Snap shares fell by more than a third yesterday as it grapples with an advertising slowdown, leaving founder Evan Spiegel and his wife Miranda Kerr with losses of £200m.
The social media giant saw its shares plunge 35 percent after Wall Street became frustrated with its latest quarterly performance.
On Tuesday, Snap said its revenue hit £1 billion in the three months to the end of December, a figure up 5 percent from a year earlier but below market expectations.
Snap bosses said this reflected the “challenging operating environment”, including pressures on the advertising business due to the conflict in the Middle East.
And although it narrowed its quarterly loss to £196m, down from £228m a year earlier, shares plummeted when Wall Street opened yesterday.
Snapcrash: Snap shares fell 35.2%, leaving founder Evan Spiegel and his wife Miranda Kerr (pictured) with losses of £200m.
The update came just days after Snap announced plans to cut 10 percent of its global workforce, or 500 employees.
Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, said: “The rally has not kept pace with the big tech titans.”
‘Snap is trying to distance itself from social media, but it still has to compete for social advertising dollars.
“Snap is a smaller and less essential player for advertisers than Meta, and has struggled to build a strong advertising business.”
Last week, rival Meta posted excellent figures, as the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram reported a 25 percent increase in advertising revenue in the final three months of last year.
Susannah Streeter, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “It’s clear that fewer people are optimistic about Snap’s ability to recover from the advertising slump.”
“A lingering concern about the way Snap is run has turned into a crisis of trust.”
Snap was launched in 2011 by Spiegel and Bobby Murphy.
The tech founder, who is worth an estimated £2.1bn, married model Kerr in 2017.