Snap Shares Surged 60% In A Nutty Day For Stocks On Revenue, User Growth And Relief It’s Not Facebook – Update
UPDATED with share price, quarterly stats: Shares of Snapchat parent Snap soared 60% on fourth-quarter gains in revenue and daily active users and a chorus of relief across Wall Street that it’s not Facebook.
Why? Shares of Facebook parent Meta went the opposite direction, falling 25% and shedding more than $230 billion in market value, a Wall Street record. Facebook lost users for the first time as a public company. It cited a long list of headwinds, including competition from TikTok and new Apple privacy features that also impact Snap. But mostly perhaps Mark Zuckerberg appears to have massively misjudged Wall Street’s tolerance for his pivot to the Metaverse — when it’s still not a real business and requires billions of dollars of investment over who knows how long to make it one.
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Snap revenue increased 42% to $1.3 billion. It posted its first quarter of positive net income as a public company of $23 million.
Adjusted EBITDA improved 97% to $327 million. Operating cash flow swung to a positive $186 million from a negative $53 million. And free cash flow of $161 million compared with negative $69 million.
Some highlights for the quarter include: creating Spotlight to amplify the best of Snapchat. Today over 65% of Spotlight submissions use one of Snapchat’s AR Lenses or Creative Tools. Over 20 Spotlight creators are syndicating Shows on Discover (content pages).
Snap also renewed content partnerships with NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, and Disney.
PREVIOUSLY: Snap said daily active users hit 319 million, up by 54 million or 20% for the fourth quarter from the year before. Year-over-year growth in DAUs has been 20% or more for five consecutive quarters.
It beat on revenue and profit and had a better than expected outlook in sales and users. The shares surged in after-hours trading in a crazy day for social media stocks.
Snap shares plunged 24% earlier today in a rout led by Facebook parent Meta and Spotify. Facebook is in the midst of an historic correction on slower user growth on its core platform and a confused outlook at it invests heavily to pivots to the little-understood metaverse. But FB execs noted issues that also apply to Snap — namely new privacy settings by Apple that are hurting ad revenue. Google parent Alphabet earlier this week bucked the streaming/social media slowdown with stellar fourth quarter numbers and Wall Street was waiting today to see if Snap would pull a Facebook, or a Google – it did the latter.
“2021 was an exciting year for Snap and we made significant progress growing our business and serving our global community,” said Evan Spiegel, CEO. “The strength of our core business has enabled us to accelerate our investments in augmented reality, transforming the way that the Snapchat community experiences the world through our camera.”
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