Last October, researchers surveyed thousands of teenagers across America and found that Snapchat is the most popular social media app among teens beating Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Several weeks later, Snap is confidentially working on their IPO process.
Snap Inc. has filed paperwork for an initial public offering, which may value the popular social messaging app at $25 billion. Making the popular video sharing app among teens, one of the highest IPO in recent years.
An IPO is expected as early as March, which could value the company at between $20 billion to $25 billion. At the moment, Snapchat has not publicly broken the news, when they will start trading, or how much the company is looking to raise in the the IPO. But, if Snap does goes public, it will be the largest company to go public on a U.S. exchange since Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group made it’s debut at a $168 billion valuation.
The plan to go public has been on the mind of Snap’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, for a long time. At a May 2015 tech conference Spiegel said, “We need to IPO, we have a plan to do that. An IPO is really important.”
Last week, Snapchat released vending a new product in Venice Beach, Snapchat Spectacles, video glasses allow users to share 10 second video clips and upload them directly to Snapchat. Since then, those same pair of glasses are on sale for up to $1,000 each.
The Snapchat spectacles are on sale in Venice Beach for $129. When consumers purchase a pair of spectacles, the “Snapbots”, vending machines selling the product, say “our very own vending machines that dispense Spectacles and never seem to stay in one location for too long”.
After a consumer purchases a pair of spectacles all they have to do is pair them with a phone. The glasses are always on and the LED ring on the front of the glasses will turn on when users press the button to start recording. The videos will automatically appear in their memories tab.
Snapchat’s CEO told the Wall Street Journal that he plans on releasing the product in stages. “We’re going to take a slow approach to rolling them out. It’s about us figuring out if it fits into people’s lives and seeing how they like it.”
Snapchat is expected to reach nearly 60 million users in the United States by 2016 and that number is expected to increase by 13.6 percent by 2017, according to recent studies. In addition, studies argue that Snapchat generates 10 billion video views per day.