SNAP - Snap Inc.
16.96 -0.08 (-0.47%)
After hours: 7:58PM EDT
| Previous Close | 16.88 |
| Open | 16.88 |
| Bid | 17.03 x 1100 |
| Ask | 17.01 x 1300 |
| Day's Range | 16.86 - 17.14 |
| 52 Week Range | 4.82 - 18.36 |
| Volume | 31,965,849 |
| Avg. Volume | 28,048,156 |
| Market Cap | 23.475B |
| Beta (3Y Monthly) | 1.11 |
| PE Ratio (TTM) | N/A |
| EPS (TTM) | -0.81 |
| Earnings Date | Oct 23, 2019 - Oct 28, 2019 |
| Forward Dividend & Yield | N/A (N/A) |
| Ex-Dividend Date | N/A |
| 1y Target Est | 16.57 |
- Bloomberg
WeWork, WeWait, WeWorry: What’s Next for CEO Adam Neumann?
(Bloomberg) -- Steve Schwarzman has doubts. So does Larry Ellison.And so, too, do the growing numbers of Wall Street bankers and investors who are all anxiously awaiting the next move by WeWork and its brash co-founder, Adam Neumann.Neumann was a no-show this week for a long-planned appearance at a SoftBank Group Corp. three-day retreat in Pasadena, California, according to people familiar with the the matter, a further sign that company executives are hunkering down. Once the WeWork initial public offering was postponed late Monday, organizers knew Neumann’s presence would be iffy, the people said. His planned appearance was rescheduled from the first day of the event at the Langham hotel to the last and then canceled altogether.In short order Neumann’s office-sharing company has gone from a get-rich story to a you’ve-got-to-be-joking melodrama -- from WeWork to WeWait to, now, WeWorry.It was a brutal week. First, WeWork’s parent company, We Co., finally conceded that its grandiose plans for going public would have to wait.Then Schwarzman, one of the most powerful figures on Wall Street, threw shade on the company’s hoped-for valuation, which has already collapsed from upwards of $60 billion to $15 billion -- or lower.“I sort of went, what? How do you get this?” Schwarzman, the head of private equity giant Blackstone Group Inc., said of the early numbers Wednesday at a luncheon in New York. Ellison, chairman of Oracle Corp., went further, according to Barron’s. He told a group of entrepreneurs at his San Francisco home that day that WeWork is “almost worthless.”And it only gets worse. In London, two deals for major office buildings that are largely leased out to WeWork started to fray. Back in its hometown of New York, the company made a small round of job cuts. And the Wall Street Journal, examining WeWork’s over-the-top culture, reported that Neumann and his friends smoked marijuana on a private jet en route to Israel last summer -- and left a chunk of the drug behind, spurring the plane’s owner to summon it back.If all that weren’t enough, Neumann’s own bankers were getting antsy: They were looking to revise a $500 million credit line secured by WeWork stock -- an acknowledgment that those shares appear far less solid than they used to.New RisksAnd, by Friday, Wendy Silverstein, a big name in New York commercial real estate who joined WeWork last year as head of its property investment arm, had left the company. She’s spending time caring for her elderly parents.Even the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston was adding to the angst. In a speech Friday in New York, Eric Rosengren warned that the proliferation of co-working spaces might pose new risks to financial stability.A WeWork representative declined to comment on Neumann’s canceled appearance at the SoftBank conference, citing the pre-IPO quiet period. SoftBank also declined to comment.Rarely has so much gone so wrong so fast for a young company in the spotlight. Neumann has begrudgingly agreed to cede some of his powers. The question now: Will that be enough?“I’ve never seen a company of this size and scale generate such a consensus of negative opinion in my long, long life of following IPOs,” said Len Sherman, a Columbia Business School adjunct professor whose 30-year business career included time as a senior partner at consulting firm Accenture Plc. “There is no box that they haven’t ticked when you think of all the reasons that you might be very concerned -- like blaring red lights. Like, oh my gosh, caution, danger, danger.”WeWork now hopes to go public next month. But even that may be optimistic. Neumann, also We Co.’s chief executive officer, has to persuade investors that his company -- which has raised more than $12 billion since its founding and never turned a nickel of profit -- is worth billions on the stock market.Deadline LoomsTime is short. WeWork must complete its IPO before the end of the year to keep access to a crucial $6 billion loan.The company’s $669 million of bonds due in 2025 have dropped 5 cents this week to 97.75 cents on the dollar as of Thursday, according to the Trace bond-price reporting system.A few hours after the Journal story hit Wednesday, investors at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. conference in New York heard from Snap Inc.’s Evan Spiegel -- Neumann’s predecessor as a celebrated startup founder whose behavior and company control attracted unflattering attention as the unicorn went public in 2017.He was asked what advice he’d give to founders looking to become CEOs of companies that have to answer to shareholders. His answer:“Don’t go public.”(Updates with CEO’s canceled appearance in third paragraph.)\--With assistance from Gillian Tan, Matthew Boesler and Sarah McBride.To contact the reporters on this story: Ellen Huet in San Francisco at ehuet4@bloomberg.net;Scott Deveau in New York at sdeveau2@bloomberg.net;Gwen Everett in New York at geverett10@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, David Gillen, Daniel TaubFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
Snapchat's Comeback Story
Snapchat is making a comeback in a big way with a resurgence in user growth and ARPU's continuing to raise.
