Snap's expansion efforts in India continue to prove successful: Evan Spiegel

Speaking to analysts during the Q4 earnings call, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Evan Spiegel said the company is using its learnings in India to plan its community growth in new geographies Snap Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Evan Spiegel has said that the American camera and social media company's expansion efforts in India continue to prove successful. He also said that the company is using its learnings in India to plan its community growth in new geographies. "We've made a concerted effort over the past year to organize our team and make investments in our products to realize these monetization and community growth opportunities. Our expansion efforts in India continue to prove successful, and we are using our learnings to inform how we approach community growth in new geographies," Spiegel told analysts during the Q4 earnings call. He also said Snap has evolved into a leading platform for augmented reality (AR). "Our AR products and services are driving major impact at scale today, as Snapchatters use our services to shop, play, learn, explore, and entertain themselves," Spiegel said. In Q4, Snap's community grew by 20% year over year to 319 million daily active users. "We grew sequentially in each of our three regions. While North America and Europe represent our largest monetization opportunities in the near and medium term, rest of world represents our largest community growth opportunity," he said. Snapchat engages over 200 million people with augmented reality every day and its community now plays with AR Lenses an average of more than 6 billion times per day. "This momentum and the creative energy of the Snapchat community makes us incredibly excited about the future of augmented reality. At our Lens Fest AR developer event in December, we gave an update on the strength and diversity of our AR developer community, which continues to grow," Spiegel stated. Snap has over 250,000 Lens creators from more than 200 countries and territories, who use Lens Studio to build AR experiences. These creators have made more than 2.5 million Lenses that have been viewed by Snapchatters more than 3.5 trillion times, and over 300 creators have each reached more than 1 billion views of their Lenses. "As Snapchatters explore new AR experiences to enhance what they see and do in their daily life, we will continue to develop tools to empower Lens creators to push the boundaries of what is possible through the Snapchat Camera. At Lens Fest, we also shared the ways that we are supporting creators and evolving the tools they use to build for our platform. We introduced a Lens Call-To-Action feature that lets creators include a link within a Lens, making it easy to drive Snapchatters to a new destination, like a shop, from within the AR experience," the Snap chief noted. Snap CFO Derek Andersen said that the Q4 financial results reflect the company's priorities of growing its community, making focused investments in the future of its business, and scaling the operations efficiently in order to drive toward profitability and positive free cash flow. Snap's total revenue for Q4 was $1.298 billion, an increase of 42% year over year, down from 57% in the prior quarter but exceeding our expectations entering the quarter, Andersen said. He noted that Adjusted EBITDA was $327 million in Q4, an improvement of $161 million year over year. "We delivered adjusted EBITDA leverage of 42% in Q4 as we continue to invest in the future of our business while making progress toward sustained profitability and positive free cash flow," he added. The company's net income was $23 million in Q4, an improvement of $136 million over the prior year, representing net income leverage of 35% and marking its first quarter of GAAP profitability.