Snap Inc bets big on the Indian market

Snap Inc CEO-co-founder Evan Spiegel is betting big on the Indian market. During the Q4 2021 earnings call, he said that the company has made a concerted effort over the past year to organise its team and make investments in our products to realise the 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. Our desire to build a better way of communicating visually through our camera has evolved into a leading platform for augmented reality. 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,” he said.

The CEO said that the company grew revenue 64% year over year in 2021, including 42% year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter. “We achieved adjusted EBITDA profitability for the second consecutive year. We recorded our first full year of positive free cash flow, and Q4 marked our first quarter of positive net income. Achieving positive free cash flow for the full year is an important milestone, as we are increasingly able to self-fund our investments in the future,” he added.

He informed that over 200 million people engage with augmented reality on Snapchat 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. There are now over 250,000 Lens creators from more than 200 countries and territories, who use Lens Studio to build AR experiences.”
They have made more than 2.5 million Lenses that have been viewed by Snapchatters now 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,” said the CEO.He added that the company has made a catalogue of licensed music and audio clips available to integrate into Lenses so that creators can build more immersive experiences.

“We rolled out our Gifting feature, which lets Snapchatters directly support Lens creators through story replies, and announced Ghost, our AR innovation lab, providing grants of up to $150,000 and Snap team support for creative AR projects. In addition to the momentum with augmented reality on Snapchat, we are very excited by the growing demand from businesses, who want to bring Snap's AR capabilities into their own apps and websites. We are meeting this growing demand through Camera Kit, which enables partners to easily integrate our AR technology and creator ecosystem in ways that meet their business objectives,” he added.

The company rolled out successful new shows, including the Me and You show, which stars Snapchatters and their friends using our cameos feature, and reached over 50 million viewers in Q4. In Q4 2021, he said, the number of content viewers on Snapchat continued to grow at a significantly faster rate year over year than overall time spent watching content, as the