It has been a slow year for technology companies IPOs in the U.S. with only 7 offering this year. So, there is lots of interest in what might come in the first few months of 2017 as the last tech offering that created this much interest was almost a year ago when Match Group Inc., went public. Snap Inc. makes an application for sharing selfies and videos, watching news videos and chatting with friends. After its last funding round, Snap Inc.’s private market value reached $18 billion, meaning that its IPO would be the biggest of a social media company since Twitter Inc. sold shares years ago. The company like the app has matured from a destina- tion for sending silly annotated selfies between friends into a media platform that advertisers are starting to take seriously. As for the company’s evolvement, in the last year they have built out channels where news partners can create mini mobile magazines and it also compiles its users’ short videos into live coverage of events around the world making it a global application for information. Which will make it even more popular with investors and Snap Inc. continues to pioneer new forms of advertising for the app which has over 150 million daily active users.
By Jamie Barrie N ews is that Snapchat, a Los Angeles-based image messaging and multimedia mobile application company created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown[3] when they were students at Stanford University, will look to move forward with a planned initial public offering. Industry experts say the initial public offering could value Snapchat at between $25 billion to $40 billion USD, but there has been no indication from Snapchat officials as to when or the size of the IPO that will be offered. Snapchat, which recently changed its corporate name to Snap Inc., which has got people talking about them pre- paring filings for a listing and predicting an IPO in the first quarter of next year, but this has not been confirmed nor denied and because the company’s revenue is less than $1 billion, Snap Inc. will be able to file IPO documents confi- dentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
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NOVEMBER 2016 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS
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