SNAP - Snap Inc.
19.13 +0.02 (0.10%)
After hours: 7:59PM EST
| Previous close | 18.25 |
| Open | 19.10 |
| Bid | 19.13 x 29200 |
| Ask | 19.14 x 1800 |
| Day's range | 18.76 - 19.29 |
| 52-week range | 5.74 - 19.29 |
| Volume | 44,256,900 |
| Avg. volume | 24,283,820 |
| Market cap | 26.753B |
| Beta (5Y monthly) | 1.10 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | N/A |
| EPS (TTM) | -0.72 |
| Earnings date | 03 Feb 2020 |
| Forward dividend & yield | N/A (N/A) |
| Ex-dividend date | N/A |
| 1y target est | 18.35 |
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Snap (SNAP) Gains But Lags Market: What You Should Know
Snap (SNAP) closed at $18.25 in the latest trading session, marking a +0.33% move from the prior day.
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The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Himax Technologies, Alphabet, Microsoft, Snap and Apple
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Pinterest Overtakes Snapchat in Popularity Among US Users
Pinterest (PINS) becomes the third largest social media network, surpassing Snapchat, per a recently released eMarketer Report. The report predicts Pinterest's user growth to continue in 2020.
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Top Augmented Reality Stocks to Buy in 2020
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- Bloomberg
Pinterest Soars After Report Shows U.S. Users Eclipsing Snapchat
(Bloomberg) -- Pinterest Inc. shares rose as much as 13% on Tuesday after a report showed it beat out Snap Inc.’s Snapchat to become the third-biggest social media platform in the U.S.Pinterest had an estimated 82.4 million U.S. users in 2019, a 7.4% gain from the previous year, while Snapchat had 80.2 million users, data tracker eMarketer estimated. Pinterest’s U.S. users are projected to rise 4.4% to 86 million in 2020, the firm said. Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Facebook Inc., hold the top two positions.“While Snapchat has a young core audience that it caters to, Pinterest has a more universal appeal, and it’s made significant gains in a wide range of age groups,” analyst Nazmul Islam said in the report.Pinterest makes the bulk of its revenue from U.S. users and is in the early stages of efforts to boost international ad sales. The stock still hasn’t recovered from losses after a third-quarter revenue miss led to a 17% plunge in November.While some analysts say the company’s third-quarter earnings results hint at saturation in its U.S. market, bulls say the stock remains attractive as it continues to develop its advertisement offerings.Wall Street’s expectations for Pinterest’s fourth-quarter financial results “are reasonable” and user survey results revealed positive trends, RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney said in a research note late Monday. The results are due in mid-February.To contact the reporter on this story: Andres Guerra Luz in New York at aluz8@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Catherine Larkin at clarkin4@bloomberg.net, Jeran WittensteinFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Investing.com
StockBeat: Pinterest Overtakes Snapchat as Third-Biggest Social Media App
By Yasin Ebrahim
- Zacks
Has Snap (SNAP) Outpaced Other Computer and Technology Stocks This Year?
Is (SNAP) Outperforming Other Computer and Technology Stocks This Year?
- Zacks
Snap (SNAP) Gains As Market Dips: What You Should Know
In the latest trading session, Snap (SNAP) closed at $17.41, marking a +0.29% move from the previous day.
