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In a shift from past months, Snap investors aren’t running pell-mell for the exits after the company’s quarterly earnings report.
That said, the numbers are a mixed bag. Snap’s first-quarter loss was larger than the one a year ago — and wider than Wall Street expected. It lost 360 million. Moreover, the company’s sales came in a hair shy of Wall Street projections. Snap did $ 1.06 billion, slightly less than the forecast $ 1.07 billion, citing a wide downturn in the ad market.
But the company had some good tidings, too. Most relevantly, it said daily users grew by 18% in the quarter to 332 million. (This did top Wall Street’s number, which was 330 million.) User growth is one of the most popular gauges for a company’s health, and Snap’s expansion comes against hard times for its largest competitors: Meta, which has stagnant growth, and Twitter, which has set large growth goals that may be impossible to meet.
Snap shareholders sent the stock up 6% in after-hours trading. It was a rare respite for the beleaguered shares. The company has lost more than two-thirds of its market value over the past year as investors weighed concerns about Snap’s ability to handle a change in Apple’s privacy policy that hurt any company selling digital ads, including Snap, Meta and Twitter. It was especially a problem for Snap, which is first and foremost a mobile application.
