????Twitter的“不利因素”正在變得越來越不利。

????大約十年前科技股火熱、市場泡沫不斷膨脹的時候，很多公司開始發明創造，搞出了一些公布利潤的新方式。一些評論人士將這些精心選擇的、算不上凈利潤的數字稱為“剔除一切不利因素的收益”（EBBS）。其他人調侃稱，“不利因素”很好地總結了這一數據。

????這樣的嘲諷并沒有讓這種做法消失，最近似乎反而有卷土重來之勢。上周二下午公布業績的Twitter公司表示，它今年前三個月經調整息稅折攤前利潤（即該公司的“剔除一切不利因素的收益”）為3,700萬美元。這個數字較2013年同期的1,170萬美元有大幅增加。

????但上年同期，據官方會計準則計算的Twitter虧損額為2,700萬美元，與當期經調整息稅折攤前利潤的差額略低于4,000萬美元。今年第一季度，Twitter公布的收益數字與它引導投資者予以認可的、經調整收益數字之間的差距已增長至1.68億美元。

????發布經調整收益數據的理由是，這些數字剔除了一次性和非現金支出。各家公司表示，這些支出并不是真實或常規成本，如果你想知道公司“真正”賺了多少錢，這些成本應當忽略不計。

????Twitter告訴投資者稱，2013年第一季度需要投資者忽略的成本約占總成本的三分之一。但這個比例最近一直在增長。其中有些增長是預料之中的。Twitter的“經調整息稅折攤前利潤”剔除了股票期權成本。Twitter去年11月上市產生了4.33億美元的一大筆一次性費用，用于支付上市前發行的股票期權。因此，Twitter的2013年第四季度“不利因素”（即公司一直告訴投資者應予以忽略的那些成本）已經增長至總成本的近四分之三。

????不過，Twitter的遺留股票期權費用在2014年第一季度有所下降。但Twitter從經調整息稅折攤前利潤中剔除的成本占比基本沒有下降，剔除的成本包括折舊、利息和“其他成本”。今年第一季度，Twitter希望投資者將這個利潤數字視為它的真實利潤，剔除成本比例高達68%。

????2014年第一季度，Twitter的收入僅較上年同期增長了3%。如此微小的增長幅度令投資者大失所望，Twitter股價也因此出現了下跌。但如果你相信Twitter的會計數據，真實支出較前一季度下降近60%。因此，若按照這家公司推薦的利潤指標，它的利潤將飆升216%。投資者本應歡呼雀躍。令人欣慰的是，投資者沒有這么做。

????“如果投資者將所有這些費用都視為是現金支出，投資者本應歡呼，”專業期刊《分析師會計觀察》（The Analyst's Accounting Observer）的出版人杰克?切謝爾斯基說。“這是經營業務的固定成本，但他們試圖讓你忽略這些。”只要可能，它們會繼續這么做，但這不是好的經濟算法。”

????投資者或許也已經開始得出相同的結論。（財富中文網）

????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.