Snap Is Doomed

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Snap Is Doomed

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Snap Inc. (NYSE: SNAP | SNAP Price Prediction) earnings were so bad that it is hard to see how the company will survive as a standalone public corporation. The markets drove Snap’s stock down 28% when the figures were announced.
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Snap’s revenue rose 13% to $1.1 billion. This level of growth is glacial among social media companies. Snap lost a breathtaking $422 million in the quarter. To make matters worse, the number of daily active users rose 18% year over year to 347 million. That means Snap has not been able to effectively monetize its growing base. Snap said the road ahead was too hard to forecast, so it provided no guidance, a rare occurrence since COVID-19 robbed companies of their ability to do so.
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Evan Spiegel, the company’s CEO, made a predictable statement: “We are evolving our business and strategy to reaccelerate revenue growth, including innovating on our products, investing heavily in our direct response advertising business, and cultivating new sources of revenue to help diversify our topline growth.” He is the architect of Snap’s failure. He has been chief executive since 2012. The board at most public corporations would have fired him a long time ago.

Snap has taken shareholders on a brutal ride. Shares are off 75% this year. By contrast, social media leader Meta’s shares have dropped 50%, a terrific pounding.
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Snap may make a good acquisition target for a larger company that wants to expand its social media presence or add one to its primary business. Snap has $6 billion in cash and investments on its balance sheet. Its market cap is less than $20 billion.
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Snap, like Twitter and other midsized social media companies, never had enough scale to be successful. Now, that scale problem has caught up to it in a way that markets cannot stomach.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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