Snap (SNAP) 10-K2023 FY Annual report

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the Securities Act, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, about us and our industry that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this report, including statements regarding guidance, our future results of operations or financial condition, our future stock repurchase programs or stock dividends, business strategy and plans, user growth and engagement, product initiatives, objectives of management for future operations, and advertiser and partner offerings, are forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “contemplate,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “going to,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “target,” “will,” or “would” or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions. We caution you that the foregoing may not include all of the forward-looking statements made in this report.

You should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We have based the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K primarily on our current expectations and projections about future events and trends, including our financial outlook, macroeconomic uncertainty, and geo-political conflicts, that we believe may continue to affect our business, financial condition, results of operations, and prospects. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors described under “Risk Factor Summary” below, “Risk Factors” in Part I, Item 1A, and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including among other things:

Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The results, events, and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements may not be achieved or occur, and actual results, events, or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.

In addition, statements that “we believe” and similar statements reflect our beliefs and opinions on the relevant subject. These statements are based on information available to us as of the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. And while we believe that information provides a reasonable basis for these statements, that information may be limited or incomplete. Our statements should not be read to indicate that we have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into, or review of, all relevant information. These statements are inherently uncertain, and investors are cautioned not to unduly rely on these statements.

The forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this report to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this report or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, including future developments related to geo-political conflicts and macroeconomic conditions, except as required by law. We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements, and you should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements. Our forward-looking statements do not reflect the potential impact of any future acquisitions, dispositions, joint ventures, restructurings, legal settlements, or investments.

Investors and others should note that we may announce material business and financial information to our investors using our websites (including investor.snap.com), filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, webcasts, press releases, investor letters, and conference calls. We use these mediums, including Snapchat and our website, to communicate with our members and the public about our company, our products, and other issues. It is possible that the information that we make available may be deemed to be material information. We therefore encourage investors and others interested in our company to review the information that we make available on our websites.

Our business is subject to significant risks and uncertainties that make an investment in us speculative and risky. Below we summarize what we believe are the principal risk factors but these risks are not the only ones we face, and you should carefully review and consider the full discussion of our risk factors in the section titled “Risk Factors,” together with the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

1.    Our Strategy and Advertising Business

We operate in a highly competitive and rapidly changing environment so we must continually innovate our products and evolve our business model for us to succeed.

We emphasize rapid innovation and prioritize long-term user engagement over short-term financial conditions or results if we believe that it will benefit the aggregate user experience and improve our financial performance over the long term. Although we have achieved profitability in certain periods, we have a history of operating losses and, as a result of our long-term focus, we may prioritize investments and expenses we believe are necessary for our long-term growth over achieving short-term profitability. Investments in our future, including through new products or acquisitions, are inherently risky and may not pay off, which would adversely affect our ability to settle the principal and interest payments on our outstanding convertible senior notes or other indebtedness when due, and further delay or hinder our ability to sustain profitability. This in turn would hinder our ability to secure additional financing to meet our current and future financial needs on favorable terms, or at all.

We generate substantially all of our revenue from advertising. Our advertising business is most effective when our advertisers succeed. Driving their success requires continual investment in our advertising products and may be hindered by competitive challenges and various legal, regulatory, and operating system changes that make it more difficult for us to achieve and demonstrate a meaningful return for our advertisers. For example, on-going changes to privacy and data protection laws and mobile operating systems continue to present issues for us in measuring the effectiveness of advertisements on our services. Additionally, individuals are becoming increasingly resistant to the processing of personal data to deliver behavioral, interest-based, or targeted advertisements, and regulators are likewise scrutinizing such data processing activities, which could reduce the demand for our products and services and threaten our primary revenue stream. Alternative methods, to the extent we can develop such methods in compliance with current or future privacy and data protection laws, mobile operating system requirements, and other requirements, may take time to develop and be adopted by our advertisers and users, and may not be as effective as prior methods.

We believe that this impact on our targeting, measurement, and optimization capabilities has negatively affected and may continue to negatively affect our operating results. In addition, our advertising business is seasonal, volatile, and cyclical, which could result in fluctuations in our quarterly revenues and operating results, including the expectations of our business prospects.

Our business and operations have been, and in the future could be, adversely affected by events beyond our control, such as health epidemics and geo-political events and conflicts. In addition, macroeconomic factors like labor shortages and disruptions, supply chain disruptions, banking instability, and inflation continue to cause logistical challenges, increased input costs, and inventory constraints for our advertisers, which in turn may also halt or decrease advertising spending, and harm our business.

2.    Our Community and Competition

We need to continually innovate and create new products, and enhance our existing products, to attract, retain, and grow our global community. Products that we create may fail to attract or retain users or partners, or to generate meaningful revenue, if any. In addition, we have and expect to continue to expand organically and through acquisitions, including in international markets, which we may not be able to effectively manage or scale. If our community does not see the value in our products or brand, or if competitors offer better alternatives, our community could easily switch to other services. Although we have experienced rapid growth in our community over the last few years, we have also experienced declines and there can be no assurance that declines won’t happen again.

Many of our competitors have significantly more resources and larger market shares than we do, which gives them advantages over us that can make it more difficult for us to succeed.

3.    Our Partners

We primarily rely on Google, Apple, and Amazon to provide their mobile operating systems and other services for our applications and other core services, including our platform. If these partners do not provide their services as we expect, terminate their services, or change the terms, or their interpretation of the terms, of our agreements, or change the functionality of their mobile operating systems in ways that are adverse to us, our service may be interrupted and our product experience could be degraded, which may harm our reputation, increase our costs, or make it harder for us to sustain profitability. Many other parts of our business depend on partners, including content partners and advertising partners, so our success depends on our ability to attract and retain these partners.

4.    Our Technology and Regulation

Our business is complex and success depends on our ability to rapidly innovate, the interoperability of our service on many different smartphones and mobile operating systems, and our ability to handle sensitive user data with the care our users expect. Because our systems and our products are constantly changing, we are susceptible to data breaches, cyberattacks, security incidents, bugs, and other vulnerabilities and errors in how our products work and are measured. We may also fail to maintain effective processes that report our metrics or financial results. Given the complexity of the systems involved and the rapidly changing nature of mobile devices and operating systems, we expect to encounter issues, particularly if we continue to expand in parts of the world where mobile data systems and connections are less stable.

We are also subject to complex and evolving federal, state, local, and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, biometric processing, content, artificial intelligence, taxes, and other matters, which are subject to change and have uncertain interpretations. Given the nature of our business, we are particularly susceptible to changes in such laws regarding privacy and data protection, which may require us to change our products and may impact our revenue stream. Any actual or perceived failure to comply with such legal and regulatory obligations, including in connection with our consent decree with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, may lead to costly litigation or otherwise adversely impact our business.

We also must actively protect our intellectual property. We are subject to various legal proceedings, claims, class actions, inquiries, and investigations related to our intellectual property, which may be costly or distract management. We also rely on a variety of statutory and common-law frameworks for the content we provide our users, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Communications Decency Act, and the fair-use doctrine, each of which has been subject to adverse judicial, political, and regulatory scrutiny in recent times.

5.    Our Team and Capital Structure

We need to attract and retain a high caliber team to maintain our competitive position. We may incur significant costs and expenses in maintaining and growing our team, and may lose valuable members of our team as we compete globally, including with our competitors, for key talent. A substantial portion of our employment costs is paid in our common stock, the price of which has been volatile, and our ability to attract and retain talent may be adversely affected if our shares decline in value.

Our two co-founders, who serve as our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer, control over 99% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock, which means they control substantially all outcomes submitted to stockholders. Class A common stockholders have no voting rights, unless required by Delaware law. This concentrated control may result in our co-founders voting their shares in their best interest, which might not always be in the interest of our stockholders generally.

Snap Inc. is a technology company. We believe the camera presents the greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate. We contribute to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together.

Our flagship product, Snapchat, is a visual messaging application that enhances your relationships with friends, family, and the world. Visual messaging is a fast, fun way to communicate with friends and family using augmented reality, video, voice, messaging, and creative tools. Snaps are deleted by default to mimic real-life conversations, so there is less pressure to look popular or perfect when creating and sending images on Snapchat. By reducing the friction typically associated with creating and sharing content, Snapchat has become one of the most used cameras in the world.

The camera is a powerful tool for communication and the entry point for augmented reality experiences. By opening directly to the camera, Snapchat empowers our community to express themselves instantly and offers millions of augmented reality Lenses for self expression, learning, and play. In the way that the flashing cursor became the starting point for most products on desktop computers, we believe the camera screen will be the starting point for most products on smartphones. This is because images created by smartphone cameras contain more context and richer information than other forms of input like text entered on a keyboard. Given the magnitude of this opportunity, we are investing and innovating to continue to deliver products and services that are differentiated and that are better able to reflect and improve our life experiences.

Snapchat is our core mobile device application and contains five distinct tabs, complemented by additional tools that function outside of the application. With a breadth of visual messaging and content experiences available within the application, Snapchatters can interact with any or all of the five tabs.

We connect both brand and direct response advertisers to Snapchatters globally. Our ad products are built on the same foundation that makes our consumer products successful. This means that we can take the things we learn while creating our consumer products and apply them to building innovative and engaging advertising products familiar to our community.

Our research and development efforts focus on product development, advertising technology, and large-scale infrastructure.

We seek to be a force for good through our products, our work to strengthen our communities, our efforts to make a positive impact on the planet, and our inclusive workplace.

Our compensation philosophy is based around building a culture of ownership and high performance by putting both impact and our values at the center of our performance feedback process and pay outcomes. We utilize equity as part of our compensation practices to drive a long-term orientation and have committed to paying a minimum living wage for all employees globally.

As of December 31, 2023, we had 5,289 full-time employees, of whom approximately 54% are in engineering roles involved in the design, development, support, and manufacture of new and existing products and processes.

Our approach to privacy is simple: Be upfront, offer choices, and never forget that our community comes first.

We built Snapchat as an antidote to the context-less communication that has plagued “social media.” Not so long ago, a conversation among friends would be just that: a private communication in which you knew exactly who you were talking to, what you were talking about, and whether what you were saying was being memorialized for eternity. Somewhere along the way, social media—by prioritizing virality and permanence—sapped conversations of this valuable context and choice. When we began to communicate online, we lost some of what made communication great: spontaneity, emotion, honesty—the full range of human expression that makes us human in the first place.

We don’t think digital communication has to be this way. That’s why choice matters. We build products and services that emphasize the context of a conversation—who, when, what, and where something is being said. If you don’t have the autonomy to shape the context of a conversation, the conversation will simply be shaped by the permanent feeds that homogenize online conversations.

When you read our Privacy Policy, we hope that you’ll notice how much we care about the integrity of personal communication. For starters, we’ve written our Privacy Policy in plain language because we think it’s important that everyone understands exactly how we handle their information. Otherwise, it’s hard to make informed choices about how you communicate. We’ve also created a robust Safety and Privacy Hub where we show that context and choice are more than talking points. There, we point out the many ways that users can control who sees their Snaps and Stories, and explain how long content will remain on our servers, how users can manage the information that we do have about them, and much more. This is where you’ll also find our Transparency Report in which we provide insight into these efforts and visibility into the nature and volume of content reported on our platform.

We also understand that privacy policies—no matter how ambitious—are only as good as the people and practices behind those policies. When someone trusts us to transmit or store their information, we know we have a responsibility to protect that information and we work hard to keep it secure. New features go through an intense privacy-review process—we debate pros and cons, and we work hard to build products we’re proud of and that we’ll want to use. We use Snapchat constantly, both at work and in our personal lives, and we handle user information with the same care that we want for our family, our friends, and ourselves.

We compete with other companies in every aspect of our business, particularly with companies that focus on mobile engagement and advertising. Many of these companies, such as Alphabet (including Google and YouTube), Apple, ByteDance (including TikTok), Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp), Pinterest, and X (formerly Twitter), may have greater financial and human resources and, in some cases, larger user bases. Given the breadth of our product offerings, we also compete with companies that develop products or otherwise operate in the mobile, camera, communication, content, and advertising industries that offer, or will offer, products and services that may compete with Snapchat features or offerings. Our competitors span from internet technology companies and digital platforms, to traditional companies in print, radio, and television sectors to underlying technologies like default smartphone cameras and messaging. Additionally, our competition for engagement varies by region. For instance, we face competition from companies like Kakao, LINE, Naver (including Snow), and Tencent in Asia.

We compete to attract and retain our users’ attention, both in terms of reach and engagement. Since our products and those of our competitors are typically free, we compete based on our brand and the quality and nature of our product offerings rather than on price. As such, we invest heavily in constantly improving and expanding our product lines.