- Bloomberg
‘Late Capitalism’? Not Even Close
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Even the most ardent defenders of capitalism must acknowledge the indignities it occasionally imposes. The toilet seat designed to be uncomfortable with the goal of getting employees back to work quickly seems to capture some of the essence of the criticism that capitalism has jumped the shark. The image of a tiny, environmentally friendly paper straw inside a large plastic cup is similarly absurd, as are the straps you can fashion around your thighs with clips that attach to your shirt to help keep it tucked in.I found these examples by searching Twitter for “late capitalism,” an ominous phrase associated with Marxist theorists (though not Karl Marx himself) that has been borrowed widely to express exasperation with the economic system that governs the developed world today.Beyond the absurdities and affronts, critics of contemporary U.S. capitalism are concerned about corporate power, inequality and economic injustice. “The innovators (lords) capture the majority of the gains,” as a New York University professor recently put it, “and the 99% (serfs) get an awesome phone” and “Mandalorian action figures delivered within 24 hours.”Use of the term “late capitalism” has exploded during the past decade, no doubt driven by the economic and psychological damage the Great Recession of 2007-2009 inflicted on millions of people. Capitalism may have once delivered broad prosperity, the critics argue, but now the system serves to entrench the elite. And there are reasons to be concerned. Productivity growth has lagged for over a decade, threatening prosperity. Declines in geographic mobility and entrepreneurship raise legitimate worries about the energy necessary to sustain a market economy.But despite real economic challenges and the trauma of the recession, it’s important to ask whether the current “stage” of capitalism, as the pessimists like to frame it, is as dire as they would have you believe.No.Now is an odd time to argue that capitalism is broken. Only 35 U.S. workers out of every 1,000 are looking for jobs but unable to find them — the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in a half-century. The rate at which people in their prime working years hold jobs is higher than it has been in over a decade. I noted in November that it had finally fully recovered from the Great Recession, despite much concern that it never would. In 2009, there were over six unemployed workers for every job opening. Today, there are more job openings than there are unemployed workers.Are the theorists of late-stage capitalism right to be extremely concerned about income inequality? The level of inequality is high, but this is an odd decade to bemoan its rise. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, between 1979 and 2006 the rich-poor gap in income after taxes and government transfer payments increased by 27 percent. But from the beginning of the Great Recession, when criticism of capitalism became much more common, to 2016 (the last year data are available), inequality actually decreased by 7 percent. Or consider the ratio of weekly earnings between high- and low-wage workers. Between 2007 and 2019, this measure of the wage gap grew by only 1 percent.Innovators are presented as the villains of late-stage capitalism. It is true, of course, that the market can reward innovators with fabulous wealth. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com Inc., is worth $118 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.But critics of modern capitalism seem to be confused about the market’s ability to distribute benefits. Bezos’s net worth doesn’t come close to fully capturing the improvements in household welfare he has created. In a 2004 paper, the economist and Nobel laureate William Nordhaus concluded that “most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers,” not the innovators themselves. Using data from 1948–2001, his model suggests that innovators capture only 2.2 percent of the total social value they create. Applying a back-of-the-envelope calculation using Nordhaus’s result to Bezos suggests he has created $5.4 trillion in value for the rest of society.A team of economists, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar Erik Brynjolfsson, recently attempted to measure the benefit of several new digital services that are free to consumers. To place a dollar value on the benefit these services provide, they studied how much money consumers would be willing to accept to give them up. The typical U.S.-based Facebook user in their study values the social networking site at $42.17 per month.For other free digital services, the economists studied people in the Netherlands. There, consumers value Facebook at 96.80 euros a month (roughly $108). WhatsApp is worth 535.73 monthly euros ($595) to the Dutch participants in the study, and Google, Bing and Apple maps are valued at around 60 euros per month ($67). Consumers don’t value everything this highly. Participants in their study would give up Skype for less than 1 euro, Snapchat for around 2 euros, and Instagram for about 7 euros.Because they are free, these services are not well captured in current national income statistics. Brynjolfsson and his coauthors calculate that the benefits from Facebook alone would have added between 0.05 and 0.11 percentage points to the annual growth in U.S. gross domestic product growth starting in 2004. In other words, these free services represent trillions of dollars of consumer benefit.This may seem abstract, but daily life in modern societies abounds with confirmation that critics of capitalism seem to ignore. On Christmas Day, my family in Washington was able to FaceTime with relatives in Singapore, Kansas City and Brighton, England. My children know their aunts, uncles and cousins much better than they would without this technology. That is worth a lot.While driving around town this week, I received a text message with the picture of a friend’s daughter, born just the day before. It was lovely to be connected with him in real time during this important moment. People value connectivity, and the modern economy provides it to the broad middle class — not just the rich — in ways that would seem like magic just a few decades ago.And by dismissing innovation so flippantly, proponents of the late-capitalism critique are myopic. Technology builds on itself.Taking a longer view, the discussion of late-stage capitalism also seems to miss basic income statistics. According to CBO data, median household income grew by 21 percent from 1990 through 2016. After accounting for taxes and government transfer payments, median income increased by 44 percent. Incomes grew faster for households below the median. Capitalism has delivered significant increases in purchasing power for typical households.The phrase “late capitalism” suggests that capitalism is spent and exhausted. It isn’t. True, the Great Recession was traumatic, and its effects are still with us. Public policy should work hard to alleviate those effects and provide economic opportunity to all. But enemies of modern capitalism seem to be late to the fact that the Great Recession is largely in the rear view mirror. We aren’t in the twilight of the market economy. The storm clouds from the recession have passed.To contact the author of this story: Michael R. Strain at mstrain4@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the editor of “The U.S. Labor Market: Questions and Challenges for Public Policy.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Investing.com
Snap Pops as Wall Street Sees User Growth Boosting Ad Sales
Investing.com – Snapchat owner Snap jumped on Thursday after Wall Street turned bullish on the social media company on expectations it will attract meaningful ad spend in the coming year thanks to an uptick in user growth.
