Snap Inc., the company behind the popular social app Snapchat, today registered its lowest-ever share price, going as low as $8.43. This marks a 43% drop since the start of the year, Business Insider reports. The news comes shortly after Facebook formally announced that its Stories had surpassed 300 million active users earlier this week, putting it well ahead of the number of Snapchat users.
Snapchat has been facing an ever-increasing amount of pressure over the past year or so. In May of last year, Snap Inc. saw its shares drop in price due to disappointing growth, and then once more when Instagram"s Stories feature - taken from Snapchat itself - outgrew the company"s pioneer implementation.
Things didn"t get much better in 2018. Following a poorly-received design change in the app, a tweet by celebrity Kylie Jenner caused Snap to lose $1.5 billion in value. To make matters worse, the quarterly report released in August showed that the number of active Snapchat users had actually dropped.
To the company"s credit, it has been doing some things right lately. An upcoming redesign of its Android app seems to offer much better performance, which has been a major pain point for users on Google"s OS. The two new Spectacles models are also relatively interesting and almost look like normal sunglasses, but even that hasn"t seemed to be able to make the situation better.
Source: Business Insider