Shares of Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, are down 1.2% at $19.97, after Instagram announced its Snapchat-like Stories app has more daily users.
The Facebook-owned Instagram announced on Thursday that Stories has more than 200 million daily users, ahead of the 161 million reported by Snapchat.
Things haven’t gone so well for tech’s most darling IPO of 2017. Snap had a blistering March 2 debut, which saw its first trade occur at $24 after pricing at $17. The stock hit an all-time high of $27.09 on March 3, but has been in a tailspin ever since.
Snap received several “sell” ratings early on as analysts questioned its ability to deal with competition from bigger companies.
“Investors in Snap will be exposed to an upstart facing aggressive competition from much larger companies, with a core user base that is not growing by much and which is only relatively elusive,” Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group, wrote as he placed a $10 target on the stock the day Snap went public.
After putting in a high the day after its IPO, Snap tumbled nearly 30% in the following weeks before receiving a deluge of bullish ratings from its underwriters.
Here's a rundown of those calls:
- Goldman Sachs: Buy, $27 price target Morgan Stanley: Overweight, $28 price target Citi: Buy, $27 price target RBC: Outperform, $31 price target Jefferies: Buy, $30 price target Oppenheimer: Market perform Credit Suisse: Outperform, $30 price target UBS: Neutral, $24 price target Stifel: Hold, $24 price target Cowen: Outperform, $26 price target
Snap was able to ride the momentum of those ratings, moving back up to $24.40 a share on March 27. Since then, however, the stock has pressed back towards the post-IPO low of $18.90 as the company has had to deal with companies like Facebook cloning some of its ideas.
On Wednesday, Snap announced its first-ever quarterly conference call will take place on May 10. It is unclear if CEO Evan Spiegel will participate.