- Zacks
Facebook Luxottica Deal to Bring AR Glasses Mainstream
Codenamed Orion, Facebook's (FB) smart glasses are reportedly being designed to disrupt the smartphones market when it hits the shelves anywhere between 2023 and 2025.
- Zacks
Snap (SNAP) Outpaces Stock Market Gains: What You Should Know
Snap (SNAP) closed at $16.91 in the latest trading session, marking a +0.48% move from the prior day.
- Yahoo Finance
Here’s what happens when your privacy is violated on social media
One in five users say they had their privacy violated on social media, according to an exclusive new Verizon Media survey.
- Yahoo Finance
PitchBook names top entrepreneurial schools of 2019
PitchBook released its new 2019 rankings for the university programs that produce the most entrepreneurs who go on to score venture capital funding.
- Bloomberg
WeWork Isn’t Solving Its Biggest Problem
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- WeWork is slightly less WeWork, but it's still very WeWork.The commercial real estate/wannabe tech company shed a few of its egregious provisions that gave Adam Neumann, the company's co-founder and chief executive officer, an unusual measure of authority over his company – including the power through his wife to pick his replacement from beyond the grave. WeWork also agreed to cut in half the voting power of Neumann’s stock, and he will hand to the company any profits he receives from real estate properties he had owned and leased to WeWork. If you’re new to reading about this company, yes, all of those eyebrow-raising things happened at WeWork.Neumann is an extremely effective pitch man for his company, but it's understandable that potential investors in WeWork’s initial public stock offering reportedly balked at buying wildly valued shares of a company with a short operating history, unsteady unit economics, a governance structure that favors one person above all others, a history of questionable spending and – oh yes – an obligation to pay nearly $50 billion in lease payments in coming years. Neumann's willingness to dump some of the terms that enriched or empowered him shows how badly WeWork needs the money to fund its ambitious, or perhaps unsustainable, business. The company burned $2.2 billion in cash last year, and those conditions aren't likely to change soon. If it wasn't able to get an IPO done, WeWork would have lost out on as much as $10 billion in fresh cash from the stock sale as well as bank loans that are in part contingent on the IPO. That is a lot of motivation to make promises, but not too many. “Corporate governance is important to our company,” is a sentence written in WeWork’s updated IPO prospectus filed Friday. If that were true, of course, we would never have gotten to this point. WeWork and Neumann will likely have to take the psychological blow of a steep valuation haircut in an IPO, although it remains to be seen how much. Bankers months ago were talking about WeWork meriting a stock market value of as much as $65 billion; it now may be significantly south of $20 billion.WeWork's valuation as a private company was always a fiction written by Neumann and his biggest financial backer, the Japanese telecom giant SoftBank. But assuming WeWork goes public at a significantly reduced number to its fictional valuation, it nevertheless could have real consequences for SoftBank's relationships with partners in its massive tech-focused investment fund, and for WeWork employees who might be holding overvalued stock. Even after the changes WeWork was forced to make, this is still a company controlled almost entirely by Neumann – who seems fine using it as a foundation to collect many hundreds of millions of dollars from personal loans or WeWork stock sales – that’s run with the discipline of bears escaped from a circus and structured to funnel profits and minimize taxes for Neumann and a tiny cadre of others. As I said, WeWork is still very WeWork. In the outrage that exploded since WeWork released its IPO prospectus last month, there has been justifiable blame on Neumann and on SoftBank's bazooka of cash for letting WeWork get so very WeWork. Let's not stop there. There is plenty of blame to spread around. WeWork has a legion of experienced investors who poured more than $12 billion into the company, sat on its board of directors and apparently bought Neumann's vision and empowered him to do whatever he wanted. Let’s point fingers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and other banks that lined up to lend Neumann money, presumably with dollar signs in their eyes hoping to do business with his company. When no one wants to kill or even slightly inconvenience a potentially golden goose, it can’t be a surprise when the goose makes an utter holy mess. