As the dust settles on what was arguably the hottest IPO of the past few years, both investors and analysts haven’t quite decided what to make of Snap.
Until last week, the company behind popular messaging app Snapchat had received predominantly negative ratings from Wall Street’s analysts causing its share price to trend downwards for large parts of March. Last Monday however, the quiet period for the banks directly involved in Snap’s IPO ended and a slew of positive ratings hit the airwaves, causing the company’s stock price to recover from its mid-March low of $18.90.
Despite the different opinions on whether or not Snap’s shares are a good investment at the current price, there is one point that all analysts seem to agree on: Snap is going to lose money for the foreseeable future.
According to consensus projections gathered by Fortune, this year could turn out to be especially loss-laden for the self-proclaimed camera company. On average, Wall Street analysts expect Snap to lose $2 billion this year on roughly one billion in revenue.
Even for tech company standards, that is a lot. Amazon for example, a notoriously unprofitable company in its early years has never posted a loss as high. The company’s highest annual loss was $1.4 billion in 2000.