We also compete with other companies to attract and retain partners and advertisers, which depends primarily on our reach and ability to deliver a strong return on investment.

Finally, we compete to attract and retain highly talented individuals, including software engineers, designers, and product managers. In addition to providing competitive compensation packages, we compete for talent by fostering a culture of working hard to create great products and experiences and allowing our employees to have a direct meaningful contribution to new and exciting projects.

We have historically seen seasonality in our business. Overall advertising spend tends to be strongest in the fourth quarter of the calendar year, and we have observed a similar pattern in our historical revenue. We have also experienced seasonality in our user engagement, generally seeing lower engagement during summer months and higher engagement in December.

Our success depends in part on our ability to protect our intellectual property and proprietary technologies. To protect our proprietary rights, we rely on a combination of intellectual property rights in the United States and other jurisdictions, including patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secret laws, license agreements, internal procedures, and contractual provisions. We also enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and contractors and sign confidentiality agreements with third parties. Our internal controls are designed to restrict access to proprietary technology.

As of December 31, 2023, we had approximately 3,174 issued patents and approximately 3,111 filed patent applications in the United States and foreign countries relating to our camera platform and other technologies. Our issued patents will expire between 2024 and 2047. We may not be able to obtain protection for our intellectual property, and our existing and future patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property rights may not provide us with competitive advantages or distinguish our products and services from those of our competitors.

We license content, trademarks, technology, and other intellectual property from our partners, and rely on our license agreements with those partners to use the intellectual property. We also enter into licensing agreements with third parties to receive rights to patents and other know-how. Third parties may assert claims related to intellectual property rights against our partners or us.

Other companies and “non-practicing entities” that own patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and other intellectual property rights related to the mobile, camera, communication, content, internet, and other technology-related industries frequently enter into litigation based on allegations of infringement, misappropriation, and other violations of intellectual property or other rights. As our business continues to grow and competition increases, we will likely face more claims related to intellectual property and litigation matters.

We are subject to many federal, state, local, and foreign laws and regulations, including those related to privacy, rights of publicity, data protection, content regulation, intellectual property, health and safety, competition, protection of minors, consumer protection, employment, money transmission, import and export restrictions, gift cards, electronic funds transfers, anti-money laundering, advertising, algorithms, encryption, and taxation. These laws and regulations are constantly evolving and may be interpreted, applied, created, or amended in a manner that could harm our business. Compliance with these laws and regulations has not had, and is not expected to have, a material effect on our capital expenditures, results of operations, and competitive position as compared to prior periods, and we do not currently anticipate material capital expenditures for environmental control facilities.

In December 2014, the Federal Trade Commission resolved an investigation into some of our early practices by handing down a final order. That order requires, among other things, that we establish a robust privacy program to govern how we treat user data. During the 20-year lifespan of the order, we must complete biennial independent privacy audits. In June 2014, we entered into a 10-year assurance of discontinuance with the Attorney General of Maryland implementing similar practices, including measures to prevent minors from creating accounts and providing annual compliance reports. Violating existing or future regulatory orders or consent decrees could subject us to substantial monetary fines and other penalties that could negatively affect our financial condition and results of operations.

Furthermore, foreign data protection, privacy, consumer protection, content regulation, and other laws and regulations are often more restrictive than those in the United States. It is possible that certain governments may seek to block or limit our products or otherwise impose other restrictions that may affect the accessibility or usability of any or all our products for an extended period of time or indefinitely. Not all of our products are available in all locations and may not be due to such laws and regulations. Our public policy team monitors legal and regulatory developments in the United States, as well as many foreign countries, and communicates with policymakers and regulators in the United States and internationally.

Information about segment and geographic revenue is set forth in Notes 1 and 2 of the notes to our consolidated financial statements included in “Financial Statements and Supplementary Data” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Our website address is www.snap.com. Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to these reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Exchange Act are filed with the SEC. Such reports and other information filed or furnished by us with the SEC are available free of charge on our website at investor.snap.com when such reports are available on the SEC’s website. We use our website, including investor.snap.com, as a means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD.

We had 414 million daily active users, or DAUs, on average in the quarter ended December 31, 2023. We view DAUs as a critical measure of our user engagement, and adding, maintaining, and engaging DAUs have been and will continue to be necessary. Our DAUs and DAU growth rate have declined in the past and they may decline in the future due to various factors, including as the size of our active user base increases, as we achieve higher market penetration rates, as we face continued competition for our users and their time, or if there are performance issues with our service. In addition, as we achieve maximum market penetration rates among younger users in developed markets, future growth in DAUs will need to come from older users in those markets or from developing markets, which may not be possible or may be more difficult, expensive, or time-consuming for us to achieve. While we may experience periods when our DAUs increase due to products and services with short-term popularity, we may not always be able to attract new users, retain existing users, or maintain or increase the frequency and duration of their engagement if current or potential new users do not perceive our products to be fun, engaging, or useful. In addition, because our products typically require high bandwidth data capabilities for users to benefit from all of the features and capabilities of our application, many of our users live in countries with high-end mobile device penetration and high bandwidth capacity cellular networks with large coverage areas. We therefore do not expect to experience rapid user growth or engagement in regions with either low smartphone penetration or a lack of well-established and high bandwidth capacity cellular networks. As our DAU growth rate continues to slow or if the number of DAUs becomes stagnant, or we have a decline in DAUs, our financial performance will increasingly depend on our ability to elevate user activity or increase the monetization of our users.

Snapchat is free and easy to join, the barrier to entry for new entrants in our business is low, and the switching costs to another platform are also low. Moreover, the majority of our users are 18-34 years old. This demographic may be less brand loyal and more likely to follow trends, including viral trends, than other demographics. These factors may lead users to switch to another product, which would negatively affect our user retention, growth, and engagement. Snapchat also may not be able to penetrate other demographics in a meaningful manner. Falling user retention, growth, or engagement could make Snapchat less attractive to advertisers and partners, which may seriously harm our business. In addition, we continue to compete with other companies to attract and retain our users’ attention. There are many factors that could negatively affect user retention, growth, and engagement, including if:

Any decrease to user retention, growth, or engagement could render our products less attractive to users, advertisers, or partners, and would seriously harm our business.

Substantially all of our revenue is generated from third parties advertising on Snapchat. For the years ended December 31, 2023, 2022, and 2021, advertising revenue accounted for approximately 96%, 99%, and 99% of our total revenue, respectively. Even though we have introduced other revenue streams, including a subscription model for one of our products, we still expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future. Most advertisers do not have long-term advertising commitments with us, and our efforts to establish long-term commitments may not succeed.

Our advertising customers range from small businesses to well-known brands, and may include advertising resellers. Many of our customers spend a relatively small portion of their overall advertising budget with us, but some customers have devoted meaningful budgets that contribute more significantly to our total revenue. In addition, advertisers may view some of our advertising solutions as experimental and unproven, or prefer certain of our products over others. Advertisers, including our customers who have devoted meaningful advertising budgets to our product, will not continue to do business with us if we do not deliver advertisements in an effective manner, or if they do not believe that their investment in advertising with us will generate a competitive return relative to other alternatives. As our business continues to develop, there may be new or existing customers, including from different geographic regions, that contribute more significantly to our total revenue, and a loss of such customers or a significant reduction in how much they spend with us could adversely impact our business. Any economic or political instability, whether as a result of the macroeconomic climate, war or other armed conflict, terrorism, or otherwise, in a specific country or region, may negatively impact the global or local economy, advertising ecosystem, our customers and their budgets with us, or our ability to forecast our advertising revenue, and could seriously harm our business.

Moreover, we rely heavily on our ability to collect and disclose data and metrics to our customers so we can attract new customers and retain existing customers. Any restriction, whether by law, regulation, policy, or other reason, on our ability to collect and disclose data and metrics that our customers find useful would impede our ability to attract and retain advertisers. Regulators in many of the countries in which we operate or have users are increasingly scrutinizing and regulating the collection, use, and sharing of personal data related to advertising, which could materially impact our revenue and seriously harm our business. Many of these laws and regulations expand the rights of individuals to control how their personal data is collected and processed, and place restrictions on the use of personal data of teens. The processing of personal data for personalized advertising continues to be under increased scrutiny from regulators, which includes ongoing regulatory action against large technology companies like ours, the outcomes of which may be uncertain and subject to appeal. These laws may prohibit us and our customers from targeting advertising to teens based on the profiling of personal data. Other legislative proposals and present laws and regulations may also apply to our or our advertisers’ activities and require significant operational changes to our business. These laws and regulations could have a material impact on the development and deployment of AI and machine learning in the context of our targeted advertising activities. Other laws to which we are or may become subject further regulate behavioral, interest-based, or targeted advertising, making certain online advertising activities more difficult and subject to additional scrutiny. These laws grant users the right to opt-out of sharing of their personal data for certain advertising purposes in exchange for money or other valuable consideration, or require parental consent to be obtained for the processing of personal data of users under a certain age and restrict tracking and use of teens’ data, including for advertising. Regulators have issued significant monetary fines in certain circumstances where the regulators alleged that appropriate consent was not obtained in connection with targeted advertising activities. In addition, legislative proposals and present laws and regulations in countries where we operate regulate the use of cookies and other tracking technologies, electronic communications, and marketing.

Furthermore, in April 2021, Apple issued an iOS update that imposed heightened restrictions on our access and use of user data by allowing users to more easily opt-out of tracking of activity across devices. Additionally, Google announced that it will implement similar changes with respect to its Android operating system, and major web browsers, like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, have or plan to make similar changes as well. The implemented changes have had, and the announced or planned changes likely will have, an adverse effect on our targeting, measurement, and optimization capabilities, and in turn our ability to target advertisements and measure the effectiveness of advertisements on our services. This has resulted in, and in the future is likely to continue to result in, reduced demand and pricing for our advertising products and could seriously harm our business. The longer-term impact of these changes on the overall mobile advertising ecosystem, our competitors, our business, and the developers, partners, and advertisers within our community remains uncertain, and depending on how we, our competitors, and the overall mobile advertising ecosystem adjusts, and how our partners, advertisers, and users respond, our business could be seriously harmed. Any alternative solutions we implement are subject to rules and standards set by the owners of such mobile operating systems which may be unclear, change, or be interpreted in a manner adverse to us and require us to halt or change our solutions, any of which could seriously harm our business. In addition, if we are unable to mitigate or respond to these and future developments, and alternative solutions do not become widely adopted by our advertisers, then our targeting, measurement, and optimization capabilities will be materially and adversely affected, which would in turn continue to negatively impact our advertising revenue. Our advertising revenue could also be seriously harmed by many other factors, including:

Moreover, individuals are also becoming increasingly aware of and resistant to the collection, use, and sharing of personal data in connection with advertising. Individuals are becoming more aware of options and certain rights related to consent and other options to opt-out of such data processing, including through media attention about privacy and data protection. Some users have opted out of allowing Snap to combine certain data from third-party apps and websites with certain data from Snapchat for advertising purposes, which has negatively impacted our ability to collect certain user data and our advertising partners’ ability to deliver relevant content, all of which could negatively impact our business

These and other factors could reduce demand for our advertising products, which may lower the prices we receive, or cause advertisers to stop advertising with us altogether. Either of these would seriously harm our business.

Because Snapchat is used primarily on mobile devices, the application must remain interoperable with popular mobile operating systems, primarily Android and iOS, application stores, and related hardware, including mobile-device cameras. The owners and operators of such mobile operating systems and application stores, primarily Google and Apple, each have approval authority over whether to feature our core products on their application stores and make available to consumers third-party products that compete with ours. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that any approval previously provided by such owner or operator will not be rescinded in the future. Additionally, mobile devices and mobile-device cameras are manufactured by a wide array of companies. Those companies have no obligation to test the interoperability of new mobile devices, mobile-device cameras, or related devices with Snapchat, and may produce new products that are incompatible with or not optimal for Snapchat. We have no control over these mobile operating systems, application stores,

Moreover, our products require high-bandwidth data capabilities. If the costs of data usage increase or access to cellular networks is limited, our user retention, growth, and engagement may be seriously harmed. Additionally, to deliver high-quality video and other content over mobile cellular networks, our products must work well with a range of mobile technologies, systems, networks, regulations, and standards that we do not control and which may be subject to future changes. In addition, the proposal or adoption of any laws, regulations, or initiatives that adversely affect the growth, popularity, or use of the internet, including laws governing internet neutrality, could decrease the demand for our products, including by impairing our ability to retain existing users or attract new users, make Snapchat a less attractive alternative to our competitors' applications, and increase our cost of doing business.