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Matt Levine wrote recently, the oddity of WeWork is that it actually had to make compromises as it graduates from startup to a public company. This hasn't been typical in the last few years as young and cool companies from Snapchat to Lyft and Slack started going public. They've been able to stay the same insulated, founder-empowering startups, giving the new owners of their companies as little influence as possible while basically continuing to do whatever they wanted – just as they had when they started in a proverbial garage. WeWork broke that mold. WeWork still might do just fine as a public company. Or not. The tepid at best public market reception to Uber, Lyft, Snap and others shows that stock investors aren't solely persuaded by the bright shiny object of fast revenue growth, if a company doesn't have a proven business model or can't competently execute its business plan.However the IPO goes, WeWork's difficulties hitting the stock market should – but probably won’t – spark soul searching among those who start companies and support them with financing in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street and far beyond. Some big ideas have bloomed in the last decade that wouldn’t have been possible without the easy availability of cash for young tech companies. But I have grown increasingly worried that the limitless cash has created a generation of bad companies. When we look back at the "unicorn" wave of the 2010s, we may see companies puffed up by easy money and limping along on flabby financials, with cash spackling over the glaring holes in their business models. I worry the easy money has ossified in young companies a lack of accountability, with egotistical and insular leadership.That is the downside of the free-cash era for unicorns. WeWork may be the apotheosis of the phenomenon, but it is far from a singular example of startup rot.To contact the author of this story: Shira Ovide at sovide@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Beth Williams at bewilliams@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Shira Ovide is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. She previously was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Market Realist
Snap Stock: Should Investors Place Bets Now?
Snap stock rose 3% on Thursday and closed at $15.77. At the closing price of $15.31, Snap’s market capitalization is $21.8 billion.
- Yahoo Finance
Why the dismal performance of super-unicorns will sink the We Company’s IPO
In addition to its huge losses, terrible business model, and laughable corporate governance, one of the main reasons WeWork is struggling to go public is the dismal performance of other so-called super-unicorn stocks over the past couple of years.
- Bloomberg
Snapchat Downloads Calm Fears That ‘Face Swap’ Pop Was a Blip
(Bloomberg) -- Snap Inc. should continue to see growth in the critical metric of daily active users, according to analysts who analyzed the latest data on downloads for the social-media company’s Snapchat app. The data helps to support the thesis that a recent uptrend in user engagement could be lasting.Guggenheim wrote that SimilarWeb’s August data showed “relatively stronger DAU growth” for Snapchat compared with other social-media sites. Snapchat’s quarter-to-date growth of 3.2% among Android users outpaced Pinterest’s 2% growth, as well as the 0.5% increase seen at both Facebook and Instagram, according to the Wall Street firm, which has a neutral rating on Snap. Both Facebook and Instagram -- which is also owned by Facebook Inc. -- have much larger user bases than Snapchat.Snap had 203 million daily active users in its second quarter, up from 190 million in the first quarter, and 188 million in the second quarter of 2018. Daily active users are expected to grow to 205.8 million in the third quarter, according to Bloomberg MODL estimates.Citi analyst Hao Yan wrote that while the correlation of downloads to daily active user growth “is yet to be perfect,” there are “strong upward trends” in download activities thus far this year. This “corresponds to the positive SNAP DAU recovery in recent quarters.” The firm has a neutral rating and $18 price target on Snap.While the SimilarWeb data is limited to Android phones, Citi said that if July and August’s activity trends continue in September, “the downside risk on 3Q DAU outlook could be more limited vs what was suggested by the recent market reaction.”Earlier this week, Bank of America estimated that app downloads thus far in the third quarter were up 23% on a year-over-year basis, a reflection of the recent viral success of Snapchat’s “face swap” photo filters. However, they were down 18% from the second quarter, underlining fears that the jump in popularity was temporary, and that stock gains were overdone.Those comments from BofA contributed to a two-day drop of nearly 10% in Snap’s shares. Snap rose 1.2% as of 12:03 p.m. Wednesday in New York. The stock has tripled from a December low.To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Vlastelica in New York at rvlastelica1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Catherine Larkin at clarkin4@bloomberg.net, Jeremy R. Cooke, Steven FrommFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Facebook Hires Health Expert to Help Prevent Suicides
