On the way to a pivotal year



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Things seem to be stabilizing this year. Snapchat has stopped losing users, and badysts hope that prospects for its parent company Snap will improve, especially after the first-ever partner summit in Los Angeles last week, which featured new products and announcements. commercial.

"We have come out of Snap's first big-league summit with a more upbeat feeling than previously about the pace of innovation and the overall trajectory of the company in 2019," wrote L & # 39; Barclays badyst, Ross Sandler, in a recent note to investors.

The company's shares also reflect this sentiment. It has more than doubled since the beginning of the year, even though it is still trading below the $ 17 IPO price.

"2018 has been a year of transition," said Ron Josey, an badyst at JMP Securities. "Snap is much better this year than a year ago."

At his event last week, Break (BREAK) has announced several new features that he hopes to increase the time spent by users on the Snapchat app. The company has launched a new gaming platform featuring titles only available on Snapchat, additional additions to its original series lineup, and a way to post Snapchat stories on other platforms such as Tinder.
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Snap also introduced new monetization and advertising opportunities, including six-second advertising in games and ways advertisers can target users outside the Snapchat app for the first time.

Josey, of JMP, said he was impressed by Snap's reach and its continued innovations in augmented reality and direct messaging. At the event, the company announced that it was now reaching 90% of Americans aged 13 to 34 years old.

Analysts also believe that Snap "grows up". After a visit to the company's new headquarters in Santa Monica, Jefferies badysts said in March that they "felt like [Snap] According to CNBC, the start-up had become "more impressed" by the "cohesion and positive progress of the company on the road to recovery".
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During its last quarter, Snap stopped losing daily active users after two consecutive quarters of losses. The company's revenues reached a record $ 390 million, up 36% from the same period last year and well above investor expectations.
The supposedly faster Android application of Snap is deployment, which could help him attract more users. In the past, Android users complained about the often blocked application and the quality of their camera lower than that of iOS.
Everyone is not so optimistic. The research firm eMarketer has canceled its estimates of Snapchat users Wednesday, citing the unpopular reworking of the application. The company expects Snapchat to have 77.5 million monthly US users in 2019, down 2.8% from last year. (Snapchat only shares daily user statistics, not monthly).

"I do not think everything is lost to Snapchat," eMarketer badyst Jasmine Enberg told CNN. "It's hard to say at the beginning of the year, but all these things [announcements] are good signs to increase engagement within the app, and possibly even add new users if this Android app turns out well. "

The priority of Snap this year should be to increase the commitment and add users, according to Josey.

"Things are certainly better than six, nine, even three or six months ago," he said. "Now it's a question of, can you run and keep momentum."

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