Snap的未來不能指望騰訊

Even by the tumultuous standards of its short life as a public company, Snap has had a rollercoaster week.

Snap在其上市以來的短暫時間裏股價一直波動巨大，不過即便以其自身的標準來衡量，這周的行情也猶如“過山車”一般。

On Monday its main app, Snapchat, suffered a global service outage for several hours. Tuesday brought the third successive earnings report to miss Wall Street’s estimate since its March initial public offering, sending its stock plunging to below $13.

週一，Snap的主要應用Snapchat遭遇持續數小時的全球服務中斷。週二，Snap公佈的財報自今年3月首次公開發行(IPO)以來連續第三次不及華爾街預期，導致其股價下挫至13美元以下。

Wednesday morning then brought a slight reprieve. Snap’s quarterly regulatory filing revealed that Tencent, the Chinese internet group behind WeChat, had quietly built a 12 per cent stake in the Los Angeles-based company, worth more than $2bn.

接着，週三早晨的消息讓人略爲鬆了一口氣。Snap上報的季度監管文件顯示，旗下擁有微信(WeChat)的中國互聯網集團騰訊(Tencent)已默默將其對這家總部位於洛杉磯的公司的持股增至12%，價值超過20億美元。

Both the reaction to Monday’s outage and Tencent’s investment show that, despite a loss of faith on Wall Street that has sunk its shares almost 25 per cent below its $17 IPO price, there are still believers in Snap’s story.

對於週一服務中斷以及騰訊入股的反應表明，儘管華爾街缺乏信心導致Snap股價較其17美元的IPO發行價下跌近25%，但仍有人對Snap買賬。

“A world without Snapchat is not a world I want to live in,” tweeted @alisdirections when the service was offline. “My Snapchat isn’t even working, might as well throw my whole phone away,” added @vpxvx.

“我不想活在一個沒有Snapchat的世界。”在Snapchat服務中斷期間，@alisdirections在Twitter上發帖說。“我的Snapchat都不工作了，我還不如把手機整個扔掉呢。”@vpxvx補充說。

But even though American teenagers continue to adore Snapchat, opening the app as many as 25 times a day according to the company, much of the rest of the world remains befuddled or indifferent.

然而，儘管美國青少年還是很喜歡Snapchat（根據Snapchat的數據，他們每日打開該應用的次數多達25次），但全球其他地區仍然搞不懂這款應用或對它不感冒。

Evan Spiegel, the Los Angeles-based company’s co-founder and chief executive, acknowledged for the first time on Tuesday that Snapchat, which added just 4.5m new daily active users in the last three months, was attracting new users at a “lower rate than we would have liked” and that the app could be “difficult to understand or hard to use” for many people.

Snap聯合創始人兼首席執行官埃文?施皮格爾(Evan Spiegel)週二首次承認，Snapchat吸收新用戶的速度“不理想”，很多人覺得這款應用可能“很難理解或不好用”。過去3個月，Snapchat僅新增了450萬個每日活躍用戶。

He said Snap is redesigning its app to improve usability, especially for Android devices, in the hopes of broadening its appeal beyond Western millennials to older people and those in emerging markets.

他表示，Snap正重新設計其應用以提高易用性（特別是對安卓設備），希望將其吸引力擴展到西方千禧一代以外的年紀較大人羣以及新興市場中的用戶。

Mr Spiegel acknowledged the careful balancing act that he faces, in retaining the intimacy and fun that made his app so appealing to young users.

施皮格爾承認，需要謹慎把握平衡：在擴展對其他人羣吸引力的同時，還要保持令年輕用戶對他的應用欲罷不能的東西——私密感與趣味。

“There is a strong likelihood that the redesign of our application will be disruptive to our business in the short term, and we don’t yet know how the behaviour of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application,” he said.

他表示：“我們應用的重新設計很有可能會在短期內擾亂我們的業務，目前還不清楚，當人們開始使用新版應用時，我們社區的行爲會發生何種變化。”

The promise to address slowing user growth did not prevent Wall Street analysts from taking a scythe to their forecasts in the wake of Tuesday’s results. Several brokers downgraded their recommendation on the stock, after Snap added half as many new users as Wall Street had been expecting.

解決用戶數量增長緩慢問題的承諾，沒有阻止華爾街分析師在週二財報公佈後下調他們的預測。Snap增加的新用戶數量僅達華爾街預期半數的消息公佈後，幾家券商調低了對該股的推薦度。

Snap’s revenues grew 126 per cent year-on-year to $208m but came in well short of analysts’ forecasts, as net losses more than tripled to $443m. Snap executives blamed the revenue shortfall on near-term disruption from the shift to automated advertising sales, which use an auction-based system that has driven down prices.

Snap營收同比增長126%，至2.08億美元，但其表現遠未達到分析師的預期——淨虧損增長逾兩倍，至4.43億美元。Snap高管把營收滑坡歸咎於轉向自動化廣告銷售對業績造成的短期干擾，這種銷售策略採用基於拍賣的系統，壓低了價格。

Many analysts, however, believe that Snap is losing advertiser dollars to the much larger networks available at Facebook and Google.

然而，很多分析師認爲，這是廣告商轉投Facebook和谷歌(Google)所致，這兩家公司的網絡規模要大得多。

“We still haven’t seen an inflection in [daily user] growth despite substantial product innovation,” said RBC analyst Mark Mahaney in a note that downgraded the broker’s rating from “outperform” to “sector perform”. “Advertisers go where the eyes are and we need to see further user growth.”

