic executive to the team, Sameer Dholakia, the CEO of SendGrid. So Sameer, let me turn the call over to you for some thoughts on our future together. Sameer Dholakia -- Chief Executive Officer Thanks, Jeff, and I'm so proud to be joining the leadership team and this extraordinary company. One of most important aspects of making combinations like this successful is the people dimension and how the individuals feel about the cultural fit and shared values between the two companies. And I can say, speaking for all of the SendGrid folks, we are incredibly excited to work arm in arm with our new team mates. While we won't to be reporting our stand-alone SendGrid Q4 results in full detail, I'm happy to report that we had another strong quarter of growth across the business, producing revenue of $41 million. More importantly, we've been hard at work planning for our future together. One of the many reasons that led us down this acquisition path is the conversations we've had over the years with customers looking to create an integrated communications platform, serving the full scope of their customer engagement requirements. We've had a number of exciting discussions with customers and prospects about this potential once their platforms are combined. A great example of this is a Fortune 100 retailer who spoke at our opening kick-off in January. They happen to be a joint customer of both companies and foresee a future where Twilio is the foundation of their customer engagement platform across all channels, letting their end customers choose their preferred method of communication for every interaction. It's clear to me that both companies are kindred spirits in so many ways. We have an opportunity to help companies around the world to engage with their end customers in a whole new way. To all of the former SendGrid shareholders who have supported us thus far in our journey, thank you. Thank you for your confidence in us along the way.<doc-sep>
Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Hedge funds often measure their investments in minutes, not decades; but for Anchorage Capital Group, its long-held stake in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. is proving that patience can also be profitable.The New York-based money manager stands to make roughly $2 billion on its investment in the film and TV producer, one that began almost 11 years ago with MGM in bankruptcy court. Amazon.com Inc. agreed to buy the company for $8.45 billion Wednesday, a price that includes just under $2 billion in debt.The deal is in many ways a vindication for Kevin Ulrich, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. trader who co-founded Anchorage in 2003 and was part of a group of distressed debt investors that took control of MGM as it went through the restructuring process. In recent years the stake looked to be an albatross for the fund, one that came with significant drama in its own right.Ulrich brought in and later fired a high-profile chief executive officer, resisted efforts by activist investor Carl Icahn to take control, and held out for a bigger payday after years of considering various exit strategies. By selling now, as demand for media content from entertainment and technology companies alike is booming, he’s proving his long-held faith in the investment was justified.“There was a lot of maneuvering, a lot of financial engineering,” said Steven Azarbad, chief investment officer at New York’s Maglan Capital, an MGM investor who sold his shares four years ago. “But they’ve done great.”A representative for Anchorage declined to comment.When Ulrich first invested in MGM, he was new to Hollywood. He helped pick Gary Barber, a South African-born producer of films such as “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” as chief executive officer of the storied but debt-laden studio. Barber brought to the table a shrewd business sense, and connections into a world Ulrich long admired from afar.Barber shepherded MGM’s development of “The Hobbit” franchise, a co-production with Warner Bros., that became a global smash hit. He helmed the release of the James Bond film, “Skyfall,” which generated over $1 billion at the box office, and he revived the studio’s work in television. Barber also brokered a deal to bring on TV super producer Mark Burnett, which gave MGM access to reality show hits like “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” but would ultimately become personally troublesome.In 2012 the company bought back Icahn’s stock for $590 million. It also filed paperwork for a possible public offering of shares, and considered other options, such as a sale.As Barber boosted MGM’s film and TV pipeline, Ulrich was increasingly entranced by the allure of Hollywood. He became a regular at movie premieres in Los Angeles and New York, and frequented industry parties in the Hamptons and elsewhere. He became active in creative decisions after becoming chair of MGM’s board -- somewhat unusual for a non-executive lacking Hollywood experience -- even getting involved with business granularities like casting.Growing RiftBut over the following years a rift began to open up between Barber and Ulrich. When it was time to renew Barber’s contract in 2017, Ulrich conducted an extensive search for a new CEO. When it ended, he ultimately chose to sign Barber to a new five-year deal. Yet around the same time, the pair split on whether to sell the company, with Ulrich wanting to hang on to the studio and Barber saying it was time to find a buyer.The company would hold buyout talks with Apple Inc. as well as Chinese investors that would ultimately prove fruitless.Only months after renewing Barber’s deal, Ulrich fired him. The shock departure meant the company had to pay Barber for five years of salary and buy out his equity, a package totaling $260 million. In the three years since Barber left, Ulrich hasn’t replaced him, instead operating an “office of the chief executive officer,” comprised of various people that each have their personal vision for MGM.Barber declined to comment via his spokesperson.Bounce BackAfter the initial period of success following the restructuring, the gains became harder to come by, as they did in Anchorage’s overall credit-focused business. Two senior managers left the firm in January 2020, and another in November. Anchorage’s flagship strategy, with about $8.5 billion under management, returned just 0.6% in 2018, 1.5% in 2019 and 4.4% in 2020, according to people familiar with the matter.In December, MGM hired investment bankers for a potential sale.MGM only released one film in theaters in 2020.