- Business Wire
Snap Inc. Announces Date of Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2019 Results Conference Call
Snap Inc. (NYSE: SNAP) will hold its quarterly conference call to discuss fourth quarter and full year 2019 financial results on Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time (5:00 p.m. Eastern Time).
- TechCrunch
Snapchat quietly acquired AI Factory, the company behind its new Cameos feature, for $166M
After acquiring Ukraine startup Looksery in 2015 to supercharge animated selfie lenses in Snapchat — arguably changing the filters game for all social video and photo apps — Snap has made another acquisition with roots in the country, co-founded by one of Looksery's founders, to give a big boost to its video capabilities. The company has acquired AI Factory, a computer vision startup that Snap had worked with to create Snapchat's new Cameos animated selfie-based video feature, for a price believed to be in the region of $166 million. Victor Shaburov, the founder of Looksery who then went on to become Snap's director of engineering -- leaving in May 2018 to found and lead AI Factory -- declined to provide a comment for this story.
- Bloomberg
FarmVille Maker Zynga Is Booming Again
(Bloomberg) -- Frank Gibeau had only just become Zynga Inc.’s CEO, but he had to deliver some bad news.The once-high-flying company, which shot to fame with Facebook games such as FarmVille, was now in trouble. At an all-hands meeting in Zynga’s cafeteria in March 2016, Gibeau put up a slide showing its return on equity compared with video-game peers. The room was very quiet.“I showed them that we are the worst of the worst,” he recalled in an interview. “We are generating less return than everybody else in the industry.”Fast-forward three years, and the mood is very different. The company increased its guidance three times last year. Profit margins have rebounded, and sales are growing at their fastest pace since the game developer went public in 2011. Zynga is “on track to be one of the fastest-growing -- if not the fastest-growing -- gaming company at scale,” Gibeau said.Zynga shares have nearly tripled to $6.15 since Gibeau, now 51, took over as chief executive officer. That includes a 56% gain in 2019, eclipsing the S&P 500’s 29% increase.The stock is still far below its post-IPO high set in 2012, when the exuberance around social media propelled Zynga to almost $16. But shareholders and Wall Street analysts are embracing the company again.“Investors like a good turnaround story,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co.Along the way, Gibeau reinvented what Zynga is about. It now makes only a sliver of its money from Facebook-based games, which gave the company a reputation for delivering endless requests and notifications to social-media users.Instead, Zynga focuses on stand-alone titles that consumers play on their phones. They include Words With Friends, Zynga Poker, and Merge Dragons!, which lets players combine dragon eggs and treasures to produce skills and objects.Zynga also has used acquisitions to dial up growth. In 2018, it agreed to buy controlling stakes in Small Giant Games for about $560 million and Gram Games for $250 million. And it has a war chest of cash and short-term investments that’s approaching $1.5 billion, which could be used for additional deals. To raise money, Zynga has sold bonds and made more than $300 million from unloading its San Francisco headquarters in a leaseback deal last year.Spending SpreeThe idea is to create a mini-empire of game studios and franchises, said Gibeau, a veteran of Electronic Arts Inc.“We see a lot of opportunities to acquire assets that would grow value for shareholders,” he said. “We want to put those dollars to use.”Zynga is preparing to reinvent itself again by embracing new platforms and devices -- no matter what they may end up being.