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As he read what was presumably a prepared statement to investors on an earnings call Thursday, Snap C.E.O. Evan Spiegel’s tone recalled a man at the gallows. “We have a significant opportunity to grow and broaden our global community over the long term,” he said in a grim monotone. “There are billions of people worldwide who do not yet use Snapchat.” The reason for his consternation was abundantly clear: Snap, which has seen more than half of its value erased since its March 2017 I.P.O., announced in its third-quarter earnings report that its number of daily active users had fallen to 186 million, and predicted another drop in users in the fourth quarter. The news sent the company’s stock tumbling as much as 12 percent to an all-time low of $6.28. The reasons for Snapchat’s decline are manifold—a botched redesign, low internal morale, a string of executive departures, Facebook’s successful replication of Snapchat’s best features in Instagram—but one thing seems clear: what could have been an aberration now appears to be an existential issue that could threaten the future of the company.
Still, some employees have their hopes pinned on an Android redesign, code-named Mushroom, to turn things around, a prospect that Spiegel, too, has teased. Android users make up a majority of the global smartphone market, and as Spiegel said in his prepared remarks, Android users are “a global growth opportunity for us,” and that the new app is “lightweight, modular, and performant.” The original Android app was slow and buggy, as Snapchat initially prioritized its iOS app over Android. “Snap’s users are vocal, loyal, and fickle,” one investor told me. “Hitching your hopes to the company on the strength of another app redesign is risky, but Snap knows the stakes.”
Analysts, however, are markedly less hopeful. Although Spiegel has told employees in a memo that he hopes to make Snap profitable next year, some experts don’t believe he has done nearly enough to address the elephant in the room: Facebook, and the imminent threat it poses. Back in August, multiple sources told Bloomberg that the Snap C.E.O. initially “refused” to believe that Instagram’s copycat features were siphoning growth away from Snapchat (Snap denied this characterization)—an alleged oversight that, if true, may have cost his company. “Instagram Stories’ daily active users now dramatically larger than Snapchat and time spent among your core teen/young-adult demo now far more evenly split than a year ago between Instagram and Snapchat,” Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, told Bloomberg.
That’s not to say that all hope is lost—Twitter was able to pull off a comeback in 2018, two years after it looked like a prime acquisition target with a tumbling stock price. But analyst Michael Nathanson is more skeptical of Snap. “While it is obvious that Snap wasn’t prepared for life as a public company, it now has a more pressing problem. It is quickly running out of money,” he wrote in a note to clients. “Call us skeptical as—despite the memo—we don’t have faith in Snap’s leadership to navigate these rapids.” Nathanson predicted the company will have to raise capital as soon as mid-2019, and revised his 2019 revenue estimates earlier this month, cutting them by 7 percent and forecasting both slower user growth and revenue per user growth.
N.Y.U.’s Scott Galloway more or less agreed. “I believe this company is going out of business,” he told Recode’s Kara Swisher last month. “Snap will not be an independent company by the end of 2019.” He sees Google and Amazon are the most likely potential buyers, and of the two, he said Amazon makes more sense. “I think Bezos says, ‘All right, you have a core constituency that buys stuff and buys stuff irrationally,’” he explained. “High-margin coffee, flying knit tennis shoes, they’re crazy. We love teenagers because they’re stupid because they spend all their money.” Another investor I spoke with agreed, adding that if Snap does sell, it will almost surely go at a steeply discounted rate to one of a small number of possible buyers. “Telecom giant? Maybe. Facebook? Definitely not. Google? They’ve failed at social already. Apple? Maybe, but it seems like a long shot, and it’s hard to see Snap fitting into Apple’s existing thesis.” Noting that Tim Stone, Snap’s new C.F.O., was a longtime executive at Amazon, as well as the fact that Snap and Amazon launched a joint e-commerce initiative this month, they concluded, “Snap’s best hope in an acquisition scenario is Amazon.”
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