Snapchat has filed for an early public offering on the New York Stock Exchange today, picking the ticker symbol “SNAP.” The firm hopes to raise $3 billion and claims 158 million active users daily.
The IPO would apparently rate the company above $20 billion.
The filing arises at a thrilling but tough time for Snap Inc. The company (originally launched as Snapchat) has stated its objectives to become “a camera company,” rather than just a company of application developers. And it has already found success with the Goggles, its cool pair of video recording sunglasses.
Snap Inc is Losing a Lot of Money
As per the company, its ad business is developing rapidly with $58.7 million revenue for 2015, and growing to $404.5 million in 2016. Along with such revenue generation however, its losses have also amplified. Snapchat lost $372.9 million in 2015 and $514.6 million in 2016, which was more than its total revenue.
Snap Plans to Invest more and more in Hardware
Snap Inc’s IPO also comes just as the company’s core property, Snapchat, is under serious competition from Instagram. Facebook, Instagram’s owner, has been trying its best to make Snapchat irrelevant.
Every effort brutally failed , until lately, when Instagram copied a major feature of Snapchat story for its own platform and dubbed it as ‘Instagram Stories’. This feature was successful in Instagram, so much that now Facebook has copied the same for Messenger.
Experts have been recording exponential decline in views of Snapchat Stories as compared to Instagram Stories.
The founders will take the decision that Snapchat has never seen the celebrities and influencers on its platform in the same way Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have. Its core value lies as much in one to one picture messaging and also in one to many broadcasting.
“Our two co-founders have control over all stockholder decisions because they control a substantial majority of our voting stock,” Snap said in its S-1 filing. “The Class A common stock issued in this offering will not dilute our co-founders’ voting control because the Class A common stock has no voting rights.”
