SNAP soared 55% on Q4 results: here’s what you should know

Snap Inc (NYSE: SNAP) jumped roughly 50% in the stock market after-hours on its earnings report for the fiscal fourth quarter that broadly pleased shareholders.

Q4 financial highlights

Snap said its net income came in at $22.6 million that translates to a cent per share. In the same quarter last year, it had posted a loss of $113.1 million or 8 cents per share. On an adjusted basis, the camera company earned 22 cents a share.

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At $1.30 billion, Snap’s revenue was up 42% YoY, as per the earnings press release. According to Refinitiv, experts had forecast 10 cents of adjusted EPS on $1.20 billion in revenue. Snap’s free cash flow more than doubled YoY to $161 million in Q4.

Snap added 13 million global DAUs in the recent quarter for a total of 319 million, with ARPU at $4.06. In comparison, analysts had expected $3.79 in ARPU from 316.9 million global DAUs.

Fiscal 2021 was the first full year of positive free cash flow ($224 million) for Snap as revenue jumped 64%, and net loss contracted 48%. Despite a massive move in extended trading, the stock is still down about 20% year-to-date.

Future outlook and CEO’s remarks

For the current quarter, Snap is looking at a revenue of $1.03 billion to $1.08 billion with 328 million to 330 million DAUs. This compares to the consensus estimate of $1.01 billion for revenue and 327.8 million for DAUs. CEO Evan Spiegel said:

2021 was an exciting year, and we made significant progress growing our business and serving our global community. The strength of our core business enabled us to accelerate our investments in AR, transforming the way that the Snap community experiences the world through our camera.

Snap expressed confidence that its advertising business was recovering from Apple’s privacy changes at a faster pace than anticipated but said it’ll take another couple of quarters for the segment to fully return.

A day earlier, peer Meta Platforms said iOS changes could result in a $10 billion hit to revenue this year.