Snap Snapped- MMM #29

4 min readJul 25, 2022

Hi there,

This’ll be one of my last weeks in London. Wrapping things up definitely feels a bit weird still, especially after the very intense courses during the past month. I’ve been out biking in the early mornings to appreciate the city before the tourists come out which produced some surreal pictures.

📃 In this Monday Morning Mashup:

⭐Highlight: Snap Snapped
🚀Space: SpaceX breaks previous record
👔 Business: Morgan Stanley on Non-GAAP measures
🎁Extra: the first lunar curse was…

Have a great week!

⭐Highlight: Snap Snapped

Snapchat: the smash hit app that rivaled Instagram for a while seems to be facing competition. Although user numbers are up (beating the forecast even), revenue growth is slowing down. The reason: advertising.

The company cites privacy changes to iOS as one of the drivers behind slower growth of advertising revenue, something I’ve written about before (MMM #9).

To be honest, I was surprised that the daily active users of Snapchat were increasing this rapidly still. In my friend group people rarely use it, if at all, or have uninstalled it entirely.

It’ll be interesting to see where Snapchat is headed next. The social media landscape is definitely changing after the introduction of short form video content by TikTok. What would it look like in 10 years?

Snap shares plunge 25% as economy, fierce competition slow revenue growth | Reuters — www.reuters.com
Snap Inc on Thursday painted a grim picture of the effects of a weakening economy on social media and declined to make a forecast in “incredibly challenging” conditions, sending its shares down 25% and setting off a chain reaction of stocks among rivals.

🚀Space: SpaceX breaks previous record

SpaceX has the goal of launching once per week this year, that’s 52 launches. Last year it managed to launch 31 missions, a record which the company has beaten this week.

Using its partially reusable technology, the firm has dramatically reduced the cost to orbit. This has led to the firm quickly gaining market share, now sitting at above 65% (development shown below, thanks to Wikipedia).

With the company set to match its goal, the sky really seems the limit. I’m personally following the development of Starship, their next rocket, closely. The new one will be fully reusable, which is set to slash launch costs significantly again.

SpaceX has monopolized the launch market through sheer technological prowess. Something we do not see often, but I’ve talked about it before in the semiconductor market where ASML holds a similar position.

SpaceX whizzes past annual launch record with Starlink mission | Reuters — www.reuters.com
Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Friday broke its record for the number of rockets launched in a calendar year, topping last year’s slate of 31 missions amid a whirlwind campaign to launch its own internet satellites into orbit.

👔 Business: Morgan Stanley on Non-GAAP measures

Earlier this year in my accounting class at LSE there was a lecture focusing on the usefulness of non-GAAP profit measures. Non-GAAP refers to financial measures that are calculated outside of reporting requirements. For example: EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization).

Recently Morgan Stanley published a report on the (increasing) usefulness of these measures for measuring economic reality. This made me think of an argument made by my professor at LSE: if reporting standards no longer reflect economic reality well, they should be changed. We saw a similar move with leases in IFRS-16 for example.

Interesting read for sure and remarkably accessible even with little financial background.