(New York) Snap, parent company of the social network Snapchat, recorded the first profitable quarter in its history at the end of 2021, and reports continued strong growth in its users.
Posted at 6:21 p.m.
The publication appealed to investors and the title took 52% in trading after the close of Wall Street. It thus seemed to be preparing a rebound on Friday after an abominable session on Thursday (-23.60%), marked by the failure of another social network, Facebook (Meta).
Snap did better than analysts expected in terms of revenue, which came in at $1.29 billion, and net income, with a profit of 22.5 million, the first in the platform’s history.
Revenue per user jumped 18% year-on-year and 16% from the prior quarter.
In total, Snapchat had 319 million daily active users, up 20% from the same period of 2020.
In the third quarter, the group had suffered from the impact of the update of the operating system of the Apple iPhone (iOS). The program now asks the user whether or not they want to allow an app downloaded to the iPhone to track their online journey outside of the app.
If he refuses, the application can no longer collect data when the user visits other sites and other applications, which was the case before.
As a result of these changes, many of the tools advertisers used to measure the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns had been rendered virtually inoperative.
For Snapchat, a free social network whose business model is largely based on advertising revenue, the consequences were immediate.
But Thursday, during the conference call to present the results, the financial director Derek Andersen explained that the advertising activity had adapted to this new environment “faster than we had anticipated”.
The “challenges are not behind us, but we are increasingly confident in our ability to adjust to them,” explained operational manager Jeremi Gorman.
Snap is targeting between 328 and 330 million daily active users by the end of the quarter, which would equate to growth of between 17 and 18 percent.
“Snapchat ended 2021 on a high note, exceeding our expectations for advertising revenue,” reacted Jasmine Enberg, analyst at Insider Intelligence.
For the analyst, Snapchat is not as exposed to the “TikTok effect” as Meta (Facebook), whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted on Wednesday that it suffered from competition from the Chinese network.