“Ten years from now, I know for a fact that the platforms will be different,” he said. “There could be other platforms -- like streaming platforms, cloud-based gaming.”The video-game consoles that dominated the industry for so long may not exist in a decade, opening the door to other options, Gibeau said. “I want our games to be playable on anything, even if it’s a toaster or refrigerator.”Zynga has already jumped onto Snapchat. And while it hasn’t provided details on what else is in the works, the company is developing a new multiplatform strategy.“We have a saying, ‘Make platform transition your friend,’” Gibeau said. “You can turn yourself out of position, which frankly Zynga did by being so focused on Facebook.”When Zynga struggled to pull out of its slump, co-founder Mark Pincus recruited Gibeau out of retirement. Though Gibeau was only in his 40s, he’d already spent 25 years at Electronic Arts and helped turn that company around.“I really wasn’t looking for a job,” Gibeau said. “I was getting in shape. I was flying airplanes. I was looking to apply for a master’s program in history. I was spending time with my kids, traveling.”But Bing Gordon, a fellow Electronic Arts veteran who served on Zynga’s board, approached Gibeau for help on behalf of Pincus. A 30-minute chat over coffee with Pincus turned into a three-hour meeting, and Gibeau soon joined Zynga’s board. He found himself visiting the company once a week, then everyday, and he was asked to become CEO.“I just fell in love with the place -- I love turnarounds,” Gibeau said. “I learned a lot from the failures at EA. I looked at it and thought, ‘Man, this is perfect.’ I knew exactly what to do here.”The biggest task was focusing. Under Gibeau’s new management team, Zynga went from working on about 140 projects to a dozen games.The company concentrated on so-called live services -- basically, providing new content for existing games on an ongoing basis -- and tried to make its games more complex and engaging. It also invested in titles tied to movie franchises, such as Harry Potter and Star Wars. And Zynga expanded into Asia and other markets.‘Firm Footing’“The company has significant live-services expertise and has a strong advertising platform, so it can help rapidly scale promising games as they come to market,” said Matthew Kanterman, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “All in, Zynga is on firm footing for the next few years.”Zynga’s comeback is far from complete. Its profit margins still trail those of peers, and its ability to catch up will depend on the games it releases in 2020 and beyond.But the company has a happier workforce -- and takeover targets actually want to be acquired by Zynga. That wasn’t the case a few years ago, said Mike Hickey, an analyst at Benchmark Co.“Frank and his management just reset the culture and what the market perceives Zynga to be,” he said. “You stop worrying about losing your job and start getting excited about the bonus you make because you’ve hit your goals. That’s the biggest step in a turnaround.”To contact the reporter on this story: Olga Kharif in Portland at okharif@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net, Rob Golum, John J. Edwards IIIFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- TechCrunch
Snapchat will launch Bitmoji TV, a personalized cartoon show
Snapchat's most popular yet under-exploited feature is finally getting the spotlight in 2020. Starting in February with a global release, your customizable Bitmoji avatar will become the star of a full-motion cartoon series called Bitmoji TV. It's a massive evolution for Bitmoji beyond the chat stickers and comic strip-style Stories, where they were being squandered to date.
- Zacks
This Decade in Tech
The world as we know it has changed. Technology has become more fluid, filling gaps we never perceived existed, bringing people closer together like never before.
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Snap (SNAP) Outpaces Stock Market Gains: What You Should Know
Snap (SNAP) closed the most recent trading day at $15.55, moving +0.58% from the previous trading session.
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3 Tech Stocks for Growth Investors to Buy for 2020
Check out three tech stocks we found with our Zacks Stock Screener that growth investors might want to consider buying for 2020...