(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. said it will begin sharing public data about how users talk about suicide as part of ongoing efforts to address concerns about suicide and self-harm on the social media site.In a blog post on World Suicide Day, Facebook said it will give academic researchers access to CrowdTangle, a tool often used by news and media organizations to monitor social media, to explore how information shared on Facebook and Instagram can be used to help prevent suicide. The company will also include guidelines for talking about mental health by Orygen, an organization that studies youth mental health, on the platform’s Safety Center and hire a health expert to join its safety team.The moves grew out of consultations Facebook has been having since earlier this year with experts to discuss some of the more difficult topics related to suicide and self-harm. Facebook has also tightened its policies to no longer allow images of graphic cutting and making it harder to search for this type of content on its apps.Facebook uses software algorithms to find posts related to self-harm, an approach it also employs for other types of sensitive content like posts promoting terrorism or child pornogrophy. Facebook says it removed or added a sensitivity screen to more than 1.5 million pieces of suicide or self-injury related content between April and June, and said it found 95% of those posts before they were flagged by another user. It did the same for over 800,000 pieces of content on Instagram.Facebook will sometimes send resources to individuals who created the posts or, in cases of imminent danger, alerts local authorities.Governments and academics have raised red flags about rising rates of suicides among teens that appear to correspond to the increasing popularity of social media. A study published by the JAMA Open Network in May didn’t cite a specific cause for an increase in suicides since 2007, but other researchers who looked at the data questioned the role of social media in the spike of incidents. In April, the U.K. asked Facebook, along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Snap Inc., to commit to dealing with the issue.“Experts have told us that one of the most effective ways to prevent suicide is for people to hear from friends and family who care about them,” Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, wrote on the blog. “Facebook has a unique role in facilitating those kinds of connections and we’re taking additional steps to support those who are discussing these sensitive topics, especially young people.”(Updates to include statistics about the number of suicide-related posts Facebook took action on.)To contact the reporter on this story: Kiley Roache in New York at kroache@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Molly Schuetz, Robin AjelloFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Market Realist
Snap Stock Fell More than 7%: What Next?
Snap (SNAP) stock fell around 7.9% on Monday. The decline came after a Bank of America analyst noted a sequential fall in the top US app downloads.
- Motley Fool
3 Top Stocks Under $20
A social media comeback kid, one of the hottest media stocks of the past decade, and a high-yielding telco make the cut in this quest for the best stocks trading in the teens or lower.
- Business Wire
Snap Inc. To Participate In the Goldman Sachs 28th Annual Communacopia Conference
Snap Inc. announced today that Evan Spiegel, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, will participate in the Goldman Sachs 28th Annual Communacopia Conference in New York, NY on September 18, 2019 at 3:45 p.m.
- Market Realist
Why Snap Stock Gained Over 7% in Seven Days
Snap (SNAP) stock has been on the rise since the beginning of September. It's gained over 7% in the last seven days, rising from $15.51 on August 27.
- TechCrunch
Spotify users can now share music and podcasts to Snapchat
Spotify users can now share their favorite music and podcasts with friends on Snapchat, the company announced this morning, with added support for sharing a song, playlist, artist profile or podcast either directly to your friends on Snapchat or to your Snapchat Story. Snapchat is now one of several destinations that Spotify users can share to, along with WhatsApp, Messages, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram Stories and, as of just last week, Facebook Stories. In addition to simply sharing music with friends, the feature also will make it possible for Spotify artists and their teams to promote their music to Snapcat's 203 million daily users -- most of whom are within the coveted teen to young adult demographic that Spotify's artists are hoping to reach.
- Zacks
Snap (SNAP) Gains But Lags Market: What You Should Know
Snap (SNAP) closed at $15.89 in the latest trading session, marking a +0.57% move from the prior day.
Motley FoolWill Facebook Do to Match What It Did to Snap?
The social media giant's new dating feature could be a major challenge for Match Group.
- Motley Fool
Can Snap Generate $350 Million in Annual Gaming Revenue by 2022?
The company's new gaming business could become its new growth engine.
- Market Realist
Snap Stock Gets a Rating Upgrade from Evercore
On Tuesday morning, Snap stock gained more than 1% in premarket trading after Evercore ISI upgraded the stock to “outperform” from “in-line.”
- Yahoo Finance
Companies to Watch: Roche gets more time for Spark deal, AstraZeneca shows promise in clinical trial, Snap get upgraded
Roche, Spark, AstraZeneca, Snap, Walmart and eBay are the companies to watch
- Yahoo Finance
We need to protect democracy: MIT professor
David Austen, professor of management at MIT, talked to Yahoo Finance’s On the Move about preventing elections from getting hacked.
- Motley Fool
Snap Investors Shouldn't Fear Instagram's New "Threads"
An app that posts automatic status updates doesn’t sound like a Snapchat killer.
