Snapchat CEO Says 70% of Users Are Women

Nov 20, 2013

Snapchat CEO Says 70% of Users Are Women

By Douglas MacMillan

Roughly 70% of Snapchat users are women, the chief executive of the messaging app said at a closed-doorGoldman SachsGS -0.96% conference Wednesday. Co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said Snapchat users are sending 400 million“snaps” a day on the service, where messages disappear after a few seconds, according to a person who was present at the meeting. He said half of Snapchat’s users have tried out “stories,” a feature the company introduced last month to link multiple messages together. The on-stage interview, titled “What Lies Ahead for Snapchat,” covered the two-year-old company’s plans after spurning a roughly $3 billion acquisition offer from FacebookFB +0.15%. Snapchat has not disclosed its number of users. Spiegel was asked about user numbers Wednesday but declined to discuss them. Snapchat has no revenue, and Spiegel said the company is in no hurry to make money from advertisers. “There are a lot of things in our product that make it appealing for advertisers, but we want to do it right,” Spiegel told a packed room at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, according to the person who was present. Mary Ritti, a spokeswoman for Snapchat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Spiegel said Snapchat’s biggest competitors are rival messaging apps. WeChat and Line are popular in their home markets of China and Japan, respectively, but “there are no real huge players worldwide,” he said. To expand overseas, Snapchat is relying on users to translate its app into new languages – a low-cost strategy that’s worked for other Internet services such as Facebook and Pinterest. The company plans to add to its current team of 30 employees, Spiegel said.

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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