Snap released positive Q4 results, but still fell short of expectations

The social messaging company will be cutting 10% of its fulltime workforce.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, announced good news and bad news in its Q4 report. Unfortunately for the social messaging company, the good news fell short of expectations. As a result, Snap saw their shares drop 30% in trading on Tuesday.

The company reported that revenue rose 5% to $1.36 billion, up from the $1.3 billion from the prior year, but missed the $1.38 billion that was estimated. It’s net losses were down: $248 million compared to $288 million last year. But it posted an adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) significantly lower than the prior year: $159 million, compared to $233 million.

“In Q4, we continued to make progress on our core priorities of growing our community and improving depth of engagement, driving topline growth and diversifying our revenue sources, and carving a path to adjusted EBITDA profitability and positive free cash flow,” the company wrote to investors.

“Monthly active users (MAU) increased more than 8% year-over-year and surpassed the 800 million milestone in Q4, on our way toward our goal of one billion MAU. Daily active users (DAU) reached 414 million in Q4, an increase of 10% year-over-year. We continued to deepen engagement with our content platform, with the number of viewers and total time spent watching content growing year-over-year.”

But while users may have grown, Snap’s workforce won’t be. In the week leading up to the report, the company announced that it would be cutting about 10% of its workforce, which totals about 550 employees. According to CEO Evan Spiegal, this was partly done to reduce the amount of stock-based compensation it pays out to senior people.

According to Tuesday’s announcement, the cuts “will reduce layers of management and concentrate our team members in major hub locations to support in-person collaboration, resulting in a reduction in our full-time work force of approximately 10% in Q1 of 2024.”