We may not successfully cultivate relationships with key industry participants or develop products that operate effectively with these technologies, systems, networks, regulations, or standards. If it becomes more difficult for our users to access and use Snapchat, if our users choose not to access or use Snapchat, or if our users choose to use products that do not offer access to Snapchat, our business and user retention, growth, and engagement could be seriously harmed.

Google and Amazon provide distributed computing infrastructure platforms for business operations, commonly referred to as a “cloud” computing service. We currently run the vast majority of our computing on Google Cloud and AWS and have built our software and computer systems to use computing, storage capabilities, bandwidth, and other services provided by Google and AWS. Our systems are not fully redundant on the two platforms. Any transition of the cloud services currently provided by either Google Cloud or AWS to the other platform or to another cloud provider would be difficult to implement and would cause us to incur significant time and expense. Given this, any significant disruption of or interference with Google Cloud or AWS, whether temporary, regular, or prolonged, would negatively impact our operations and our business would be seriously harmed. If our users or partners are not able to access Snapchat or specific Snapchat features, or encounter difficulties in doing so, due to issues or disruptions with Google Cloud or AWS, we may lose users, partners, or advertising revenue. The level of service provided by Google Cloud and AWS or similar providers may also impact our users’, advertisers’, and partners’ usage of and satisfaction with Snapchat and could seriously harm our business and reputation if the level of service decreases. Hosting costs also have and will continue to increase as our user base and user engagement grows and may seriously harm our business if we are unable to grow our revenues faster than the cost of utilizing the services of Google Cloud, AWS, or similar providers.

In addition, Google or Amazon may take actions beyond our control that could seriously harm our business, including:

We aim to protect our confidential proprietary information, in part, by entering into confidentiality agreements and invention assignment agreements with our employees, consultants, advisors, and third parties who access or contribute to our proprietary know-how, information, or technology. We, however, cannot assure you that these agreements will be effective in controlling access to, or preventing unauthorized distribution, use, misuse, misappropriation, reverse engineering, or disclosure of our proprietary information, know-how, and trade secrets. These agreements may be breached, and we may not have adequate remedies for any such breach. Enforcing a claim that a party illegally disclosed or misappropriated a trade secret or know-how can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, and the outcome can be unpredictable. Furthermore, these agreements do not prevent our competitors or partners from independently developing offerings that are substantially equivalent or superior to ours.

We also rely on trademark, copyright, patent, trade secret, and domain-name protection laws to protect our proprietary rights. In the United States and internationally, we have filed various applications to protect aspects of our intellectual property, and we currently hold a number of issued patents, trademarks, and copyrights in multiple jurisdictions. In the future, we may acquire additional patents or patent portfolios in the future, which could require significant cash expenditures. However, third parties may knowingly or unknowingly infringe our proprietary rights, third parties may challenge proprietary rights held by us, third parties may design around our proprietary rights or independently develop competing technology, and pending and future trademark, copyright, and patent applications may not be approved. Moreover, we cannot ensure that the claims of any granted patents will be sufficiently broad to protect our technology or platform and provide us with competitive advantages. Additionally, failure to comply with applicable procedural, documentary, fee payment, and other similar requirements could result in abandonment or lapse of the affected patent, trademark, or copyright application or registration.

Moreover, a portion of our intellectual property has been acquired or licensed from one or more third parties. While we have conducted diligence with respect to such acquisitions and licenses, because we did not participate in the development or prosecution of much of the acquired intellectual property, we cannot guarantee that our diligence efforts identified and remedied all issues related to such intellectual property, including potential ownership errors, potential errors during prosecution of such intellectual property, and potential encumbrances that could limit our ability to enforce such intellectual property rights.

Further, the laws of certain foreign countries do not provide the same level of protection of corporate proprietary information and assets such as intellectual property, trade secrets, know-how, and records as the laws of the United States. For instance, the legal systems of certain countries, particularly certain developing countries, do not favor the enforcement of patents and other intellectual property protection. As a result, we may be exposed to material risks of theft of our proprietary information and other intellectual property, including technical data, manufacturing processes, data sets, or other sensitive information, and we may also encounter significant problems in protecting and defending our intellectual property or proprietary rights abroad. In any of these cases, we may be required to expend significant time and expense to prevent infringement or to enforce our rights. Our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims, and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights, and, if such defenses, counterclaims, and countersuits are successful, we could lose valuable intellectual property rights. Our inability to protect our proprietary technology against unauthorized copying or use, as well as any costly litigation or diversion of our management’s attention and resources, could impair the functionality of our platform, delay introductions of enhancements to our platform, result in our substituting inferior or more costly technologies into our platform, or harm our reputation and brand. In addition, we may be required to license additional technology from third parties to develop and market new platform features, which may not be on commercially reasonable terms, or at all, and would adversely affect our ability to compete. Although we have taken measures to protect our proprietary rights, there can be no assurance that others will not offer products, brands, content, or concepts that are substantially similar to ours and compete with our business. If we are unable to protect our proprietary rights or prevent unauthorized use or appropriation by third parties, the value of our brand and other intangible assets may be diminished, and competitors may be able to more effectively mimic our service and methods of operations. Any of these events could seriously harm our business.

Our two co-founders, Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy, control over 99% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock as of December 31, 2023, and Mr. Spiegel alone can exercise voting control over a majority of our

If Mr. Spiegel’s or Mr. Murphy’s employment with us is terminated, they will continue to have the ability to exercise the same significant voting power and potentially control the outcome of all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval. Either of our co-founders’ shares of Class C common stock will automatically convert into Class B common stock, on a one-to-one basis, nine months following his death or on the date on which the number of outstanding shares of Class C common stock held by such holder represents less than 30% of the Class C common stock held by such holder on the closing of our IPO, or 32,383,178 shares of Class C common stock. Should either of our co-founders’ Class C common stock be converted to Class B common stock, the remaining co-founder will be able to exercise voting control over our outstanding capital stock. Moreover, Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy have entered into a proxy agreement under which each has granted to the other a voting proxy with respect to all shares of our Class B common stock and Class C common stock that each may beneficially own from time to time or have voting control over. The proxy would become effective on either founder’s death or disability. Accordingly, on the death or incapacity of either Mr. Spiegel or Mr. Murphy, the other could individually control nearly all of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock.

In addition, in October 2016, we issued a dividend of one share of non-voting Class A common stock to all our equity holders, which will prolong our co-founders’ voting control because our co-founders are able to liquidate their holdings of non-voting Class A common stock without diminishing their voting control. Furthermore, in July 2022, our board of directors approved the future declaration and payment of a special dividend of one share of Class A Common stock on each outstanding share of Snap’s common stock, subject to certain triggering conditions. In the future, our board of directors may, from time to time, decide to issue additional special or regular stock dividends in the form of Class A common stock, and if we do so our co-founders’ control could be further prolonged. This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support. Conversely, this concentrated control could allow our co-founders to consummate such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support. In addition, our co-founders may make long-term strategic investment decisions for the company and take risks that may not be successful and may seriously harm our business.

As our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Spiegel has control over our day-to-day management and the implementation of major strategic investments of our company, subject to authorization and oversight by our board of directors. As board members and officers, Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy owe a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must act in good faith in a manner they reasonably believe to be in the best interests of our stockholders. As stockholders, even controlling stockholders, Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy are entitled to vote their shares, and shares over which they have voting control, in their own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally. We have not elected to take advantage of the “controlled company” exemption to the corporate governance rules for companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, or NYSE.

Global economic and business activities continue to face widespread macroeconomic uncertainties, including labor shortages and disruptions, supply chain disruptions, banking instability, inflation, and recession risks, which may continue for an extended period, and some of which have adversely impacted, and may continue to adversely impact, many aspects of our business.

As some of our advertisers experienced downturns or uncertainty in their own business operations and revenue, they halted or decreased or may halt, decrease, or continue to decrease, temporarily or permanently, their advertising spending or may focus their advertising spending more on other platforms, all of which may result in decreased advertising revenue. Labor shortages and disruptions, supply chain disruptions, banking instability, and inflation continue to cause logistical challenges, increased input costs, inventory constraints, and liquidity uncertainty for our advertisers, which in turn may also halt or decrease advertising spending and may make it difficult to forecast our advertising revenue. Any decline in advertising revenue or the collectability of our receivables could seriously harm our business.

As a result of macroeconomic uncertainties, our partners and community who provide content or services to us may experience delays or interruptions in their ability to create content or provide services, if they are able to do so at all. Members of our community may also alter their usage of our products and services, particularly relative to prior periods when travel restrictions were in place. A decrease in the amount or quality of content available on Snapchat, or an

To the extent that macroeconomic uncertainties continue to impact our business, many of the other risks described in these risk factors may be exacerbated.

Significant geo-political conflicts and events have had, and will likely continue to have, a substantial effect on our business and operations. We have had, and will likely continue to have, team members and their families in impacted regions who face substantial personal risk, unprecedented disruption of their lives, and uncertainty as to the future. We have provided emergency assistance and support to these team members and their families, and we expect to continue this support in the future. In addition, we have offices, hardware, and other assets in impacted regions that may be at risk of destruction or theft. We have incurred, and will likely continue to incur, costs to support our team members and reorganize our operations to address these ongoing challenges. In addition, our management has spent significant time and attention on these and related events. The ongoing disruptions to our team members, our management, and our operations could seriously harm our business.

Generally, during times of war and other major conflicts, we, the third parties on which we rely, and our partners are vulnerable to a heightened risk of cyberattacks, including retaliatory cyberattacks, that could seriously disrupt our business. We have experienced an increase in attempted cyberattacks on our products, systems, and networks, which we believe are related to the conflicts. We may also face retaliatory attacks by governments, entities, or individuals who do not agree with our public expressions with regards to any conflicts or support for team members. Any such attack could cause disruption to our platform, systems, and networks, result in security breaches or data loss, damage our brand, or reduce demand for our services or advertising products. In addition, we may face significant costs (including legal and litigation costs) to prevent, correct, or remediate any such breaches. We may also be forced to expend additional resources monitoring our platform for evidence of disinformation or misuse in connection with the ongoing conflict.

Geo-political conflicts and events are inherently unpredictable, evolve quickly, and may have negative long-term impacts. On a macroeconomic level, geo-political conflicts may disrupt trade, intensify problems in the global supply chain, and contribute to inflationary pressures. All of these factors may negatively impact the demand for advertising as companies face limited product availability, restricted sales opportunities, and condensed margins. Any pause or reduction in advertising spending in connection with geo-political conflicts or events could negatively impact our revenue and harm our business.

Our ability to engage, retain, and increase our user base and to increase our revenue will depend heavily on our ability to successfully create new products, both independently and together with third parties. We may introduce significant changes to, or discontinue, our existing products or develop and introduce new and unproven products and services, including technologies with which we have little or no prior development or operating experience. These new products and updates may fail to increase the engagement of our users, advertisers, or partners, may subject us to increased regulatory requirements or scrutiny, and may even result in short-term or long-term decreases in such engagement by disrupting existing user, advertiser, or partner behavior or by introducing performance and quality issues. For example, in January 2023, we made changes to our advertising platform, which we believe will lay the foundation for future growth, but which have been disruptive to our customers and how some of them utilized our platform. The short- and long-term impact of any major change, or even a less significant change such as a refresh of the application or a feature change, is difficult to predict. Although we believe that these decisions will benefit the aggregate user experience and improve our financial performance over the long term, we may experience disruptions or declines in our DAUs or user activity broadly or concentrated on certain portions of our application. Product innovation is inherently volatile, and if new or enhanced products fail to engage our users, advertisers, or partners, or if we fail to give our users meaningful reasons to return to our application, we may fail to attract or retain users or to generate sufficient revenue, operating margin, or other value to justify our investments, any of which may seriously harm our business in the short term, long term, or both.

Because our products created new ways of communicating, they have often required users to learn new behaviors to use our products, or to use our products repeatedly to receive the most benefit. These new behaviors, such as swiping and tapping in the Snapchat application, are not always intuitive to users. This can create a lag in adoption of new products and new user additions related to new products. We believe this has not hindered our user growth or engagement, but that may be the result of a large portion of our user base being in a younger demographic and more willing to invest the time to learn to use our products most effectively. To the extent that future users, including those in older demographics, are less willing to invest the time to learn to use our products, and if we are unable to make our products easier to learn to use, our user growth or engagement could be affected, and our business could be harmed. We may also develop new products or initiatives that increase user engagement and costs without increasing revenue in the short or long term.