- Bloomberg
Unicorns Have to Live in the Now, Not the Starry Future
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- “Uber, but for short-term restaurant and warehouse jobs,” sounds like a startup pitch circa 2015. But the actual Uber Technologies Inc. is expanding a test of a temporary staffing program.I’ve been skeptical of Uber and other logistics companies that say they can capably match supply and demand for a host of goods and services. But this could work. Uber’s network has several million drivers, some of whom might be interested in picking up other flexible work. With U.S. unemployment at low levels, many businesses are eager to find good workers, too.The staffing story also reminded me how quickly the balance has shifted from Uber’s promise to its reality. Before Uber’s IPO flopped in May, there was more patience for experiments to get bigger and broader. Now, apart from this relatively low-stakes staffing project, the pressure is on for the company to focus on what works right now.Facing investor doubts and a 33% share decline from its IPO, Uber recently pledged to deliver adjusted profits much more quickly than anyone had expected. Uber is on the clock to prioritize its most promising businesses and markets and abandon many projects that can’t pay for themselves relatively quickly. You can see can that in Uber’s cost-cutting, continuing discussions to sell its food-delivery business in India, and its discontinued restaurant-kitchen rental pilot project.Uber has backed away before from cash-burning businesses with uncertain payoff. There is more urgency now for the company to change the balance between the future and the now.Other companies will or are confronting this shift. Post-IPO share declines of Uber, Lyft Inc., Snap Inc., Pinterest Inc. and other richly valued former startups reflect in part investor skittishness about funding fast-growing but sometimes cash-hungry businesses. More young companies will be judged by what they are doing rather than what they might be able to accomplish in a starry future.(1) It’s no longer viable to count on expanding in perpetuity with other people’s money.The sudden impatience about startups has also trained a spotlight on the SoftBank Vision Fund, the $100 billion investment pool that is all about encouraging short-term losses to fulfill outsize promise. If you haven’t already, it’s essential to read this Bloomberg Businessweek article about how the Vision Fund operates.Its strategy of arming startups with bazookas of cash means they must think incredibly big to generate bazooka-like returns. That creates sometimes perverse incentives. In one episode, SoftBank’s powerful leader yelled at an underling for steady but slow progress at a portfolio company. A SoftBank-backed automated pizza startup was urged to chase a reorientation of the U.S. food production system. (“Are we the next Theranos?” as one Zume Pizza Inc. worker asked in a management Q&A, is probably not something Domino’s Pizza bosses have to tackle.)The struggles of SoftBank-backed Uber and WeWork are justifiably calling attention to the downsides of motives to grab for the the biggest potential outcome at any cost. WeWork wasn’t “elevating the world’s consciousness.” It was a real estate arbitrage company burning piles of SoftBank’s money to find growth with little oversight because no one had an incentive to confront the warning signs. WeWork is the worst-case scenario. But it’s also true that the abundance of capital available to certain kinds of superstar companies in the last decade has enabled some very big and handy ideas. Uber and similar services couldn’t exist in their current forms without mountains of capital. Cash-burning Netflix Inc. couldn’t exist without people willing to bankroll a globe-spanning digital television network.The last decade’s bazookas of cash brought many good ideas to life. Bad news: They might not be financially viable when those bazookas run out of ammo. And it also means there are rich motivations for outlandish ideas pursued with recklessness.A version of this column originally appeared in Bloomberg’s Fully Charged technology newsletter. You can sign up here.(1) The changing distaste for short-term losses can affect public companies. Share Now, an urban car-rental project backed by automakers BMW AG and Daimler AG, said Wednesday that it wouldend operations in North America and three European cities.To contact the author of this story: Shira Ovide at sovide@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Daniel Niemi at dniemi1@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.
- Investor's Business Daily Video
Snap Gaps Out Of Base
The parent company of the popular Snapchat app soared Friday after UBS upgraded shares to buy from neutral with a 24 price target.
BloombergWhy Jefferies Raised Its Snap Price Target to $21
Jan.09 -- Brent Thill, a Jefferies analyst, explains his bullish outlook for Snap Inc. on "Bloomberg Technology."
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DeRay McKesson joins Influencers with Andy Serwer
Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer sits down with civil rights activist, DeRay McKesson.
