Nearly five years after going public, Snap Inc., creator of the highly popular Snapchat app, has announced its first profitable quarter. During the company's Q4 2021 earnings call, Snap announced a profit of $23 million. Even though it's a small number in comparison to other big tech companies' profit — Apple posted a profit of $34.6 billion and Facebook posted a profit of $33.67 billion — Snap has finally become profitable.
Overall, the company reported net revenue of $4.1 billion for Q4 2021. Snapchat continues to add more daily active users. Last quarter, the company added 13 million daily active users taking the total to 319 million.
A few highlights of Snap Inc's Q4 2021 results (via Snap):
- Revenue increased 64% to $4.1 billion in 2021, compared to the prior year.
- Net loss improved 48% to $488 million in 2021, compared to the prior year.
- Second consecutive year of positive Adjusted EBITDA with $617 million in 2021.
- First full year of positive operating cash flow and Free Cash Flow of $293 million and $223 million.
It's surprising that Snap has posted a profitable revenue for Q4 2021. The company criticized Apple for App Tracking Transparency when it came out last year preventing Snap from showing personalized ads to the user. The company is also said to be working on its own module that will bypass Apple's ATT. Despite all this, the company’s CBO Jeremi Gorman said that Snapchat's advertising business is expanding excellently:
On the Direct Response side, we continued to work through challenges presented by Apple’s ATT-related changes and we are making solid progress. As anticipated, on the Brand side, macro headwinds related to supply chain disruptions and labor disruptions materialized, and remain unresolved in the new year. Despite all of this, we continued to onboard new advertisers, which drove our active advertiser count to another all-time high.