“儘管進行了重大產品革新，但我們還沒有看到（日用戶數量）增長出現明顯加速。”加拿大皇家銀行(RBC)分析師馬克?馬哈尼(Mark Mahaney)在一份研究報告中表示，“廣告商會追隨關注度，我們需要看到用戶數量進一步增長。”這份研究報告將該銀行對Snap的評級從“跑贏大盤”下調至“與同板塊持平”。

After such a disappointing performance, the timing of Snap’s announcement of Tencent’s stake raised eyebrows among some analysts, as the company’s filing noted it was “not obligated to disclose” the investment.

Snap在公佈瞭如此令人失望的業績後宣佈騰訊入股，這一時機選擇引起一些分析師的側目——正如Snap在監管文件中所指出的，它“沒有強制性義務要披露”這筆投資。

“We have long been inspired by the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of Tencent and we are grateful to continue our longstanding and productive relationship that began over four years ago,” Snap wrote in its filing, adding that the two companies planned to share “ideas and experiences”.

Snap在文件中寫道，“長期以來，我們一直受到騰訊創造力和開拓精神的鼓舞，我們很慶幸能夠繼續這份開始於4年多以前的長期而富有成效的關係”，並補充稱，兩家公司計劃分享“想法和經驗”。

Nonetheless, Brian Wieser, analyst at Pivotal Research, said Tencent’s move was unlikely to make any difference to Snap’s valuation. The company’s shares were trading 15 per cent lower on Wednesday morning, even after Tencent’s latest endorsement.

然而，Pivotal Research分析師布賴恩?威澤(Brian Wieser)表示，騰訊的舉動不太可能改變Snap的估值。週三早盤，在騰訊做出最新支持姿態之後，Snap股價依然下跌15%。

“It seems highly unlikely that Tencent would ever be in a position to buy the whole company given sensitivity around foreign influence in social media in the US and given China’s own issues with foreign investment at the present time, and it seems equally unlikely that Snap would ever be allowed to establish a foothold in China,” Mr Wieser said.

威澤表示：“鑑於外國勢力對社交媒體的影響在美國是個敏感問題，中國自己目前在對外投資方面也存在一些問題，騰訊收購整個公司的可能性看上去極低，而且Snap有朝一日獲准在中國立足的可能性也同樣極低。”

“That said, any time a given investor — whether a company or random billionaire — makes a big investment it can help to convey that at least someone out there believes in the long-term potential for the company,” he added.

他補充稱：“儘管如此，任何時候如果某個投資者（不管是一家公司還是某個億萬富翁）做出鉅額投資，它能夠幫助傳達這樣的信息——至少還有人相信這家公司的長期潛力。”

The show of faith was desperately needed after Snap executives staged what analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research called “a reversal on almost every key strategic point from the last few years in one earnings call”.

在Snap的高管謀求改變——用Jackdaw Research分析師簡?道森(Jan Dawson)的話來說就是“用一個財報電話會議的功夫就把過去幾年幾乎所有關鍵性的戰略要點都逆轉了”——後，這種展示信心的舉動正是Snap迫切需要的。

The shift included Snap’s new-found ambition to reach older users and markets with less developed wireless networks, rather than focusing on its core demographic of under-30s in places with high-speed mobile coverage. Even disclosing that a Snapchat redesign was under way was an unprecedented step for a company that has rivalled Apple in its efforts to maintain the secrecy of its product plans.

此次轉變包括Snap的如下新抱負：試圖觸及年齡更大的用戶和無線網絡欠發達市場，而不是把重點放在高速移動網絡覆蓋地區30歲以下的核心用戶羣體。對於產品計劃保密工作一向做得跟蘋果(Apple)一樣滴水不漏的Snap來說，即便是對外透露正在重新設計Snapchat這件事，也是前所未有的舉動。

“The mythos of Snapchat for a long time was Evan Spiegel, the product genius,” Mr Dawson said. “His gut doesn’t seem to be serving the company very well.”

“長久以來Snapchat的神話一直是產品天才埃文?施皮格爾，”道森表示，“眼下他的直覺似乎不那麼有助於本公司的發展了。”

In defence of doing product development by “thesis” rather than basing decisions on hard data, Mr Spiegel on Tuesday pointed to the fact that Snapchat’s much-copied Stories format had “basically no one using it for the first six months or so”.

施皮格爾主張基於“觀點”來開發產品、而非根據確鑿數據來決策，週二，他援引如下事實爲上述觀點辯護：Snapchat如今被廣泛抄襲的Stories設計，“在最初6個月左右基本上沒人使用”。

Yet Tuesday’s results also provided Snap sceptics with a costly example of how the company’s decision-making can go awry. It took at $40m hit from unsold inventory of its video-camera sunglasses, Spectacles.

不過，週二的財報還給了對Snap持懷疑態度的人一個昂貴的例子，表明該公司的決策會如何出岔子。該公司配有攝像機的太陽眼鏡Spectacles的未售庫存導致其減記4000萬美元。

The write-off is roughly double Spectacles’ $20m in sales for its first three quarters on the market, Mr Dawson noted. “I suspect that was a hubris-based decision rather than a data-based decision,” he said.

道森指出，這筆減記幾乎是Spectacles面世頭3個季度銷售額（2000萬美元）的兩倍。他表示，“我猜這是因爲自大做出的決定，而不是根據數據做出的決定。”

On Tuesday’s call with analysts, Mr Spiegel insisted that upheaval was nothing new at his young company. “There has been a ton of change in a very short period of time,” he said. “That’s been the case over the life of the business in the last six years?.?.?.?I guess we are just not afraid to make changes in the long term interest of the business.”

施皮格爾週二在與分析師的電話會議上堅稱，對於還很年輕的Snap而言，劇變不足爲奇。“在非常短的時間內出現了無數改變。”他表示，“這是這家企業在過去6年裏習以爲常的事……我想我們就是無懼於爲了公司長遠利益而做出改變。”