San Francisco (AFP) – Snap, the house-mother of the popular mobile messaging Snapchat, has made official Thursday its long-awaited proposed ipo, which is shaping up as one of the biggest launches in Wall Street since the chinese Alibaba in September 2014.
In the document published Thursday on the website of the gendarme american stock (DRY), Snap fastens the tentative goal of raising up to $ 3 billion.
This amount is only used for now to calculate registration fees, and it will evolve when the exact number of titles and their introductory price will be fixed. But the fact that it is valued in the billions already gives an idea of the importance of the operation.
The media have estimated that Snap could achieve a valuation of between 20 and 25 billion.
And his first steps on the market will be even more followed that they could be used to take the temperature, and may be able to convince other potential candidates to Wall Street, such as Airbnb, Spotify or Uber, for example.
These startups are very to share with to the Snap of the valuations very high, in which some observers denounce a new “bubble” in the technology sector.
Trip Chowdhry, analyst at Global Equities Research, advised and even recently to stay away from the ipo of Snapchat, to the value, according to him, “hyper inflated” like Zynga, Groupon, FitBit or GoPro, whose stock-market performance proved disappointing, or for speculative investors to resell the securities at the first opportunity.
- explosive Growth, heavy losses -
Snap up here very secretive about its financial performance, has at the same time lifted the veil and confirmed an explosive growth with a turnover of almost seven-fold increase in the last year, to $ 404 million. But it acknowledges at the same time a net loss of $ 515 million.
The company states that the advertising is its source almost exclusively of income. It has also stepped up efforts in recent months to expand its offering to advertisers, which could bring revenue of nearly a billion dollars this year, estimated the research firm eMarketer.
having regard to the period of time that the company must now meet before commencing its “roadshow”, the official tour presentation to investors before the ipo, Snap is now in a position to make its first step into the market in march.
Like Twitter or Alibaba before him, he’s going to start on the New York Stock Exchange rather than on the electronic platform Nasdaq, long considered an obvious destination for companies in the technology sector but the reputation tarnished in recent years by a series of technical problems.
another surprising decision of the company is his choice to put on the market for the shares, which will not be accompanied by any voting rights. This will maintain the effective control of Snap in the hands of its co-founders Evan Spiegel (ceo) and Bobby Murphy (technical director), who today share 88.6 percent of the voting rights.
- niche Product ? -
The company, Evan Spiegel, based in Venice, California, was renamed Snap last year, at the time of the launch of glasses that are connected and equipped with a miniature camera (“Shows”), to show that it was not restricted more to a single product.
But his active lighthouse remains Snapchat, which has gained great popularity among adolescents and young adults with messages that disappear shortly after being seen by their recipients.
This is confirmed in the draft introduction, which specifies that among the 168 million daily users claimed by this e-mail service, the majority are between 18 and 34 years old. And the use tends to decrease with age: the over 25 year-olds devote an average of 20 minutes daily, compared to more than 30 minutes for less than 25 years.
This could become a problem for Snapchat, which for the duration will have to prove that it is not just a niche product for young people, “Millennials”, especially as by his own admission the competition already on the market where it operates “will continue to intensify”.
In the immediate future, it is considered by many analysts as the enemy number one for Facebook, who had also tried without success to redeem it a few years ago, and has now begun to fight back by cloning some of its features.
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