Snap Inc. (NYSE:SNAP) has had an indifferent year in term of their stock prices that kept plummeting. Their year ended with shares trading at $5.51 down from $14 at the beginning of the year marking a 62% drop in stock price.
Although SNAP’s stock price has been on the decline for the better part of the year, on February after the announcement of the fourth quarter earnings, it did spike beyond its offering price of $17. However, the spike dint last as the shares dropped following a pushback by users against their contentious redesign.
SNAP’s 2018 defining moments
SNAP experienced its first drop in stock price on January 4 when shares declined by 5% after it became apparent that most advertisers had a preference for Instagram. However, the announcement that Twitter could copy Snapchat for its users to quickly post videos and photos saw a gain of 5%.
Source: Stockcharts.com
On February the shares recorded a historic increase beyond their offering price for the fourth quarter in which they reported to have had an increase in users bringing the total of active users to 187 million. Following the announcements of Q4 earnings, the shares surged by 47% the following day with the stock price closing at $20.75.
SNAP recorded the highest stock price at $27.09 which was a high they had not reached since starting to trade publicly. This followed back-end enhancements of the application that saw a surge in stock price.
The tweet that sent SNAP shares crushing
A single tweet from Kylie Jenner sent SNAP shares crushing with a decline of 6% following the tweet in which Jenner revealed that she does not open Snapchat anymore. In another tweet, Rihanna reproached Snapchat about the sensitivity of an ad that she considered inappropriate which equally contributed in a drop in stock prices.
After its contentious redesign, SNAP experienced pushback from users saw its shares record $11.03 low thus missing on first-quarter estimates. They also experienced slow user growth adding only 4 million users
Although SNAP had indicated a recovery in share price at the end of the Q4, it nonetheless experienced a decline in the Q1 of 2019 fiscal year. The stock price dropped below $10 towards the end of June, but this was as a result of the general decline in social media stocks.
A report by a Wall Street analyst in October saw a decline in stock to $7 and although SNAP revealed its ambitious plans having some a series tab on the app the shares continued to fall even below $7. Following the announcement of the third quarter earnings results, the stock went below $6 although they indicated that they were gaining a foothold regarding users.
For the first time since going public their shares dropped below $5 with the stock price closing at $4.99 on December 20.
Turning down Facebook
In 2013, SNAP rejected a $3 billion take over from Facebook when the company was just two years old. Reportedly they turned a down a chance to sell to Facebook in 2016 before SNAP going public at an initial offering price of $17 per share. However, SNAP CEO, Evan Spiegel, turned down the idea of selling and they did not receive a formal offer as well as a proposed price.
In 2017 when SNAP started to trade publicly, they were valued at $24 billion, but its shares closed at $5 at the end of 2018 put the value of the company at $6.7 billion.
The number of active Snapchat users continues to decreases, and the company has had a grim year in which they saw some executive officers leaving the company.