Snap Quarterly Results Q4 2022 [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Snap Quarterly Results Q4 2022 [pdf]

investor.snap.com

30 pointsmfiguiere48 comments

It’s really cold outside, I’m bored, let me play devil’s advocate…

Snap is well-positioned for a comeback.

TikTok is at a high risk of being banned by the US government, and Meta properties increasingly lack any sort of focus and coherent product management. When TikTok exits the US market, by choice or by decree, and when Meta fails to regain user trust and engagement, Snap will be the choice of the burgeoning Gen Z market.

…ow, ow, I think I hurt something in my shoulder, I was reaching so hard there. Ow.

Not a bad hypothesis, at the same time, I struggle to think of cases in social media where users / activity return to a stagnating platform. Seems there is always some new platform users migrate to, rather than going back to something “old”.

I agree. I have come to view social media and dating apps as the virtual equivalent of bars - just like bars in real life, there seems to be a trendy hotspot for five years or so that then gradually declines in popularity as new ones open up. The previous hotspot may continue on for years with a core set of users or become a local institution but will likely never be as popular as in it's heyday unless it has both a complete redesign and a rebrand turning it into a brand new bar.

Us government doesn't have the balls to do it IMO

There seem to be a lot of legal hurdles they'd have to get over along with political hurdles.

interesting, honestly if that plays out you can quickly 2x your money there

Not saying that you're wrong but it'll be an uphill battle for Snap.

Snap's focus on salacious content turned off a lot of my friends. People wanted something a bit more wholesome than Snap but not as sterile as Instagram. TikTok fit the bill perfectly.

If those were the only real contenders, maybe. Many young people are starting to appreciate privacy and move to ad and tracking free protocols such as Signal and Matrix. There is no money to be made on them, and they are not advertised. This slows their growth, but they are growing.

The Snap app literally destroyed my Nexus 5 phone. After installing it, the battery overheated and the screen glitched out. That was the last of that, and most social apps in general.

Is there anything funnier than money incinerating "tech" companies' non-GAAP EBITDA? "Hey, sure we may have lost $1.5B, but look if we ignore over $1.3B of stock based compensation and a few other very real expenses, we actually made money!"

The stock-based compensation numbers are truly staggering. EBITDA/FCF measures tend to completely ignore it, making actual profitability significantly worse than non-GAAP measures imply

SNAP:

Revenue: $1.3B and projected to decline

Stock based comp: $446M

EBITDA doesn’t ignore stock-based compensation. Adjusted EBITDA typically does so though - just like adjusted EPS.

Community adjusted EBITDA

OTOH, there are few companies on this planet that can boast 375 Million DAU

There are even fewer than can have that many and yet still lose $1.5B.

That’s a tautology since you described a subset.

Earnings before interest, taxes, payroll, depreciation, losses, dividends, and expenses.

Despite revenue growing 2%, net income went from +$23MM to -$288MM?? Yikes

Seems like the biggest change between those two quarters is stock based compensation expense?

Yes. Stock based compensation expense Q422 $446M vs. Q421 $297M. (up 50% YoY)

So they're not losing any actual cash. How's their FCF?

Right in the first section: “ Free Cash Flow3 was $78 million in Q4 2022, compared to $161 million in Q4 2021.”

FCF is a poor metric to use for RSU/option heavy tech companies.

Stock based comp directly dilutes shareholders, and using FCF hides the profitability hole that SBC creates for many of these companies.

FCF is more relevant for companies where net income adjustments are largely one time or moreso accounting gimmicky (depreciating real estate/assets to show a GAAP loss etc). SBC dilution is very real

I don't care about shareholders here, just their cash burn rate.

Well, they can materialize more cash at any time by issuing shares or raising debt. They're well above a fundamentally based fair value share price.

So not sure why FCF matters from your perspective. They could clearly become net income positive by reducing costs, if it became necessary

This. SNAP has been a publicly traded company for 6 years, one cannot just ignore and hand wave away this expense, especially given how much growth prospects have deteriorated.

You can’t really look at numbers like that to paint a full picture.

Net income in particular is sensitive to one time events.

In this case, imo, it looks like the most important story is that revenue per user is falling hard. 17% more users. -15% revenue per user. Revenues are falling in North America and they have to try and make up for it by targeting the rest of the world.

Costs are growing faster...

                                Q4 2022   Q4 2021
  Cost of revenue               481,311   449,151
  Research and development      584,942   434,195
  Sales and marketing           295,150   245,228
  General and administrative    225,929   194,438
  Total costs and expenses    1,587,332 1,323,012

(Revenue is up 0.1%, by the way. That 2% is doing as if exchange rates had not moved.)

Hard to believe how much they’re expanding the team given the financial situation. They’ve gotta be thinking it’s time to be making money here

Maybe I just don’t understand finance very well, but who is bankrolling over 1B in losses? And why?

Shareholders. A lot of their expenses are equity compensation.

Stock is tanking in after hours trading so market doesn’t seem too impressed. Looks like the trap of anemic revenue growth couple with a struggle to get costs under control.

They need to stop reporting quarterly with blue chips. These guys are a couple of years from shutting down. Who the heck uses Snap? He should’ve taken the offer from Zuck and Meta stocks before the pandemic run up.

Snapchat is currently #17 of all free apps in the US. I see it much higher sometimes. If you don’t like the app, I get it. But let’s not pretend Snapchat is dead or something.

Ranking top 20 of free apps in US is hardly a barometer of future potential of a company that has never exhibited an ability to return steady profit to shareholders, and hardly bodes well for their future growth prospects.

That has nothing to do with the question “Who uses Snap?”

This thread is about SNAP's financial results, and SNAP's valuation has long been dependent on future growth prospects. Ranking within the top 20 is not a good sign to that end, especially given how SNAP managed to lose $1.5B in the last year and has not put forward any credible plan on how they might make a sustainable return for shareholders.

No, the thread you replied to started with the question I quoted.

375 million people use it every day, up 17% year over year... so a lot of people...

If they can't turn that into revenue, DAU doesn't matter.

> He should’ve taken the offer from Zuck and Meta stocks before the pandemic run up.

SNAP has outperformed FB/META basically every period since Q1 2018, though. If anything, the time to sell out was after the pandemic run-up, in Q3/Q4 2021: SNAP had gained ~365% since the beginning of 2020 versus ~85% for FB/META.

SNAP is currently at its lowest price since March 2019. Coincidentally, META is at its lowest price since Jan 2019. So I guess let's call it a wash?

Ah yes, the "I'm not the target audience and I don't use this product, so no one else uses it" argument.

I do agree with you though that social media is more about being "flavor of the month" and riding popular trends. In that sense, I think one trick social media companies are very risky.

However, Snap has enough inertia to last for some time.

Time for the markets and tech stocks to slide downwards again. All thanks to Snap and Electronic Arts.

Down almost 15 percent after hours. Markets don't like this one bit.

Surprising NA users are with so much more than other geos’ users.

I personally find Europe only generating 2x more revenue than "rest of the world" than NA being 8x. The NA stat just seems inline with differences in GDP per capita.

>Surprising NA users are with so much more than other geos’ users.

North American (by which I mean "US", of course) users and content creators are ridiculously valuable compared to the rest of the world. Back when Trump was trying to ban TikTok in 2020, US was 50% of users but 90% of the top 50 creators.

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