It will seek to raise as much as $4 billion in the IPO, people familiar with the matter have said, for a market value of as much as $25 billion. The app is founded by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy at Stanford, and was built as a tool to send messages and visuals that would self-erase after an allotted time.
Snap - which initially let users send disappearing messages and has since added other services - is an unbelievable success story that's likely to revive the market for venture-backed technology IPOs.
In 2016, Snap started selling "Spectacles, a line of camera-equipped sunglasses that help funnel even more user content onto the platform".
Its daily active users grew to an average of 158 million at the end of December 2016, registering 48% growth year-on-year.
Among the risk factors, Snap noted that it faces significant competition, which is something the company anticipates will continue to intensify.
The stock will trade under the ticker SNAP on the New York Stock Exchange.
Senate confirms Rex Tillerson for secretary of state
The vote was the "biggest blow yet" in an effort to "demonize the oil and gas industry", the group said in a statement . Talking on MSNBC yesterday, Sen. "Hi, I'm the new guy", Tillerson said, to laughs. "But I certainly welcome them all".
Snap has 75 employees in the United Kingdom and plans to expand in the future, as well as more than 10 million daily users. Three different types of stock will be sold in the IPO, and the filing states: "Snap is a camera company". This was just about a month after the launch of Snapchat's direct competitor Instagram Stories that recently claimed to reach 150 million daily active users.
After a bit of a drought, another big social media initial public offering (IPO) is on the way. Facebook, Instagram's owner, has for five years now been trying its best to destroy Snapchat.
Snapchat said it expects to derive most of its revenue from advertising, where it will compete against rivals such as Google, Facebook and Twitter.
The parent company of photo messaging service Snapchat is set to be one of the biggest public offerings in recent years. For this reason, some predict that Snap's stock performance will be more like Twitter than Facebook, which reported a profit before going public. The level of service provided by Google Cloud may also impact the usage of and our users', advertisers', and partners' satisfaction with Snapchat and could seriously harm our business and reputation.
The problem is almost four years later Twitter is still struggling to shake off these questions, and there are fears among some experts that Snapchat could shape up to go the same way.
