Frankie Cordeira Jr.

Description: UPDATE: Wall St vomiting SNAP shares... Snap investors are vomiting and this time it isnt rainbows. Snap Inc. shares plunged as much as 23.5 percent on Thursday as slowing growth numbers stoked fears that Facebook has been successfully knocking off the quirky features of its disappearing-photos app. The selloff erased $1 billion from the paper net worth of Snaps 26-year-old CEO Evan Spiegel who tried to brush off fears that Facebook is poaching Snapchat features like photo filters that can depict users vomiting rainbows or wearing puppy-dog ears and snouts. Just because Yahoo has a search box it doesnt mean they are Google Spiegel told analysts on a Wednesday conference call insisting that Facebooks knockoffs of Snapchats camera-focused app wasnt an existential threat. Wall Street wasnt buying it as Snaps first-ever quarterly earnings report was a clunker by three crucial metrics: user growth revenue growth and the size of its loss. Snap shares plunged to $17.59 their lowest since the initial public offering on March 2 wiping off more than $6 billion of its market value. The stock had debuted at $17. The 7 million daily active users net-adds were not strong enough to disprove the Facebook is crushing Snapchat thesis which we think will persist for a while Barclays analyst Ross Sandler wrote in a client note. Analysts including Sandler on Thursday revised their expectations for the stock with at least nine brokerages lowering their price targets. The median price target on the stock is $24. Currently 12 of the 35 brokerages covering the stock rate it buy or higher. Sixteen have hold ratings and seven rate it sell or lower. Facebook had also plunged after posting results for the first time in 2012 but has since ensconced itself as a Wall Street darling by transforming the company into an advertising giant. Shares of Twitter which competes with Snap and had 328 million average monthly active users in the latest quarter had also tumbled 24 percent after its first quarterly report. Snapchat is battling Facebook for users on multiple fronts. Instagram owned by Facebook has more than 200 million people a day using its Stories while WhatsApp Status launched in February has more than 175 million daily active users. Both applications mimic Snapchat allowing users to post a string of photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. Facebook also allows users to tweak photos on their smartphones with visual details like a rainbow or a beard of glitter also similar to Snapchat. Facebook itself had some 1.94 billion people using its service monthly as of March 31. Snaps daily active users on the other hand rose 36.1 percent to 166 million in the first quarter from a year earlier marking a slowdown from the 47.7 percent rise for the fourth quarter and 62.8 percent jump for the third quarter. Questions about Snaps ability to monetize its product a hit with millennials remained as well. Average revenue per user was 90 cents in the first quarter up from 33 cents the same quarter a year earlier but below the $1.05 per user in the fourth quarter of 2016. Snap came to the public markets just as its user and monetization growth were both starting to meaningfully slow. It now faces incrementally fierce competition from deeper-pocketed rivals including Facebook Instinet LLC analyst Anthony DiClemente said. With Reuters
By Frankie Cordeira Jr.
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