Snapchat’s maker, Snap Inc, was celebrated in the tech industry for the success of its stock market debut five days ago. Its share price went shooting for the stars in the first two days that it was on the market. However, optimism did not reach Wall Street. As a matter of fact, analysts remained doubtful of Snap Inc.’s current value. Today, it certainly did not disappoint them.
On Monday morning, shares of Snap opened at $28.17, which is up of about 4% from the market closing price last Friday. It was also up of around 66% from the price that was paid last week by Snap IPO’s investors, which was at $17. By Tuesday morning, it sunk to just a little above $22 that is below the initial trading price which was at $24.
What most analysts on Wall Street believe is that $22 is still above the real worth of Snap shares and the price will continue to drop in the following days or even months. Of the eight analysts that were surveyed by FactSet, none of them bought a single share of Snap. As a matter of fact, none of them recommended the purchase of Snap shares. They have also set their target price or fair value estimate with the average of $16.50.
One of Pivotal Research Group’s senior analysts, Brian Wieser, said in an interview last Monday that Snap shares are overvalued, which is ‘the simple conclusion.’ Weiser also said that Snap’s stock would hit $10 for its year-end target price. According to him, it is a good idea to ‘sell’ the stocks, especially when he has the numbers or estimates of Snap Inc.’s future profitability.
“In order to reach to current valuation, it will require willful optimism concerning the fundamentals,” the senior analyst added.
In a report, he also pointed out the high costs of the company which included content creation, serving, and hosting, not to mention sharing the revenue with their content partners. Several other analysts were also worried about the company’s ability to grow. As of now, Snap Inc. is struggling to keep up with Facebook, which currently has 1.2 billion active users daily. Snapchat reported to have 158 million active users daily and it has a much younger demographic.
Laura Martin of Needham & Co. said that Snapchat’s bandwidth-intensive app and narrow target demographic limit its audience to younger people from first-world countries. Martin estimated the audience’s total size to be at 650 million and compared it to Facebook and Google’s 3.6 billion each.
Even with Snapchat’s core demographic, it is still facing competition from copycats, said Martin last Monday in an interview.
According to her, if you are a shareholder of Snap, you will get hit with failures from left and right as the company experiments. Once it actually wins, Facebook will then copy it. Investors do not have any protection at all.
In fact, Instagram launched its version of a Snapchat feature, Stories. Snap’s growth by the end of last year slowed sharply because of it.
