Groupon's fourth quarter earnings appear to have been the last straw for CEO Andrew Mason, who was ousted from his post on Thursday.
Mason's dismissal came the morning after the company reported its results, so there's an obvious causation. But how bad was Groupon's 4Q? As this chart from Statista shows, there's a case to be made that the quarter wasn't that bad. In particular, the company seems to have made real progress lowering its marketing expenses as a proportion of revenues. However, the bottom line was that the company returned to unprofitablity.
There's more to it than that, though. Groupon was projecting lower revenues for its first quarter than Wall Street had been expecting and the company's operating cash flow fell 61% year over year.
All of this managed to spook investors -- Groupon's stock fell as much as 27% after it announced those 4Q numbers.
Whatever Mason's strengths as a thinker and executive, he does not appear to have mastered the game of managing investors' expectations.