After years of flipping between will it or won’t it, messaging service Snap (NYSE: SNAP), finally went public. The market has been looking forward to the IPO. But Snap will have to do more than just publish user metrics now. To justify its valuation, Snap will have to show its ability to drive revenue growth and profitability.
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Snap’s Financials
Founded as a Stanford class project by Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy, Snap has diversified its business from being an ephemeral messaging service to an advertising platform and, of late, a hardware company. Snap began to monetize its business in October 2014. It was only in the IPO filing that it finally revealed how far it has come.
For the year ended December 2016, Snap recorded revenues of $404.5 million compared with a rather modest $58.7 million earned a year ago. Snap does not break out details about the revenue segments. Global average revenue per user has increased from $0.31 a year ago to $1.05 for the quarter ended December 2016. Snap continues to suffer losses and it incurred a net loss of $514.6 million for the year 2016 compared to a net loss of $372.9 million in 2015. It ended 2016 with 158 million daily active users generating an average of 2.5 billion snaps every day.
Till earlier this week, Snap was venture funded with $2.65 billion in funding from investors including Alibaba, General Atlantic, GSV Capital, Fidelity Investments, Glade Brook Capital Partners, York Capital Management, August Capital, Yahoo!, GIC, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Coatue Management, Tencent, SV Angel, Benchmark, General Catalyst Partners, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Lone Pine Capital. Its last round of funding was held in May last year when it justify its valuation. Valuation increased from $16 billion in March 2015.
Earlier this month, Snap went public by selling 200 million shares at $17 each, pegging the company valuation at a fairly high $24 billion. Post the listing, the stock soared to $29.44, taking its market capitalization to an even higher $34.7 billion. But since then, the stock has been floundering. Currently, it is trading at $22.71 with a market capitalization of $28.7 billion, still above its list price. Still very high, though.
