Twitter and Apple set to release latest results

Apple and Twitter are set to report their latest financial results, with questions continuing to hang over the social media site while rare negative figures are expected from the iPhone maker.

After five successive quarters where Apple has reported record revenues, the first three months of 2016 are likely to have seen the first year-on-year decline in iPhone sales for the first time in the device's history.

Offering guidance for the future in its previous round of results in January, Apple warned investors that decline was imminent, suggesting it expected revenue to be between 50 billion and 53 billion US dollars (£34.4 billion to £36.5 billion), which would represent a drop of around 10% on the same period last year.

Slowing growth in China has been suggested as the core reason for the drop, an area Apple has focused on heavily in the last two years, alongside the increasingly saturated smartphone market - with competition from rivals such as Samsung continuing, but also due to improved performances from Chinese firms including Huawei.

Twitter continues to face questions over its future, with its last round of results at the beginning of the year revealing it had failed to add any new users in the previous quarter, even briefly losing around a million active users at one point.

The site's investors will be keen to see an improvement this quarter amid the continued rollout of new features in an attempt to spark new interest in the site, including a Direct Message button to tweets so they can be shared privately more quickly.

Since November, Twitter's stock has been trading in the US below the price at which it launched on the market.

The micro-blogging site is believed to be planning its own movement into China, where it is currently banned, after appointing its first managing director for the country earlier this month.