$Microsoft (MSFT.US)$ Good stock.

$Snap Inc (SNAP.US)$ Snap reported a record 306M daily active users for the third-quarter last week, showing 23% year over year growth, and the earnings card showed record users in all territories. In Q3'21, 96M of Snap's 306M daily active users were from the U.S. and Canada, which calculates to a geographic user share of 31%. The number of users outside of North America surged to a new record of 210M in the third-quarter, 80M of which came from Europe and 130M came from other regions, loosely grouped together as the rest of the world. The geographic user shares for Europe and ROW were 26% and 42%. The fastest growth, once again, came from countries outside North America and Europe. These regions added 10M new daily active users to Snap's platform quarter over quarter.
Non-western regions and markets present the largest growth and market opportunity for Snap. While the U.S. is the most profitable market for Snap regarding advertising dollars and monetization, Snap's low penetration rate of 5% in non-western markets creates a long runway for user and revenue growth.
The third-quarter was largely a successful quarter for Snap, commercially speaking. The firm's top line surged 57% year over year due to accelerating platform and user growth. Snap's Q3'21 revenues soared to $1.07B but they fell slightly short of the firm's guidance of $1.1B. Although losses narrowed year over year, Snap, despite surging user and ARPU growth, failed to report a profit. The loss for Q3'21 was $72.0M.
After the social media submitted its earnings card, shares of Snap dropped nearly 30%.
The reasons for the steep drop were that Snap fell short of revenue expectations (including its own forecast) and submitted a weak sales forecast for the next quarter. Snap expects just $1.17B to $1.21B in revenues in Q4'21, which indicates slowing revenue growth. Snap's revenue outlook, however, still implies a minimum of 9% revenue growth, quarter over quarter…
Growing concerns about Snap's revenues are related to $Apple (AAPL.US)$ iOS 14.5 update in April. The iOS update included a feature called App Transparency Tracking which gives users the option to limit advertisers' ad tracking capabilities. For advertisers, this policy change has wide ranging implications because the opt out feature allows users to effectively limit advertisers' campaign insights. Less ad tracking means less efficient market campaigns which translates into a lower ROAS (return on ad spend) for advertisers. Another factor affecting Snap's ad business relates to the current supply chain crisis… which appears to be getting worse, not better. Advertisers are holding back on ad campaigns since it takes longer to get goods to retail stores. These issues represent short term commercial challenges for Snap.
Final thoughts
Snap's ad revenues may decline short term, but the long term trend in digital advertising indicates growing ad spend, which is set to benefit large platforms like Snap with hundreds of millions of active users. Snap is growing its user base and ARPU rapidly, which are the two most important metrics for social media companies. After Snap went through a near-30% drop in pricing, I bought Snap for the recovery potential!

Hello, mooers! On Apr.22,2021 5:00 PM EST / Apr.23,2021 5:00 AM SGT, our moo community moo_live will broadcast the earnings conference call of  $Intel (INTC.US)$ , the world's largest and highest valued semiconductor chip manufacturer, to report its first-quarter 2021 results.
Schedule:
INTC: 04/22/2021 5:00 PM EST/ 04/23/2021 5.00 AM SGT
Earnings Preview
Coronavirus-induced work-from-home and online learning waves may have bolstered sales of processors utilized in enterprise laptops and data center servers. This, in turn, is anticipated to get reflected in ...