Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc, has done the expected and filed for an initial public offering of shares. This will finally turn it into a public listed company, and follow in the footsteps of other social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.
The Wall Street Journal expects Snap Inc to be valued at between $20 billion (about RM88.5 billion) and $25 billion (about RM110 billion). If this is accurate, it would place the value of the company far ahead of the $3 billion that Facebook once offered for it.
Snapchat going public is not surprising as the company has seen substantial growth since its founding. The company currently claims that it has 158 million people using the service daily and recorded revenue of $404 million (about RM1.8 billion) in 2016.
However, simply going public will not ensure the future of Snap. Facebook has been working on competing directly with the ephemeral imaging service by introducing features that mimic Snapchat. Although, it seems that the competition has not been enough to dent the forward momentum of Snap.
Fortunately, Snapchat seems to have found a way to properly monetise its platform. Unlike Twitter which is rapidly discovering that people don’t want to pay for things that were previously free of charge.
[Source: Wall Street Journal, via Engadget]
