Snap Revenue Surges on User Growth and Advertising Gains

Snap Revenue Surges on User Growth and Advertising Gains
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Snap delivered sales that blew past analysts’ expectations, its first upbeat quarterly report since going public, as advertisers start to get more comfortable spending money on its Snapchat app, according to Bloomberg. The stock jumped as much as 31 percent in extended trading.

Snap’s first year as a public company has been marked hurdles, including the loss of its heads of product and engineering. Facebook has copied some of Snapchat’s most popular features for bigger audiences, while a dramatic redesign of the app is rolling out slowly. Snap, already popular with young people, has enough growth potential to carve out a solid slice of a digital ad market dominated by Facebook and Google.

Snap said fourth-quarter sales jumped 72 percent to $285.7 million, beating the $252.8 million average projection of analysts. Snapchat had 187 million daily active users in the fourth quarter, up 18 percent from a year ago and ahead of the 184.3 million analysts estimated.

Excluding certain items, the Los Angeles-based company reported a loss of 13 cents a share, compared to the 16-cent loss analysts predicted. The net loss was $350 million in the fourth quarter, for a full-year loss of $3.45 billion. Average revenue per user, a closely watched number, rose 46 percent to $1.53 in the final period of 2017, while a similar measure of costs grew much more slowly, according to the company.