Snap, Inc. Hits All-Time Stock Market Low, Shares Less Than $10

Snapchat’s parent company has not had an easy time on the stock market since its 2017 initial public offering. On Thursday, Snap, Inc. (SNAP) descended below $10 per share for the first time, after several consecutive days of losses, according to CNBC.

With a couple of hours to go before market close on Thursday, Snap’s share price had dropped by nearly 4 percent, putting it at just above $9.70 per share. It was a new low for the app maker, which went public in March of 2017. Its IPO was reasonably successful, but within a few months, it had already dipped below its IPO price.

The drop may not have necessarily had much to do with anything Snapchat did or did not do, but rather a low level of investor confidence around social media in general. Major industry players like Facebook and Twitter sent executives to testify in front of Congress this week after months of concerns over user privacy and foreign election meddling.

That led to an industry-wide stock market dip in the middle of the week. Twitter, Inc. (TWTR) lost almost 6 percent from its share price on Thursday, while Facebook, Inc. (FB) sunk by over 3 percent at the time of writing. Still, despite their struggles, both companies’ share prices were significantly higher than the single digits exhibited by Snap.

Snap’s drop has been precipitous in recent months. It hit a 12-month high of $21.22 per share in February, meaning it has lost 54 percent in value since then. There has been widespread user dissatisfaction with the photo-sharing app since an infamous app redesign in late 2017. Snapchat shed three million daily active users in the second quarter of 2018 alone.

Though Snapchat remains popular among teens, it has not been able to keep up with the Joneses, even with features it pioneered in the first place. Stories, for example, were originated by Snapchat but have taken on a life of their own on competitor Instagram. The Instagram Stories feature alone has twice as many active users as the entirety of Snapchat’s app offering.

Snapchat also infamously lost a significant amount of stock value earlier this year when celebrity user Kylie Jenner criticized the app post-redesign.