In addition, we have invested, and expect to continue to invest, in new lines of business, new products, and other initiatives to increase our user base and user activity, and attempt to monetize the platform. For example, in 2020, we launched Spotlight, a new entertainment platform for user-generated content within Snapchat, in 2022, we launched Snapchat+, a subscription product that gives subscribers access to exclusive, experimental, and pre-release features, and Snapchat for Web, a browser-based product that brings Snapchat’s signature capabilities to the web, and in 2023, we launched My AI, an artificial intelligence powered chatbot. Such new lines of business, new products, and other initiatives may be costly, difficult to operate and monetize, increase regulatory scrutiny and product liability and litigation risk, and divert management’s attention, and there is no guarantee that they will be positively received by our community or provide positive returns on our investment. We frequently launch new products and the products that we launch may have technical issues that diminish the performance of our application, experience product failures, or become subject to product recalls. These performance issues or issues that we encounter in the future could impact our user engagement. In addition, new products or features that we launch may ultimately prove unsuccessful or no longer fit with our priorities, and may be eliminated in the future. Such eliminations may require us to reduce our workforce and incur significant expenses. In certain cases, new products that we develop may require regulatory approval prior to launch or may require us to comply with additional regulations or legislation, including laws that are rapidly changing. There is no guarantee that we will be able to obtain such regulatory approval, and our efforts to comply with these laws and regulations could be costly and divert management’s time and effort and may still not guarantee compliance. If we do not successfully develop new approaches to monetization or meet the expectations of our users or partners, we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated or recover any associated development costs, and our business could be seriously harmed.

We face significant competition in almost every aspect of our business both domestically and internationally, especially because our products and services operate across a broad list of categories, including camera, visual messaging, content, and augmented reality. Our competitors range from smaller or newer companies to larger, more established companies such as Alphabet (including Google and YouTube), Apple, ByteDance (including TikTok), Kakao, LINE, Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp), Naver (including Snow), Pinterest, Tencent, and X (formerly Twitter). Our competitors also include platforms that offer, or will offer, a variety of products, services, content, and online advertising offerings that compete or may compete with Snapchat features or offerings. For example, Instagram, a competing application owned by Meta, has incorporated many of our features, including a “stories” feature that largely mimics our Stories feature and may be directly competitive. Meta has introduced, and likely will continue to introduce, more private ephemeral products into its various platforms which mimic other aspects of Snapchat’s core use case. We also compete for users and their time, so we may lose users or their attention not only to companies that offer products and services that specifically compete with Snapchat features or offerings, but to companies with products or services that target or otherwise appeal to certain demographics, such as Discord or Roblox. Moreover, in emerging international markets, where mobile devices often lack large storage capabilities, we may compete with other applications for the limited space available on a user’s mobile device. We also face competition from traditional and online media businesses for advertising budgets. We compete broadly with the products and services of Alphabet, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Pinterest, and X (formerly Twitter), and with other, largely regional, social media platforms that have strong positions in particular countries. As we introduce new products, as our existing products evolve, or as other companies introduce new products and services, we may become subject to additional competition.

Many of our current and potential competitors have significantly greater resources and broader global recognition, and occupy stronger competitive positions in certain market segments, than we do. These factors may allow our competitors to respond to new or emerging technologies and changes in market requirements better than we can, undertake more far-reaching and successful product development efforts or marketing campaigns, or adopt more aggressive pricing policies. In addition, ongoing changes to privacy and data protection laws and mobile operating systems have made it more

Certain acquisitions by our competitors may result in reduced functionality of our products and services, provide our competitors with valuable insight into the performance of our and our partners’ businesses, and provide our competitors with a pipeline of future acquisitions to maintain a dominant position. As a result, our competitors may acquire and engage users at the expense of our user base, growth, or engagement, which may seriously harm our business.

We believe that our ability to compete effectively depends on many factors, many of which are beyond our control, including:

If we cannot effectively compete, our user engagement may decrease, which could make us less attractive to users, advertisers, and partners and seriously harm our business.

We began commercial operations in 2011 and we have historically experienced net losses and negative cash flows from operations. As of December 31, 2023, we had an accumulated deficit of $11.7 billion and for the year ended December 31, 2023, we had a net loss of $1.3 billion. We expect our operating expenses to increase in the future as we expand our operations. We may incur significant losses in the future for many reasons, including due to the other risks and uncertainties described in this report. Additionally, we may encounter unforeseen expenses, operating delays, or other unknown factors that may result in losses in future periods. If our revenue does not grow at a greater rate than our expenses, our business may be seriously harmed and we may not be able to attain and sustain profitability.

We depend on the continued services and performance of our key personnel, including Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy. Although we have entered into employment agreements with Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy, the agreements are at-will, which means that they may resign or could be terminated for any reason at any time. Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy are high profile individuals who have received threats in the past and are likely to continue to receive threats in the future. Mr. Spiegel, as Chief Executive Officer, has been responsible for our company’s strategic vision and Mr. Murphy, as Chief Technology Officer, developed the Snapchat application’s technical foundation. Should either of them stop working for us for any reason, it is unlikely that the other co-founder would be able to fulfill all of the responsibilities of the departing co-founder nor is it likely that we would be able to immediately find a suitable replacement. The loss of key personnel, including members of management and key engineering, product development, marketing, and sales personnel, could disrupt our operations, adversely impact employee retention and morale, and seriously harm our business.

We cannot guarantee we will continue to attract and retain the personnel we need to maintain our competitive position. We face significant competition in hiring and attracting qualified engineers, designers, and sales personnel, and the change by companies to offer a remote or hybrid work environment may increase the competition for such employees from employers outside of our traditional office locations. In February 2023, we implemented our return to office plan that still encompasses a hybrid approach, but requires greater in-office attendance. While we intend to continue offering flexible work arrangements based on the different needs of teams across our company on a case-by-case basis, we may face difficulty in hiring and retaining our workforce as a result of this shift to have greater in-office attendance. Further, labor is subject to external factors that are beyond our control, including our industry’s highly competitive market for skilled workers and leaders, inflation, other macroeconomic uncertainties, and workforce participation rates. In addition, if our reputation were to be harmed, whether as a result of our strategic decisions or media, legislative, or regulatory scrutiny or otherwise, it could make it more difficult to attract and retain personnel that are critical to the success of our business.

As we mature, or if our stock price declines, our equity awards may not be as effective an incentive to attract, retain, and motivate team members. Stock price declines may also cause us to offer additional equity awards to our existing team members to aid in retention. Furthermore, if we issue significant equity to attract and retain team members, we would incur substantial additional stock-based compensation expense and the ownership of our existing stockholders would be further diluted. If we do not succeed in attracting, hiring, and integrating excellent personnel, or retaining and motivating existing personnel, we may be unable to grow or effectively manage our business and our business could be seriously harmed.

We began commercial operations in 2011, began meaningfully monetizing Snapchat in 2015, and we launched Snapchat+, a paid subscription product, in 2022. We have a continually evolving business model, which makes it difficult to effectively assess our future prospects. Accordingly, we believe that investors’ future perceptions and expectations, which can be idiosyncratic and vary widely, and which we do not control, will affect our stock price. For example, investors may believe our timing and path to increased monetization will be faster or more effective than our current plans or than actually takes place. You should consider our business and prospects in light of the many challenges we face, including the ones discussed in this report.

In the ordinary course of business, we collect, store, use, and share personal data and other sensitive information, including proprietary and confidential business data, trade secrets, third-party sensitive information, and intellectual property (collectively, sensitive information). Our efforts to protect our sensitive information, including information that our users, advertisers, and partners have shared with us, may be unsuccessful due to the actions of third parties, including traditional “black hat” hackers, nation states, nation-state supported groups, organized criminal enterprises, hacktivists, and our personnel and contractors (through theft, misuse, or other risk). We and the third parties on which we rely are subject to a variety of evolving threats, including social-engineering attacks (for example by fraudulently inducing employees, users, or advertisers to disclose information to gain access to our sensitive information, including data or our users’ or advertisers’ data, such as through the use of deep fakes, which may be increasingly more difficult to identify as fake), malware, malicious code, hacking, credential stuffing, denial of service, and other threats, including attacks enhanced or facilitated by artificial intelligence. While certain of these threats have occurred in the past, they have become more prevalent and sophisticated in our industry, and may occur in the future. Because of our prominence and value of our sensitive information, we believe that we are an attractive target for these sorts of attacks.

In particular, severe ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly prevalent. To alleviate the financial, operational, and reputational impact of these attacks, it may be preferable to make extortion payments, but we may be unwilling or unable to do so, including, for example, if applicable laws or regulations prohibit such payments. And, even if we make such payments, cyber threat actors may still disclose data, engage in further extortion, or otherwise harm our systems or data. Moreover, for certain employees we permit a hybrid work environment, which has increased risks to our information technology systems and data, as our employees utilize network connections, computers, and devices outside our premises or network, including working at home, while in transit and in public locations.

In addition, cyber threat actors have also increased the complexity of their attempts to compromise user accounts, despite our defenses and detection mechanisms to prevent these account takeovers. User credentials may be obtained off-platform, including through breaches of third-party platforms and services, password stealing malware, social engineering, or other tactics and techniques like credential harvesting, and used to launch coordinated attacks. Some of these attacks may be hard to detect at scale and may result in cyber threat actors using our service to spam or abuse other users, access user personal data, further compromise additional user accounts, or to compromise employee account credentials or social engineer employees into granting further access to systems.

We rely on third-party service providers and technologies to operate critical business systems to process sensitive information in a variety of contexts, including cloud-based infrastructure, data center facilities, artificial intelligence, encryption and authentication technology, employee email, content delivery, and other functions. We may also rely on third-party service providers to provide other products or services to operate our business or enable features in our platform. Additionally, some advertisers and partners store sensitive information that we share with them. Our ability to monitor these third parties’ information security practices is limited, and these third parties may not have adequate information security measures in place despite their contractual representations to implement such measures and our third-party service provider vetting process. If these third parties fail to implement adequate data security practices or fail to comply with our terms, policies, or contractual obligations, our sensitive information may be improperly accessed or disclosed, and we may experience adverse consequences. And even if these third parties take all of these steps, their networks may still suffer a breach, which could compromise our sensitive information. We or our third-party providers may also experience failures or malfunctions of hardware or software, the loss of technology assets, or the loss of data that, while not caused by threat actors, may have a similar impact and risk to our business. While we may be entitled to damages if our third-party service providers fail to satisfy their privacy or security-related obligations to us, or cause the loss of our data or prolonged downtime, any award may be insufficient to cover our damages, or we may be unable to recover such award.

Moreover, supply chain attacks have increased in frequency and severity, and we cannot guarantee that third parties in our supply chain have not been compromised or that their systems, networks, or code are free from exploitable defects or bugs that could result in a breach of or disruption to our platform, systems, and networks or the systems and networks of third parties that support us and our services. We are also reliant on third-party and open source software that may contain bugs, vulnerabilities, or errors that could be exploited or disclosed before a patch or fix is available.

While we have implemented security measures designed to protect against security incidents, there can be no assurance that these measures will be effective. We take steps designed to detect and remediate vulnerabilities in our

If any of these or similar events occur, our or our third-party partners’ sensitive information and information technology systems could be accessed, acquired, modified, destroyed, lost, altered, encrypted, or disclosed in an unauthorized, unlawful, accidental, or other improper manner, resulting in a security incident or other interruption.

We may expend significant resources or modify our business activities to adopt additional measures designed to protect against security incidents. Certain data privacy and security obligations may require us to implement and maintain specific security measures or industry-standard or reasonable security measures to protect our systems and sensitive information. While we have implemented security measures designed to protect against security incidents, there can be no assurance that these measures will be effective.

We have previously suffered the loss of sensitive information related to employee error, insider threats, and vendor breaches. Any security incident experienced by us or our third-party partners could damage our reputation and our brand, and diminish our competitive position. Applicable privacy and security obligations may require us to notify relevant stakeholders, including affected individuals, customers, regulators, and investors, of security incidents. Such disclosures are costly and the failure to comply with these legal requirements could lead to adverse consequences. Governments and regulatory agencies (including the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC) have and may continue to enact new disclosure requirements for cybersecurity events. In addition, affected users or government authorities could initiate legal or regulatory action against us, including class-action claims, mass arbitration demands, investigations, penalties, and audits, which could be time-consuming and cause us to incur significant expense and liability or result in orders or consent decrees forcing us to modify our business practices. We could also experience loss of user or advertiser confidence in the security of our platform, additional reporting requirements or oversight, restrictions on processing sensitive information, claims by our partners or other relevant parties that we have failed to comply with contractual obligations or our policies, and indemnification obligations. We could also spend material resources to investigate or correct the incident and to prevent future incidents. Maintaining the trust of our users is important to sustain our growth, retention, and user engagement. Concerns over our privacy and security practices, whether actual or unfounded, could damage our reputation and brand and deter users, advertisers, and partners from using our products and services. Any of these occurrences could seriously harm our business.

