Snap Inc., the parent company behind widely popular ephemeral messaging app Snapchat, was one of the much-waited tech giants to make its debut on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year. Their move not only lent confidence to other tech giants but also to the investors who’d invested into the camera/messaging giant. We’d, however, not been aware of the investors of their initial offering until today.
Thanks to a regulatory filing (via Reuters), we now have a clear look at who all invested their trust and capital into Snapchat — who is currently facing intense competition from Facebook. Snap’s initial public offering was the biggest from a technology giant since the debut of Facebook back in 2012. The company’s tour across the globe seems to have paid off as it has received traction from some of the biggest mutual and hedge funds.
The company has revealed a list of its impressive investors through the quarterly disclosures of asset manager stock holdings. This is found in the 13F filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and presents us info on which investors are buying and selling Snap’s stock. No details about the investor’s current stakes are defined in this regulatory filing, but let’s take a look at who held the company’s stock as of March 31.
It has been revealed that Boston-based Fidelity Investments was the biggest stakeholder in Snap Inc with 33.4 million shares at the end of the first quarter. The Vanguard Group, an investor in Flipkart, was also a participant in the IPO and owned 6.7 million stock. In addition, Daniel Loeb’s Third Point and Daniel Och’s Och-Ziff Capital Management held 2.25 million shares and 1 million shares respectively.
What’s surprising, BlackRock Inc, who actively voices its views regarding corporate governance issues, has also picked up about 9.4 million Snap shares through the stock exchange. It has, however, neither publicly talked about the non-voting rights attached to the shares nor disclosed the name of the mutual funds or exchange-traded funds that hold the shares. A minimal 100,000 million shares are also held by David Tepper’s Appaloosa Management.
As we already know, NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast, has made a strategic investment of $500 million into Snap. This investment was made public only a day after the company’s public debut on the stock exchange. The media venture has already been a long-time partner for the ephemeral messaging giant and saw this as a one-time opportunity to support an innovative venture — helping it drive growth way further.
Recently, Snap Inc. also posted its first ever quarterly earnings report earlier this month and we witnessed the two things we all were dreading the most — slowed growth and surmounting losses. Snap reached just 166 million daily active users, meaning its growth rate was 5 percent compared to the last quarter of 2016. Instagram Stories is already operating at over 200 million daily active users when it launched just six odd months ago. The Spectacles and other operations haven’t been able to save the company from reporting losses of around $2.2 Billion, which is ridiculous as compared to the $104 million in Q1 2016.
