UPDATED 22:29 EST / OCTOBER 04 2018

APPS

As its share price hits record low, Snap aims to get profitable next year

Snap Inc., a company famous for saying in its initial public offering documents that it may never be profitable, is now trying to be profitable, according to a memo to staff from Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel.

The memo, dated Sept. 26 and first reported Thursday by Cheddar, has Spiegel (pictured) admitting that the company “rushed our redesign, solving one problem but creating many others.” He added that “in our excitement to innovate and bring many new products into the world, we have lost the core of what made Snapchat the fastest way to communicate.”

Snap launched a redesign of its core Snapchat app in 2017 in an effort to milk more money from users. But in the process, it managed to alienate a decent portion of its primarily millennial user base.

The memo goes on to describe how Snap is attempting to fix the mistakes of the past, including work on a new design for the Discover section in the app, along with details on how Snap aims to be profitable at some point next year.

The news comes as Snap’s share price has hit record lows. As of the close of trading Thursday, they sat at $7.80. That compared to an IPO price in March 2017 of $17 a share and a peak of $27.09 March 3, 2017. Its highest price in the last 12 months was $20.75 on Feb. 9.

Although Snap did primarily bring about its decline by its own actions, it was the nimbleness of the Facebook Inc.-owned Instagram that has come to the fore — not only competition but in the long term, possibly its killer. Instagram shamelessly copied the best features of Snapchat without forcing unwanted designs on users and it has thrived as a consequence.

Despite recent turmoil with its leadership and a minor account hacking scandal along the way, Instagram now has more than 1 billion users and was valued by one analyst at $100 billion in June, a nice return for Facebook given its acquisition price was $1 billion in 2012.

Some are predicting that Instagram may actually surpass Facebook itself by user numbers in the next few years, while Snapchat peaked at just below 200 million users and hasn’t seen much in the way of growth since.

Photo: jdlasica/Flickr

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