Our contracts may not contain limitations of liability, and even where they do, there can be no assurance that limitations of liability in our contracts are sufficient to protect us from liabilities, damages, or claims related to our data privacy and security obligations. We cannot be sure that our insurance coverage will be adequate or sufficient to protect us from or to mitigate liabilities arising out of our privacy and security practices, that such coverage will continue to be available on commercially reasonable terms or at all, or that such coverage will pay future claims.

In addition to experiencing a security incident, third parties may gather, collect, or infer sensitive information about us from public sources, data brokers, or other means that reveals competitively sensitive details about our organization and could be used to undermine our competitive advantage or market position.

We regularly review and share metrics, including our DAUs and ARPU metrics, with our investors, advertisers, and partners to evaluate growth trends, measure our performance, and make strategic decisions. These metrics are calculated using internal company data gathered on an analytics platform that we developed and operate and our methodologies have not in all instances been validated by an independent third party. In addition, we may change the way we measure and report metrics from time to time in connection with changes to our products, making comparisons to prior periods more difficult. While these metrics are based on what we believe to be reasonable estimates for the applicable period of measurement, there are inherent challenges in measuring how our products are used across large populations globally that may require significant judgment and are subject to technical errors. For example, there may be individuals attempt to create accounts for malicious purposes, including at scale, even though we forbid that in our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. We implement measures in our user registration process and through other technical measures

Some of our demographic data may be incomplete or inaccurate. For example, because users self-report their dates of birth, our age-demographic data may differ from our users’ actual ages. And because users who signed up for Snapchat before June 2013 were not asked to supply their date of birth, we may exclude those users from age demographics or estimate their ages based on a sample of the self-reported ages we do have. If our users provide us with incorrect or incomplete information regarding their age or other attributes, then our estimates may prove inaccurate and fail to meet investor or advertiser expectations.

Errors or inaccuracies in our metrics or data could also result in incorrect business decisions and inefficiencies. For instance, if a significant understatement or overstatement of active users were to occur, we may expend resources to implement unnecessary business measures or fail to take required actions to attract a sufficient number of users to satisfy our growth strategies. We count a DAU when a user opens the application, but only once per user per day. We have multiple pipelines of user data that we use to determine whether a user has opened the application during a particular day, becoming a DAU. This provides redundancy in the event one pipeline of data were to become unavailable for technical reasons, and also gives us redundant data to help measure how users interact with our application. However, we believe that we do not capture all data regarding our active users, which may result in understated metrics. This generally occurs because of technical issues, for instance when our systems do not record data from a user’s application or when a user opens the Snapchat application and contacts our servers but is not recorded as an active user. We continually seek to address these technical issues and improve our measurement processes and accuracy, such as comparing our active users and other metrics with data received from other pipelines, including data recorded by our servers and systems. But given the complexity of the systems involved and the rapidly changing nature of mobile devices and systems, we expect these issues to continue, particularly if we continue to expand in parts of the world where mobile data systems and connections are less stable. If advertisers, partners, or investors do not perceive our user, geographic, other demographic metrics, or measurements of advertising effectiveness to be accurate, or if we discover material inaccuracies in our metrics, our reputation may be seriously harmed. Our advertisers and partners may also be less willing to allocate their budgets or resources to Snapchat, which could seriously harm our business. In addition, we calculate average DAUs for a particular quarter by adding the number of DAUs on each day of that quarter and dividing that sum by the number of days in that quarter. This calculation may mask any individual days or months within the quarter that are significantly higher or lower than the quarterly average.

We cannot be certain that the technologies that we have developed to repel spamming attacks will be able to eliminate all spam messages from our products. Spammers attempt to use our products to send targeted and untargeted spam messages to users, which may embarrass, offend, threaten, or annoy users and make our products less user friendly. Our actions to combat spam may also divert significant time and focus from improving our products. As a result of spamming activities, our users may use our products less or stop using them altogether, and result in continuing operational cost to us.

Similarly, terrorists, criminals, and other bad actors may use our products to promote their goals and encourage users to engage in terror and other illegal activities discussed in our Transparency Report. We expect that as more people use our products, these bad actors will increasingly seek to misuse our products. Although we invest resources to combat these activities, including by suspending or terminating accounts we believe are violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines, we expect these bad actors will continue to seek ways to act inappropriately and illegally on Snapchat. Maintaining a safe platform, including by combating these bad actors, requires us to incur costs, which may be significant. In addition, we may not be able to control or stop Snapchat from becoming the preferred application of use by these bad actors, which may seriously harm our reputation or lead to lawsuits or attention from regulators. If these activities continue on Snapchat, our reputation, user growth and user engagement, and operational cost structure could be seriously harmed.

In the ordinary course of business, we collect, store, use, and share personal data and other sensitive information, including proprietary and confidential business data, trade secrets, third-party sensitive information, and intellectual property. Accordingly, we are subject to a variety of laws, regulations, industry standards, policies, contractual requirements, executive actions, and other obligations relating to privacy, security, and data protection. We also are or may in the future be subject to many federal, state, local, and foreign laws and regulations, including those related to privacy, rights of publicity, content, data protection, artificial intelligence, intellectual property, health and safety, competition, protection of minors, consumer protection, employment, money transmission, import and export restrictions, gift cards, electronic funds transfers, anti-money laundering, advertising, algorithms, encryption, and taxation.

Under certain of these laws, we could face temporary or definitive bans on data processing and other corrective actions, substantial monetary fines, or private litigation related to processing of personal data brought by classes of data subjects or consumer protection organizations authorized to represent their interests. The transfer of personal data continues to be under increased regulatory attention and scrutiny, and certain jurisdictions in which we operate have significantly limited the lawful basis on which personal data can be transferred to other jurisdictions and increased the assessments required to do so. We have attempted to structure our operations in a manner designed to help us partially avoid some of these concerns; however, we still transfer some data using mechanisms that comply with applicable law. Some of these mechanisms are subject to legal challenges, and there is no assurance that we can satisfy or rely on these mechanisms to lawfully transfer personal data in the future. If there is no lawful manner for us to transfer personal data, or if the requirements for a legally compliant transfer are too onerous, we could face significant adverse consequences, including the interruption or degradation of our operations, the need to relocate part of or all of our business or data processing activities to other jurisdictions at significant expense, increased exposure to regulatory actions, substantial fines and penalties, the inability to transfer data and work with partners, vendors, and other third parties, and injunctions against our processing or transferring of personal data necessary to operate our business. Regulators may seek to restrict our data processing activities if they believe we have violated cross-border data transfer limitations, which would seriously harm our business. Additionally, companies like us that transfer personal data between jurisdictions, particularly to the United States, are subject to increased scrutiny from regulators, individual litigants, and activist groups.

Legislation in certain of the countries in which we operate has imposed extensive obligations, and potential monetary fines, on certain online service providers, including us, who enable the sharing of user‑generated content, to identify, mitigate, and manage the risks of harm to users from illegal and harmful content, such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation and abuse, and harassment or stalking. In addition, the privacy of teens’ personal data collected online, and use of commercial websites, online services, or other interactive platforms, generally, are also becoming increasingly scrutinized. Regulations focused on online safety and protection of teens’ privacy online have and may in the future require us to change our services and incur costs to do so. Moreover, various laws to restrict or govern the use of commercial websites, online services, or other interactive platforms by teens have passed or have been proposed, including laws prohibiting showing teens advertising, requiring age verification, limiting the use of minors’ personal data, and requiring parental consent or providing for other parental rights. These laws may be, or in some cases already have been, subject to legal challenges and changing interpretations, which may further complicate our efforts to comply with laws applicable to us. These new laws may result in restrictions on the use of certain of our products or services by minors, decrease DAUs or user engagement in those jurisdictions, require changes to our products and services to achieve compliance, and increase legal risk and compliance costs for us and our third-party partners, any of which could seriously harm our business.

Laws and regulations focused on privacy, security, and data protection, including data breach notification laws, personal data privacy laws, consumer protection laws, wiretapping laws, and other similar laws have imposed obligations on companies that collect personal data from users, including providing specific disclosures in privacy notices, expanding the requirements for handling personal data, requiring consents to process personal data in certain circumstances, and affording residents with certain rights concerning their personal data. Such rights may include the right to access, correct, or delete certain personal data, and to opt-out of certain data processing activities, such as targeted advertising, profiling, and automated decision-making. The exercise of these rights may impact our business and ability to provide our products and services, and our inability or failure to obtain consent for these practices where required could result in adverse consequences, including class-action litigation and mass arbitration demands. Certain of these laws also impose stricter requirements for processing certain personal data, including sensitive information, such as conducting data privacy impact assessments. These laws also allow for statutory fines for noncompliance and, in some instances, provide for civil penalties for violations and a private right of action for data breaches, which may increase the likelihood and cost of data breach litigation, and could seriously harm our business.

Additionally, several jurisdictions in which we operate have enacted statutes banning or restricting the collection of biometric information. Certain of these laws provide for substantial penalties and statutory damages and have generated significant class-action activity. Although we maintain the position that our technologies do not collect any biometric information, we have in the past, and may in the future, settle these disputes to avoid potentially costly litigation and have in certain instances made changes to our products in an abundance of caution.

We use artificial intelligence, or AI, in consumer-facing features of our products and services, including My AI. The development and use of AI presents various privacy and security risks that may impact our business. AI is subject to privacy and data security laws, as well as increasing regulation and scrutiny. Several countries in which we operate or have users have proposed or enacted, or are considering, laws governing AI, which we are or may be subject to. The legal landscape around intellectual property rights in AI, and the use, training, implementation, privacy, and safety of AI, is evolving, including ongoing litigation against our peers relating to the use of data protected by global intellectual property and privacy laws. These obligations may make it harder for us to use AI in our products or services, lead to regulatory fines or penalties, or require us to change our business practices, retrain our AI, or prevent or limit our use of AI. We are subject to ongoing investigations by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, or ICO, and other regulatory agencies regarding the use and operation of My AI, and in October 2023 the ICO issued a preliminary enforcement notice regarding our data impact assessment of My AI. Given the current unsettled nature of the legal and regulatory environment surrounding AI, our or our partners’ AI features and use, training, and implementation of AI could subject us to regulatory action, product restrictions, fines, litigation, and reputational harm, and require us to expend significant resources, all of which may seriously harm our business. Additionally, if our AI products fail to perform as intended, or produce outputs that are harmful, misleading, inaccurate, or biased, in addition to the risks above, our reputation and user engagement may be harmed, and we may be required to change our business practices, retrain our AI, or limit our use of AI. Furthermore, certain proposed regulations related to AI could, if adopted, impose onerous obligations related to the use of AI-related systems and may require us to change our products or business practices to comply with such obligations.

Privacy advocates and industry groups have proposed, and may propose in the future, standards with which we are legally or contractually obligated to comply. Moreover, we are also bound by contractual obligations related to data privacy and security, and our efforts to comply with such obligations may not be successful. We also publish privacy policies, marketing materials, and other statements regarding data privacy and security. If these policies, materials, or statements are found to be deficient, lacking in transparency, deceptive, unfair, or misrepresentative of our practices, we may be subject to investigation, enforcement actions by regulators, or other adverse consequences.

The implementation and enforcement, including through private rights of action, of these increasingly complex, onerous, or divergent laws and regulations, and the introduction, interpretation, or revision of any new such laws or regulations, with respect to privacy, security, data protection, and our industry are uncertain and may further complicate compliance efforts, lead to fragmentation of the service, and may increase legal risk and compliance costs for us and our third-party partners. Many of these obligations are becoming increasingly stringent and subject to rapid change and uncertain interpretation. Preparing for and complying with these obligations requires us to devote significant resources, and there is no guarantee that our compliance efforts to date, or in the future, will be deemed compliant or sufficient. These obligations may necessitate changes to our products and services, information technologies, systems, and practices and to those of any third parties that process personal data on our behalf. In addition, these obligations may require us to change our business model. Our business model materially depends on our ability to process personal data in connection with our advertising offerings, so we are particularly exposed to the risks associated with the rapidly changing legal landscape regarding privacy, security, and data protection. For example, privacy regulators have targeted us and some of our competitors, including by investigating data processing activities and in the past have issued large fines to our competitors. Such enforcement actions may cause us to revise our business plans and operations. Moreover, we believe a number of investigations into other technology companies are currently being conducted by federal, state, and foreign legislative and regulatory bodies. We therefore may be at heightened risk of regulatory scrutiny, as regulators focus their attention on data processing activities of companies like us, and any changes in the regulatory framework or enforcement actions, whether against us or our competitors, could require us to fundamentally change our business model, and seriously harm our business.

