Snapchat parent company Snap beat Wall Street expectations for the first time in its fourth quarter as a public company.
Shares in the social media company spiked Tuesday, rising 22 percent in after-hours trading. Snap added nearly 9 million daily active users in the last quarter, the most since the third quarter of 2016, pumping its daily user base to 187 million.
Snap posted losses of $0.13 per share on $285.7 million in revenue versus expectations of a $0.16 per share loss on $252.95 million in revenue. Snap reported a net loss of $350 million for the quarter.
Snap hit the stock market last March with plenty of hype. The IPO valued the company at approximately $24 billion, making it the largest valuation for a U.S. tech company IPO since Facebook in 2012.
But after an initial stock surge, shares tumbled after Snap reported significant losses in multiple quarterly reports paired with sluggish user growth. Even with today’s rosier report, Snap’s stock is down approximately 42.5 percent since it started trading publicly in March.
On a call with investors, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said the company plans to slow down its hiring. Snap has brought in 2,400 people over the last two years, and this year, the focus will be on increasing productivity and “continuing to build an inclusive and creative culture.”
“While it was critical to build our team to keep pace with the growth of our business, it has become clear that we can now unlock substantially more productivity simply by changing the way that we work and by continuing to build an inclusive and creative culture,” Spiegel said. “As such, we plan to moderate the growth of our team over the next year and focus on making sure that we have the right team, leadership, and organizational practices in place to support our culture and our mission.”
In the fourth quarter, the Snap redesigned its social app to draw a clear line between users’ friends and brands that the company says “separates the social from the media.” Spiegel said the rollout of the new design will be complete in March.
Snap has an engineering center in Seattle, and last year signaled plans to expand with a big new office lease. According to its job site, Snap is hiring for a variety of engineering, research and product and project management positions in Seattle.
