Snap recently had its first earning call of the year. The company did manage to miss expectations however, its revenue from “other categories” which includes the money generated mostly from Spectacles, jumped up by a fair degree. The company generated around $8.3 million from the category in the first quarter of the year, up from $84.5 million in Q4, 2016.
Okay, so Snap refused to say how many Spectacles it had sold. However, let’s say for a moment that the other categories revenue stemmed mostly from Spectacles, the company would have had to sell somewhere around 30,000 pairs in Q4 and in excess of 60,000 pairs in Q1, this year. That is an impressive number but again, a lot would depend upon how much of this other revenue came from places other than spectacles.
Meanwhile, $8.3 million still does seem like a drop in the bucket –whether you consider Snap’s $2.2 Billion Q1 losses including the company’s stock based compensation, or the $200 million or so without it. Clearly, the company can’t rely upon spectacles alone to take it out of its troubles. If it really looks to some sort of hardware as its savior, Snap would need to do more.
Spectacles are tied up in part to the company’s own Snapchat app. So, if the app registers a slow growth — as it has been of late — there is only so much that Spectacles will be able to do for it. Along with boosting the popularity of its main app and finding other markets to grow in, the company might also want to start looking at hardware that could in turn boost the popularity of its app.
And Snap could well be working in the direction even as we speak. The company even set up a research wing in China near the end of last year. So yeah, we could see something come out of that before soon.