We may at times fail, or be perceived to have failed, in our efforts to comply with our privacy, security, and data protection obligations. Moreover, despite our efforts, our personnel or third parties on whom we rely may fail to comply with such obligations, which could negatively impact our business operations. If we or the third parties on which we rely fail, or are perceived to have failed, to address or comply with applicable privacy, security, or data protection obligations, we could face significant consequences, including government enforcement actions (such as investigations, claims, audits, and penalties), litigation (including class-action litigation) and mass arbitration demands, additional reporting requirements

We have in the past been subject to enforcement actions, investigations, proceedings, orders, or various government inquiries regarding our data privacy and security practices and processing. For example, in December 2014, the FTC resolved an investigation into some of our early practices by issuing a final order. That order requires, among other things, that we establish a robust privacy program to govern how we treat user data. During the 20-year term of the order, we must complete biennial independent privacy audits. In addition, in June 2014, we entered into a 10-year assurance of discontinuance with the Attorney General of Maryland implementing similar practices, including measures to prevent minors under the age of 13 from creating accounts and providing annual compliance reports. Violating existing or future regulatory orders or consent decrees could subject us to substantial monetary fines and other penalties that could seriously harm our business.

Our quarterly results of operations have fluctuated in the past and will fluctuate in the future. Additionally, we have a limited operating history with the current scale of our business, which makes it difficult to forecast our future results. As a result, you should not rely on our past quarterly results of operations as indicators of future performance. You should take into account the risks and uncertainties frequently encountered by companies in rapidly evolving market segments. Our financial condition and results of operations in any given quarter can be influenced by numerous factors, many of which we are unable to predict or are outside of our control, including:

We have made, and are continuing to make, investments to enable users, partners, and advertisers to create compelling content and deliver advertising to our users. Existing and prospective Snapchat users and advertisers may not be successful in creating content that leads to and maintains user engagement. We are continuously seeking to balance the objectives of our users and advertisers with our desire to provide an optimal user experience. We do not seek to monetize all of our products nor do we solely focus our efforts on users with higher ARPU, and we may not be successful in achieving a balance that continues to attract and retain users and advertisers. We focus on growing engagement across our service, and from time to time our efforts may reduce user activity with certain monetizable products in favor of other products we do not currently monetize. If we are not successful in our efforts to grow or effectively and timely monetize our user base, or if we are unable to build and maintain good relations with our advertisers, our user growth and user engagement and our business may be seriously harmed. In addition, we may expend significant resources to launch new products that we are unable to monetize, which may seriously harm our business.

Additionally, we may not succeed in further monetizing Snapchat. We currently primarily monetize Snapchat by displaying advertisements sold by us and our partners. As a result, our financial performance and ability to grow revenue could be seriously harmed if:

The growth and expansion of our business, headcount, and products create significant challenges for our management, including managing multiple relationships with users, advertisers, partners, and other third parties, and constrain operational and financial resources. If our operations or the number of third-party relationships continues to grow, our information-technology systems and our internal controls and procedures may not adequately support our operations and may require significant investments of time and capital to improve. In addition, some members of our management do not have significant experience managing large global business operations, so our management may not be able to manage such growth effectively. To effectively manage our growth, we must continue to improve our operational, financial, and management processes and systems and effectively expand, train, and manage our employee base. However, the actions we take to achieve such improvements may not have the intended effect and may instead result in disruptions, delays in new products, employee turnover, declines in revenue, and other adverse effects.

As our organization continues to mature and we are required to implement more complex organizational management structures, we may also find it increasingly difficult to maintain the benefits of our corporate culture, including our ability to quickly develop and launch new and innovative products. This could negatively affect our business performance and seriously harm our business.

In August 2022, we undertook a broad strategic reprioritization to focus on our top priorities, improve cost efficiencies, and drive toward profitability and positive free cash flow. As a result of the strategic reprioritization, in the year ended December 31, 2022, we incurred pre-tax charges of $188.9 million, primarily consisting of severance and related charges, stock-based compensation expense, lease exit and related charges, impairment charges, contract termination charges, and intangible asset amortization. As we continue to adapt and update our business model and priorities, we may make additional restructurings, reprioritizations, or reductions in the future. Any such changes could disrupt our operations, increase costs, make it harder to service our users or customers, adversely impact employee retention, hiring, and morale, negatively impact our reputation, or distract management, any of which could seriously harm our business.

Providing our products to our users is costly, and we expect our expenses, including those related to people, research and development, and hosting, to grow in the future. This expense growth will continue as we broaden our user base, as users increase the number of connections and amount of content they consume and share, as we develop and implement new product features that require more computing infrastructure or products that are not revenue generating, and as we grow our business. Historically, our costs have increased each year due to these factors, and we expect to continue to incur increasing costs. Our costs are based on development and release of new products and the addition of users and may not be offset by a corresponding growth in our revenue. We will continue to invest in our global infrastructure to provide our products quickly and reliably to all users around the world, including in countries where we do not expect significant short-term monetization, if any. Our expenses may be greater than we anticipate, and our investments to make our business and our technical infrastructure more efficient may not succeed and may outpace monetization efforts. In addition, we expect to increase marketing, sales, and other operating expenses to grow and expand our operations and to remain competitive. Increases in our costs without a corresponding increase in our revenue would increase our losses and could seriously harm our business and financial performance.

Our reputation and ability to attract, retain, and serve users depends on the reliable performance of Snapchat and our underlying technology infrastructure. We have in the past experienced, and may in the future experience, interruptions in the availability or performance of our products and services from time to time. Our systems may not be adequately designed with the necessary reliability and redundancy to avoid performance delays or outages that could seriously harm our business. If Snapchat is unavailable when users attempt to access it, or if it does not load as quickly as they expect, users may not return to Snapchat as often in the future, or at all. As our user base and the volume and types of information shared on Snapchat grow, we will need an increasing amount of technology infrastructure, including network capacity and computing power, to continue to satisfy our users’ needs which could significantly increase our costs. It is possible that we may fail to effectively scale and grow our technology infrastructure to accommodate these increased demands, or that improving our current technology infrastructure will require significant resources and delay or hinder the development of other products or services. In addition, our business is subject to interruptions, delays, and failures resulting from earthquakes, other natural disasters, geo-political conflicts, terrorism, pandemics, and other catastrophic events. Global climate change could also result in natural disasters occurring more frequently or with more intense effects, which could cause business interruptions. Wars or other armed conflicts could damage or diminish our access to our technology infrastructure or regional networks and disrupt our services, which could seriously harm our business and financial performance.

As discussed in these risk factors, substantially all of our network infrastructure is provided by third parties, including Google Cloud and AWS. We also rely on third parties for other technology related services, including certain artificial intelligence functions. Any disruption or failure in the services we receive from these providers could harm our ability to handle existing or increased traffic and could seriously harm our business. Any financial or other difficulties these providers face may seriously harm our business. And because we exercise little control over these providers, we are vulnerable to problems with the services they provide and increases in the costs of these services.

We periodically augment and enhance our financial systems and we may experience difficulties in managing our systems and processes, which could disrupt our operations, the management of our finances, and the reporting of our financial results, which in turn, may result in our inability to manage the growth of our business and to accurately forecast and report our results, each of which could seriously harm our business.

Our business is growing and becoming more complex, and our success depends on our ability to quickly develop and launch new and innovative products. We believe our culture fosters this goal. Our focus on innovations and quick reactions could result in unintended outcomes or decisions that are poorly received by our users, advertisers, or partners. We have made, and expect to continue to make, significant investments to develop and launch new products and services and we cannot assure you that users will purchase or use such new products and services in the future. We will also continue to attempt to find effective ways to show our community new and existing products and alert them to events, holidays, relevant content, and meaningful opportunities to connect with their friends. These methods may provide temporary increases in engagement that may ultimately fail to attract and retain users. Our culture also prioritizes our long-term user engagement over short-term financial condition or results of operations. We frequently make decisions that may reduce our short-term revenue or profitability if we believe that the decisions benefit the aggregate user experience and improve our financial performance over the long term. For example, we monitor how advertising on Snapchat affects our users’ experiences to attempt to ensure we do not deliver too many advertisements to our users, and we may decide to decrease the number of advertisements to increase our users’ satisfaction in the product. In addition, we improve Snapchat based on feedback provided by our users, advertisers, and partners. These decisions may not produce the long-term benefits that we expect, in which case our user growth, retention and engagement on our service or on certain platforms, our relationships with advertisers and partners, and our business could be seriously harmed.

We use software licensed to us by third-party developers under “open source” licenses in connection with the development or deployment of our products and expect to continue to use open source software in the future. Some open

In addition, our use of open source software may present greater risks than use of other third-party commercial software, as open source licensors generally do not provide support, warranties, indemnification or other contractual protections regarding infringement claims or the quality of the code. To the extent that our e-commerce capabilities and other business operations depend on the successful and secure operation of open source software, any undetected or unremediated vulnerabilities, errors, or defects in open source software that we use could prevent the deployment or impair the functionality of our systems and injure our reputation. In addition, the public availability of such software may make it easier for others to compromise our systems. Any of these risks could be difficult to eliminate or manage and, if not addressed, could have an adverse effect on our business.

Our success depends on our ability to provide Snapchat users with engaging content, which in part depends on the content contributed by our users. If users, including influential users such as world leaders, government officials, celebrities, athletes, journalists, sports teams, media outlets, and brands, do not continue to contribute engaging content to Snapchat, our user growth, retention, and engagement may decline. That, in turn, may impair our ability to maintain good relationships with our advertisers or attract new advertisers, which may seriously harm our business.

Foreign data protection, privacy, consumer protection, content regulation, and other laws and regulations are often more restrictive than those in the United States. In addition, federal, state, and local governments in the United States have taken increasingly divergent approaches to legislating, regulating, and taking enforcement action with respect to technologies that are related to our products and services, including considering or passing laws and regulations that are different than those applicable to other regions in the United States. Foreign governments may censor Snapchat in their countries, restrict access to Snapchat from their countries entirely, impose age-based restrictions on access to Snapchat, impose other restrictions that may affect their citizens’ ability to access Snapchat for an extended period of time or even indefinitely, require data localization, or impose other laws or regulations that we cannot comply with, would be difficult for us to comply with, or would require us to rebuild our products or the infrastructure for our products. Federal, state, or local governments in the United States may take, or attempt, similar steps. Such restrictions may also be implemented or lifted selectively to target or benefit other companies or products, which may result in sudden or unexpected fluctuations in competition in regions where we operate. In addition, geo-political conflicts may cause countries to target and restrict our operations, or to promote other companies’ products in place of ours. Any restriction on access to Snapchat due to government actions or initiatives, or any withdrawal by us from certain countries or regions because of such actions or initiatives, or any increased competition due to actions and initiatives of governments would adversely affect our DAUs, including by giving our competitors an opportunity to penetrate geographic markets that we cannot access or to which they previously did not have access. As a result, our user growth, retention, and engagement may be seriously harmed, and we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated and our business could be seriously harmed.

Using our products, some partners and advertisers not only can interact directly with our users but can also direct our users to content on third-party websites or downloads of third-party applications. In addition, our users may generate content by using Snapchat features, but then share, use, or post the content on a different platform. The more our users engage with third-party websites and applications, the less engagement we may get from them, which would adversely affect the revenue we could earn from them. Although we believe that Snapchat reaps significant long-term benefits from increased user engagement with content on Snapchat provided by our partners, these benefits may not offset the possible loss of advertising revenue, in which case our business could be seriously harmed.

We have developed a brand that we believe has contributed to our success. We also believe that maintaining and enhancing our brand is critical to expanding our user base, advertisers, and partners. Because many of our users join Snapchat on the invitation or recommendation of a friend or family member, one of our primary focuses is on ensuring that our users continue to view Snapchat and our brand favorably so that these referrals continue. Maintaining and enhancing our brand will depend largely on our ability to continue to provide useful, novel, fun, reliable, trustworthy, and innovative products, which we may not do successfully. We may introduce new products, make changes to existing products and services, or require our users to agree to new terms of service related to new and existing products that users do not like, which may negatively affect our brand in the short term, long term, or both. Additionally, our partners’ actions may affect our brand if users do not appreciate what those partners do on Snapchat. We may also fail to adequately support the needs of our users, advertisers, or partners, which could erode confidence in our brand. Maintaining and enhancing our brand may require us to make substantial investments and these investments may not be successful. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain our brand or if we incur excessive expenses in this effort, our business may be seriously harmed.

