Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results • Hacker News Board

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#211

Post by stillworks » Thu, May 11, 2017, 5:13 AM UTC

slackoverflower wrote: post #112

peacetreefrog wrote: post #92

It still seems overvalued. What would you rather own? Snapchat -- which, after dropping 23% today has a market cap of 21.5B. Or ALL of... Yelp - 2.21B GoPro - 1.21B FitBit - 1.38B Groupon - 2.01B Twitter - 13.59B Sonic - 1.27B ...for a total of 21.67B

I would most certainly buy $SNAP over every one of these companies. People don't get it. For everyone between the ages of 13 to 26, Snapchat is their only social network, their only messaging app, their go to camera! That is inherently more value that any of those companies combined.

Would depend on how much you are going to "invest".

If just punting out and buying a few units, yea why not.

But if you are working towards building a reliable portfolio, I would recommend spreading/indexing your monies.

And Snap is something I would personally not touch, maybe not even with an index, not just yet.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#212

Post by mbesto » Thu, May 11, 2017, 5:35 AM UTC

zkirill wrote: post #9

Is there any public company that releases earnings in realtime rather than quarterly and/or annually? Has this ever been tried? Is there any rational behind earnings being reported quarterly/annually besides it being aligned with existing regulatory and accounting procedures?

Sounds like you've never had to close the books before. The process itself is never done in real-time.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#213

Post by code4tee » Thu, May 11, 2017, 5:42 AM UTC

They lost $2.2billion on revenue of $150 million. Ouch (and yes those RSUs very much count). Even on an EBITDA basis they lost more than they had in revenue.

They've got to turn the ship around. With user growth rather anemic they're not going to easily "grow" their way to profitability. They need to sort the fundamentals of the company to get the costs in check.

Problem is even if they had 50% margin today they'd be valued at a very rich valuation. Long story short there's not much in the fundamentals other than pure hype holding up the value of the stock at this point.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#214

Post by despise-my-mom » Thu, May 11, 2017, 5:51 AM UTC

narrowrail wrote: post #152

self-diversity wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only imagine being frightened by this if I held a large stake in Google. Do you have a different reason?

This is such a crappy suggestion: That we are all just acting in our own self-interest. I'm privileged enough that this is not the case, and I despise the implication. It's like voting for Trump just because of the huge tax cut I will get. Not everyone thinks this way.

So you despise finding it odd that a person would be frightened by a user preferring Facebook to Google, and you wish this to be seen as your virtuous nature?

How fascinating. You must be an amazing person.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#215

Post by cavisne » Thu, May 11, 2017, 6:15 AM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #7

Some quick highlights as to why the stock is being punished. > Adjusted Ebitda Loss $188.2M, Est. Loss $176.9M > 1Q Daily Active Users 166M, Est. 168M > 1Q Rev. $149.6M, Est. $158.6M > 1Q Loss/Shr $2.31 I'm guessing the big issue is the miss on Daily active users. This is the same thing that caused the street ot hammer twitter. Rule of thumb for non profitable tech companies.... If you are a company that isn't making…

How is DAU audited and enforced, is there a standard?

Things like ebitda have a pretty standard audit procedure, there are bank statements and receipts that an auditor can check, and they can investigate variances.

DAU doesn't seem to have a precise definition, and how do we know the method for collecting this metric is accurate? I've personally stuffed up this kind of collection before, and once you do it's very hard to backfill.

Likewise Facebook has had several prominent advertising metric failures, how can we trust their DAU number?

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#216

Post by tim333 » Thu, May 11, 2017, 6:20 AM UTC

us0r wrote: post #135

theprop wrote: post #59

This is one of the ugliest financial statements I've ever seen. The multi-billion dollar loss is due mostly to stock compensation, but still their COGS or cost of revenues sold was greater than their revenues. That's probably the first time that's been seen for a sizable software company in the history of the industry. They said their revenue per DAU is $.90 and their server costs per DAU were $.60...so that means se…

"server costs" (Google Cloud) is an affordable $450 million per year commitment. They apparently have 2,360 employees doing who knows what (not growing the user base). My favorite part: "Spiegel laughed out loud when asked if he was worried about Facebook copying his features. “Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t mean they’re Google."" We'll check back in a year to see if he feels the same way.

>"server costs" (Google Cloud) is an affordable $450 million per year

That's interesting. I was curious how their choice to use Google App Engine would work out. It's reputation is easy to start with but expensive to run and some other issues. https://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-s...

I wonder if they would have done better with a stack like WhatsApp - Erlang running on their own servers. Or even switching over to that in the future. I think WhatsApp at 500m users had about 35 engineers and 550 servers and so costs maybe 10% of Snap's. http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#217

Post by lsseckman » Thu, May 11, 2017, 6:21 AM UTC

zkirill wrote: post #9

Is there any public company that releases earnings in realtime rather than quarterly and/or annually? Has this ever been tried? Is there any rational behind earnings being reported quarterly/annually besides it being aligned with existing regulatory and accounting procedures?

Don't know of any public, this is an interesting list of private (you're likely already aware of) https://baremetrics.com/open

In working with public company CFO's, I would guess 50% of the time & effort that goes into quarterly reporting is making sure everything came out of the SAP system correctly.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#218

Post by omarchowdhury » Thu, May 11, 2017, 6:21 AM UTC

Fricken wrote: post #174

aub3bhat wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are supposed to function as action camera, then they are probably the lousiest ones ever designed/made. While I am sure the weather is always perfect at the Venice beach with enough sunlight. For nearly all other scenarios, where you might want a camera, you might NOT want to wear sunglasses. This is the reason why Google Glass had detachable attachment for sunglasses. The fact that they are tied to sunglasse…

I'm not sure you understand what action camera's are for, they're not for late night events, that's what the camera on your phone is good for, and you already have one of those. I've taken them Rock climbing, I took them out on a trail ride, I took them to the zoo, Everybody in my town is hockey crazy, I got shots of fans going nuts after a game. I shot a little cooking video, and they were actually coolest for that…

How can you create "any type of instructional video" when the Snaps are limited to 30 seconds.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#219

Post by CodingGuy » Thu, May 11, 2017, 6:24 AM UTC

DrJid wrote: post #205

puranjay wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A side note: I've seen an increasing number of friends on Whatsapp use the 'Status' feature to share pictures (which works like Stories). It's a very tiny percentage so far - maybe 1-2% of my contacts list - but it is being used. If this gets to about 10%, Snapchat should be worried. Whatsapp has a massive user base in developing countries.

Not to forget that for many, many users in emerging markets, the mobile carriers offer free data for WhatsApp. Traveling through Colombia, and I can use WhatsApp status for free over here. SnapChat kills my data.

Which is a really bad thing for net neutrality...

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#220

Post by kgwgk » Thu, May 11, 2017, 6:31 AM UTC

harryh wrote: post #139

kgwgk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The percentage change is "not meaningful": net income increased by 2100%! (non_sequitur commented on that point a few minutes before you asked, by the way)

And the change is "not meaningful" because it includes a one time charge for stock compensation issued as part of the IPO.

I was going to say that it would have been not "meaningful" anyway, but I have just noticed that they report EBITDA growth. It's a bit misleading to say that EBITDA has doubled (from -$93mn to -$188mn). This is why growth is usually not calculated when the baseline is negative. Going from losses to profits implies growth "lower" than -100%, for example.