Friday, May 12, 2017

Snap’s chief unfazed as stocks drop and investors worry

Following its first earning call since its initial public offering, Snap stock is tanking.

The company badly missed the majority of its estimates, causing its stock to take a 25 percent hit. Though Snap reported some positive numbers—an average time of 30 or more minutes spent on the app and 3 billion snaps shared per day—the news was overwhelmingly dour.

Several attempts by rival Facebook to add features to its main platform and to Instagram that mirror Snapchat features has made the competition fierce. The social network’s moves also has kept many users on Facebook and Instagram, aiding in Snapchat’s slowed growth.

Analysts are recalling that Facebook struggled following its IPO, and Twitter’s stock price rose. Years later, Facebook is thriving while Twitter flounders.

Snap’s chief executive, Evan Spiegel, didn’t help the company’s image or ease investors’ fears during the 26-year-old’s first-ever earnings call. CNBC’s Jim Cramer labeled Spiegel as “arrogant” and suggested he needed to be “hazed.”

If you think all the Facebook copycatting is bothering Spiegel and the rest of his team, think again. During the earnings call Spiegel told investors:

I think the bottom line is, like, if you want to be a creative company you've got to get comfortable with and basically enjoy the fact that people are going to copy your products if you make great stuff.

[RELATED: Join us for the Employee Communications, PR and Social Media Summit at Microsoft.]

One quote stood out in particular, when Spiegel addressed his company’s way forward:

So I think at this point, we're kind of famous for not giving guidance on the product pipeline. But we're obviously really excited about it and we love surprising our community; so should be a fun rest of the year.

A fun rest of the year, indeed. We’ll see if marketers and investors eventually think the same.

What do you think, PR Daily readers? Has Snapchat’s popularity peaked, or is it primed for a growth spurt?

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