In the past, we have experienced, and we expect that we will continue to experience, media, legislative, and regulatory scrutiny. Unfavorable publicity regarding us, our privacy or security practices, product changes, product quality, illicit use of our product, litigation, employee matters, or regulatory activity, or regarding the actions of our founders, our partners, our users, or other companies in our industry, could seriously harm our reputation and brand. Negative publicity and scrutiny could also adversely affect the size, demographics, engagement, and loyalty of our user base, as well as parental perception of our industry or Snapchat in particular, and result in decreased revenue, fewer application installs (or increased application un-installs), or declining engagement or growth rates, including among teens who need parental approval for use of our products, any of which could seriously harm our business.

We have expanded to new international markets and are growing our operations in existing international markets, which may have very different cultures and commercial, legal, and regulatory systems than where we predominantly operate. In connection with our international expansion and growth, we also hire new team members in many of these markets. This international expansion may:

These issues may eventually lead to turnover or layoffs of team members in these markets and may harm our ability to grow our business in these markets. In addition, scaling our business to international markets imposes complexity on our business, and requires additional financial, legal, and management resources. We may not be able to manage growth and expansion effectively, which could damage our brand, result in significant costs, and seriously harm our business. For example, in August 2022, we undertook a broad strategic reprioritization to focus on our top priorities, improve cost efficiencies, and drive toward profitability and positive free cash flow. As a result of the strategic reprioritization, in the year ended December 31, 2022, we incurred pre-tax charges of $188.9 million, primarily consisting of severance and related charges, stock-based compensation expense, lease exit and related charges, impairment charges, contract termination charges, and intangible asset amortization. As we continue to adapt and update our business model and priorities, we may make additional restructurings, reprioritizations, or reductions in the future. Any such changes could

Additionally, because we have team members internationally, we are exposed to political, social, and economic instability in additional countries and regions.

Our products are highly technical and complex. Snapchat, our other products, or products we may introduce in the future, may contain undetected software bugs, hardware errors, and other vulnerabilities. These bugs and errors can manifest in any number of ways in our products, including through diminished performance, security vulnerabilities, malfunctions, or even permanently disabled products. We have a practice of updating our products, but some errors in our products may be discovered only after a product has been released or shipped and used by users, and may in some cases be detected only under certain circumstances or after extended use. While we maintain an application security program designed to detect and remediate bugs and vulnerabilities in our products prior to their launch and a bug bounty program to allow security researchers to assist us in identifying vulnerabilities in our products before they are exploited by malicious threat actors, there is no guarantee that we will be able to discover and remediate vulnerabilities or threats to our products, including in a timely manner. We may be unable to detect bugs, vulnerabilities or threats because no testing can reveal all bugs and vulnerabilities in highly technical and complex products that are constantly evolving, cyber threat actors are developing sophisticated and often undisclosed exploit development tools and techniques, and vulnerabilities in open source and third-party software that may be included in our products are disclosed daily. Any errors, bugs, or vulnerabilities discovered in our products or code (particularly after release) could damage our reputation, result in a security incident (and attendant consequences), drive away users, lower revenue, and expose us to litigation claims or regulatory investigations or enforcement actions, any of which could seriously harm our business. We may also experience delays in developing and deploying remedial measures and patches designed to address identified vulnerabilities.

We have been, are currently, and may in the future be subject to inquiries, investigations, and proceedings instituted by government entities. We regularly report information about our business to federal, state, and foreign regulators in the ordinary course of operations. For example, many companies in our industry have received additional information requests from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and companies with operations in California, including us, have received additional information requests and notices of cause from the California Civil Rights Department (formerly the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing) regarding employment practices, including pay equity. These actions, including any potential unfavorable outcomes, and our compliance with any associated regulatory orders, consent decrees, or settlements, may require us to change our policies or practices, subject us to substantial monetary fines or other penalties or sanctions, result in increased operating costs, divert management’s

Companies in the mobile, camera, communication, media, internet, and other technology-related industries own large numbers of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and other intellectual property rights, and frequently enter into litigation based on allegations of infringement, misappropriation, or other violations of intellectual property or other rights. In addition, various “non-practicing entities” and other entities that own patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and other intellectual property rights often attempt to aggressively assert their rights to extract value from technology companies. Furthermore, from time to time we may introduce new products or make other business changes, including in areas where we currently do not compete, which could increase our exposure to patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, and other intellectual property rights claims from competitors and non-practicing entities. We have been subject to, and expect to continue to be subject to, claims and legal proceedings from holders of patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, and other intellectual property rights alleging that some of our products or content infringe their rights. An unfavorable outcome in any of these lawsuits could seriously harm our business. If these or other matters continue in the future or we need to enter into licensing arrangements, which may not be available to us or on terms favorable to us, it may increase our costs and decrease the value of our products, and our business could be seriously harmed. If a third party does not offer us a license to its intellectual property on commercially reasonable terms, or at all, we may be required to develop, acquire or license alternative, non-infringing technology, which could require significant time, effort, and expense, and may ultimately not be successful. Any of these events would adversely affect our business.

Moreover, we may not be aware if our platform is infringing, misappropriating, or otherwise violating third-party intellectual property rights, and third parties may bring claims alleging such infringement, misappropriation, or violation. Because patent applications can take years to issue and are often afforded confidentiality for some period of time, there may currently be pending applications, unknown to us, that later result in issued patents that could cover one or more of our products and there is also a risk that we could adopt a technology without knowledge of a pending patent application, which technology would infringe a third-party patent once that patent is issued. Moreover, the law continues to evolve and be applied and interpreted by courts in novel ways that we may not be able to adequately anticipate, and such changes may subject us to additional claims and liabilities. In a patent infringement claim against us, we may assert, as a defense, that we do not infringe the relevant patent claims, that the patent is invalid or both. The strength of our defenses will depend on the patents asserted, the interpretation of these patents and our ability to invalidate the asserted patents. However, we could be unsuccessful in advancing non-infringement or invalidity arguments in our defense. In the United States, issued patents enjoy a presumption of validity, and the party challenging the validity of a patent claim must present clear and convincing evidence of invalidity, which is a high burden of proof. Conversely, the patent owner need only prove infringement by a preponderance of the evidence, which is a lower burden of proof. Intellectual property claims, whether or not successful, could divert management time and attention away from our business and harm our reputation and financial condition. Moreover, there could be public announcements of the results of hearings, motions or other interim proceedings or developments and if securities analysts or investors perceive these results to be negative, it could have a substantial adverse effect on our business.

We rely on a variety of Constitutional, statutory, and common-law frameworks that provide that we are not legally responsible for content created by our users, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Communications Decency Act, or CDA, the First Amendment, and the fair-use doctrine. However, these provisions, statutes, and doctrines are subject to uncertain judicial interpretation and regulatory and legislative amendments. For example, the U.S. Congress amended the CDA in 2018 in ways that could expose some Internet platforms to an increased risk of litigation. In addition, the U.S. Congress and the Executive branch have proposed further changes or amendments each year since 2019 including, among other things, proposals that would narrow the CDA immunity, expand government enforcement power relating to content moderation concerns, or repeal the CDA altogether. Some U.S. states have also enacted or proposed legislation that would undercut, or conflict with, the CDA’s protections. Some of these state-specific laws grant individuals a private right of action to sue to enforce these laws, with statutory damages. Although such state laws have been or can be expected to be challenged in court, if these laws were upheld or if additional similar laws or the changes or amendments to the CDA proposed by the U.S. Congress and the Executive branch were enacted, such changes may decrease the protections

Notwithstanding these Constitutional, statutory, and common-law protections, we have faced, currently face, and will continue to face claims relating to information that is published or made available on our products, including Snapchat. In particular, the nature of our business exposes us to claims related to defamation, intellectual property rights, rights of publicity and privacy, and personal injury torts. For example, we do not monitor or edit the vast majority of content that is communicated through Snapchat, and such content has, and may in the future, expose us to lawsuits. Specifically, we are currently facing several lawsuits alleging that we are liable for allowing users to communicate with each other, and that those communications sometimes result in harm. In addition, other lawsuits allege that the design of our platform and those of our competitors is addictive and harmful to minor users’ mental health. Other plaintiffs have argued that we should be legally responsible for fentanyl overdoses or poisoning if communications about a drug transaction occurred on our platform. We believe we have meritorious defenses to these lawsuits, but litigation is inherently uncertain. Unfavorable outcomes could seriously harm our business. These actions, including any potential unfavorable outcomes, and our compliance with any associated court orders or settlements, may require us to change our policies or practices, subject us to substantial monetary judgments, fines, penalties, or sanctions, result in increased operating costs, divert management’s attention, harm our reputation, and require us to incur significant legal and other expenses, any of which could seriously harm our business. Even if the outcome of any such litigation or claim is favorable, defending against such lawsuits is costly and can impose a significant burden on management and employees. We may also receive unfavorable preliminary, interim, or final rulings in the course of litigation.

This risk is enhanced in certain jurisdictions outside the United States where our protection from liability for third-party actions may be less than the protection that exists in the United States. For example, in April 2019, the European Union passed a directive expanding online platform liability for copyright infringement and regulating certain uses of news content online, which member states were required to implement by June 2021. In addition, legislation in Germany may impose significant fines for failure to comply with certain content removal and disclosure obligations. Numerous other countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America are considering or have implemented similar legislation imposing penalties for failure to remove certain types of content or follow certain processes.

We could incur significant costs investigating and defending such claims and, if we are found liable, significant damages, or license costs. We could also face fines or orders restricting or blocking our services in particular geographies as a result of content hosted on our services. If any of these events occur, we may incur significant costs or be required to make significant changes to our products, business practices, or operations and our business could be seriously harmed.

We are involved in numerous lawsuits, including putative class-action lawsuits brought by users and investors, some of which may claim statutory damages. We anticipate that we will continue to be a target for lawsuits in the future. Because we have millions of users, class-action lawsuits against us that are purportedly filed by or on behalf of users typically claim enormous monetary damages in the aggregate even if the alleged per-user harm is small or non-existent. For example, in November 2020, a putative class filed an action against us in Illinois, alleging that we violated an Illinois statute concerning the handling of biometric data, which we settled. Other plaintiffs have chosen to pursue a strategy of joining with other plaintiffs to bring a large number of individual claims, rather than pursuing a class action.

Similarly, because we have a large number of stockholders, class-action lawsuits on securities theories typically claim enormous monetary damages in the aggregate even if the alleged loss per stockholder is small. For example, in November 2021, we, and certain of our officers, were named as defendants in a securities class-action lawsuit in federal court purportedly brought on behalf of purchasers of our Class A common stock. The lawsuit alleges that we and certain of our officers made false or misleading statements and omissions concerning the impact that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, or ATT, framework would have on our business. In August 2022, we, and certain of our directors, were named as defendants in a class-action lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court purportedly brought on behalf of Class A stockholders, alleging that a transaction between the company’s co-founders and the company, in which the co-founders

We believe we have meritorious defenses to these lawsuits, but litigation is inherently uncertain and an unfavorable outcome could seriously harm our business. Any litigation to which we are a party may result in an onerous or unfavorable judgment that might not be reversed on appeal, or we may decide to settle lawsuits on adverse terms. Any such negative outcome could result in payments of substantial monetary damages or fines, or changes to our products or business practices, and seriously harm our business. Even if the outcome of any such litigation or claim is favorable, defending against such lawsuits is costly and can impose a significant burden on management and employees. We may also receive unfavorable preliminary, interim, or final rulings in the course of litigation.

We plan to continue expanding our business operations abroad and to enter new international markets and expand our operations in existing international markets, where in some cases we have limited or no experience in marketing, selling, and deploying our products and advertisements. Our limited experience and infrastructure in such markets, or the lack of a critical mass of users in such markets, may make it more difficult for us to effectively monetize any increase in DAUs in those markets, and may increase our costs without a corresponding increase in revenue. If we fail to deploy or manage our operations in international markets successfully, our business may suffer. We do not currently enter into foreign currency exchange contracts, which means our business, financial condition, and operating results may be impacted by fluctuations in the exchange rates of the currencies in which we do business. In the future, as our international operations increase, or more of our revenue agreements or operating expenses are denominated in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, these impacts may become material. In addition, as our international operations and sales continue to grow, we are subject to a variety of risks inherent in doing business internationally, including:

If we are unable to expand internationally and manage the complexity of our global operations successfully, our business could be seriously harmed.

As part of our business strategy, we have made and intend to make acquisitions to add specialized team members and complementary companies, products, and technologies, as well as investments in public and private companies in furtherance of our strategic objectives. Our ability to acquire and successfully integrate larger or more complex companies, products, and technologies is unproven. In the future, we may not be able to find other suitable acquisition or investment candidates, and we may not be able to complete acquisitions or investments on favorable terms, if at all. Our previous and future acquisitions and investments may not achieve our goals, and any future acquisitions or investments we complete could be viewed negatively by users, advertisers, partners, or investors. In addition, if we fail to successfully close transactions, integrate new teams, or integrate the products, technologies, and systems associated with these acquisitions into our company, our business could be seriously harmed. Any integration process may require significant time and resources, and we may not be able to manage the process successfully. For example, future or past business transactions could expose us to additional cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, as our systems could be negatively affected by vulnerabilities present in acquired or integrated entities’ systems and technologies. We may not successfully evaluate or use the acquired products, technology, and personnel, or accurately forecast the financial impact of an acquisition or investment transaction, including accounting charges. We may also incur unanticipated liabilities and litigation exposure that we assume as a result of acquiring companies. We may have to pay cash, incur debt, or issue equity securities to pay for any acquisition or investment, any of which could seriously harm our business. Selling or issuing equity to finance or carry out any such acquisition or investment would also dilute our existing stockholders. Incurring debt would increase our fixed obligations and could also include covenants or other restrictions that would impede our ability to manage our operations.

In addition, it generally takes several months after the closing of an acquisition to finalize the purchase price allocation. Therefore, it is possible that our valuation of an acquisition may change and result in unanticipated write-offs or charges, impairment of our goodwill, or a material change to the fair value of the assets and liabilities associated with a particular acquisition, any of which could seriously harm our business.

The strategic investments we make in public and private companies around the world range from early-stage companies still defining their strategic direction to mature companies with established revenue streams and business models. Many of the instruments in which we invest are non-marketable and illiquid at the time of our initial investment, and our ability to realize a return on our investment, if any, is typically dependent on the issuer participating in a liquidity event, such as a public offering or acquisition. We are not always able to achieve a return on our investments in a timely fashion, if at all, even for those companies that have achieved a liquidity event. To the extent any of the companies in which we invest are not successful, which can include failures to achieve business objectives as well as bankruptcy, we could recognize an impairment or lose all or part of our investment.

Our acquisition and investment strategy may not succeed if we are unable to remain attractive to target companies or expeditiously close transactions. For example, if we develop a reputation for being a difficult acquirer or having an unfavorable work environment, or target companies view our non-voting Class A common stock unfavorably, we may be unable to source and close acquisition targets. In addition, members of the U.S. administration and Congress have proposed new legislation, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have adopted new procedures, that could limit, hinder, or delay the acquisition process and target opportunities. If we are unable to consummate key acquisition transactions essential to our corporate strategy, it may limit our ability to grow or compete effectively and our business may be seriously harmed.

Under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, we review our intangible assets for impairment when events or changes in circumstances indicate the carrying value may not be recoverable. Goodwill is required to be tested for impairment at least annually. As of December 31, 2023, we had recorded a total of $1.8 billion of goodwill and intangible assets, net related to our acquisitions. An adverse change in market conditions, particularly if such change has the effect of changing one of our critical assumptions or estimates, could result in a change to the estimation of fair value that could result in an impairment charge to our goodwill or intangible assets. Any such material charges may seriously harm our business.

We use equity awards that vest over multiple years to compensate and motivate our employees. When our employee equity awards vest, we typically withhold taxes and remit them, along with any employee and employer social security contributions, to relevant taxing authorities on behalf of team members and, where applicable, their employers.

While the issuance of stock-based compensation to our employees does not deplete our cash balance, it is dilutive to existing stockholders. To help manage and mitigate this dilution, we can choose to use our existing cash to fund the withholding and remittance obligations on equity awards when they vest (instead of selling a portion of the vested equity award on behalf of our employees), or engage in stock repurchases. However, doing so would reduce the amount of cash we have available to fund working capital, capital expenditures, strategic acquisitions or business opportunities, and other general corporate purposes and may increase stock price volatility. If we were to elect to satisfy tax withholding and remittance obligations in whole or in part by drawing on our revolving credit facility, our interest expense and principal repayment requirements could increase significantly, which could seriously harm our business.

Manufacturing processes are highly complex, require advanced and costly equipment, and must be continuously modified to improve yields and performance. We largely rely on third-party suppliers and contract manufacturers in connection with the production of our own physical products and components. We and our contract manufacturers are all vulnerable to capacity constraints and reduced component availability, and have limited control over delivery schedules, manufacturing yields, and costs, particularly when components are in short supply, or if we introduce a new product or feature. In addition, we have limited control over our suppliers’ and manufacturers’ quality systems and controls, and therefore must rely on them to meet our quality and performance standards and specifications. Delays, component shortages, including custom components that are manufactured for us at our direction, global trade conditions and agreements, and other manufacturing and supply problems could impair the distribution of our products and ultimately our brand. For example, the United States has threatened tougher trade terms with China and other countries, leading to the imposition, or potential future imposition, of substantially higher U.S. Section 301 tariffs on certain imports from China, which may adversely affect our products and seriously harm our business.

Furthermore, any adverse change in our suppliers’ or contract manufacturers’ financial or business condition or our relationship with them could disrupt our ability to supply our products. If we change our suppliers or contract manufacturers, or shift to more internal manufacturing operations, we may lose revenue, incur increased costs, and damage our reputation and brand. Qualifying and commencing operations with a new supplier or contract manufacturer is expensive and time-consuming. In addition, if we experience increased demand for our products, we may need to increase our material or component purchases, internal or contract-manufacturing capacity, and internal test and quality functions. The inability of our suppliers or contract manufacturers to provide us with adequate high-quality materials and products could delay our order fulfillment, and may require us to change the design of our products to meet this increased demand. Any redesign may require us to re-qualify our products with any applicable regulatory bodies or customers, which would be costly and time-consuming. This may lead to unsatisfied customers and users and increase costs to us, which could seriously harm our business. As we increase or acquire additional manufacturing capacity, we are subject to many complex and evolving environmental, health, and safety laws, regulations, and rules in each jurisdiction in which we operate. If we fail to comply with any such laws and regulations, then we could incur regulatory penalties, fines, and legal liabilities, suspension of production, significant compliance requirements, alteration of our manufacturing processes, or restrictions on our ability to modify or expand our facilities, any of which could seriously harm our business.

In addition, any errors or defects in any parts or technology incorporated into our products could result in product failures or recalls that could seriously harm our business. Further, any defect in manufacturing, design, or other could cause our products to fail or render them permanently inoperable. As a result of such product failures or recalls, we may have to replace or offer refunds for these products at our sole cost and expense, face litigation, including class-action lawsuits, or be subject to other liabilities. Should we have a widespread problem of this kind, the reputational damage and the cost of replacing these products, or other liabilities, could seriously harm our business.

The FDA and other state and foreign regulatory agencies regulate Spectacles. We may develop future products that are regulated as medical devices by the FDA or regulated by other governmental agencies. Government authorities, primarily the FDA and corresponding regulatory agencies, regulate the medical device industry. Unless there is an exemption, we must obtain regulatory approval from the FDA and corresponding agencies, or other applicable governmental authorities, before we can market or sell a new regulated product or make a significant modification to an existing product. Obtaining regulatory clearances to market a medical device or other regulated products can be costly and time-consuming, and we may not be able to obtain these clearances or approvals on a timely basis, or at all, for future products. Any delay in, or failure to receive or maintain, clearance or approval for any products under development could prevent us from launching new products. We could seriously harm our business and the ability to sell our products if we experience any product problems requiring reporting to governmental authorities, if we fail to comply with applicable federal, state, or foreign agency regulations, or if we are subject to enforcement actions such as fines, civil penalties, injunctions, product recalls, or failure to obtain regulatory clearances or approvals.

We have been and may in the future be exposed to inventory risks related to our physical products as a result of rapid changes in product cycles and pricing, defective merchandise, changes in consumer demand and consumer spending patterns, changes in consumer tastes with respect to our products, and other factors. We try to accurately predict these trends and avoid overstocking or understocking inventory. Demand for products, however, can change significantly between the time inventory or components are ordered and the date of sale. The acquisition of certain types of inventory or components may require significant lead-time and prepayment and they may not be returnable. Failure to manage our inventory, supplier commitments, or customer expectations could seriously harm our business.

We engage in business with some of our partners on an open credit basis. While we attempt to monitor individual partner payment capability when we grant open credit arrangements and maintain allowances we believe are adequate to cover exposure for doubtful accounts, we cannot assure investors these programs will be effective in managing our credit risks in the future. This may be especially true as our business grows and expands, we engage with partners that have limited operating history, or we engage with partners that we may not be familiar with. If we are unable to adequately control these risks, our business could be seriously harmed.

Our ability to make principal or interest payments on, or to refinance, the Convertible Notes or other indebtedness depends on our future performance, which is subject to many factors beyond our control. Our business may not generate sufficient cash flow from operations in the future to service our debt and business. If we are unable to generate such cash flow, we may be required to adopt one or more alternatives, such as selling assets, restructuring debt, obtaining additional debt financing, or issuing additional equity securities, any of which may be on terms that are not favorable to us or, in the case of equity securities, highly dilutive to our stockholders. The Convertible Notes will mature beginning in May 2025, unless earlier converted, redeemed, or repurchased. Our ability to repay or refinance the Convertible Notes or our other indebtedness will depend on various factors, including the accessibility of capital markets, our business, and our financial condition at such time. We may not be able to engage in any of these activities or on desirable terms, which could result in a default on our debt obligations. In addition, our existing and future debt agreements, including the Convertible Notes and

In addition, holders of the Convertible Notes have the right to require us to repurchase all or a portion of the Convertible Notes on the occurrence of a fundamental change at a repurchase price equal to 100% of the principal amount of the Convertible Notes to be repurchased, plus accrued and unpaid interest, if any, to, but excluding, the fundamental change repurchase date. Further, if a make-whole fundamental change as defined in each of the indentures governing the Convertible Notes, or the Indentures, occurs prior to the maturity date of the Convertible Notes, we will in some cases be required to increase the conversion rate for a holder that elects to convert its Convertible Notes in connection with such make-whole fundamental change. On the conversion of the Convertible Notes, unless we elect to deliver solely shares of our Class A common stock to settle such conversion (other than paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we will be required to make cash payments for the Convertible Notes being converted. However, we may not have enough available cash or be able to obtain financing at the time we are required to make such repurchases of the Convertible Notes surrendered or pay cash with respect to the Convertible Notes being converted.

We have a Credit Facility that we may draw on to finance our operations, acquisitions, and other corporate purposes. If we default on these credit obligations, our lenders may:

If any of these events occur, our operations may be interrupted and our ability to fund our operations or obligations, as well as our business, could be seriously harmed. In addition, our Credit Facility contains operating covenants, including customary limitations on the incurrence of certain indebtedness and liens, restrictions on certain intercompany transactions, and limitations on the amount of dividends and stock repurchases. Our ability to comply with these covenants may be affected by events beyond our control, and breaches of these covenants could result in a default under the Credit Facility and any future financial agreements into which we may enter. If not waived, defaults could cause our outstanding indebtedness under our outstanding Convertible Notes or our Credit Facility, including any future financing agreements that we may enter into, to become immediately due and payable. For more information on our Credit Facility, see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Liquidity and Capital Resources.”

We have historically incurred net losses and negative cash flow from operations, and we may not attain and sustain profitability in future periods. As a result, we may need additional financing. Our ability to obtain additional financing, if and when required, will depend on investor demand, our operating performance, our credit rating, the condition of the capital markets, and other factors. To the extent we use available funds or draw on our Credit Facility, we may need to raise additional funds and we cannot assure investors that additional financing will be available to us on favorable terms when required, or at all. If we raise additional funds through the issuance of equity, equity-linked, or debt securities, those securities may have rights, preferences, or privileges senior to the rights of our Class A common stock, and our existing stockholders may experience dilution. In the event that we are unable to obtain additional financing on favorable terms, our interest expense and principal repayment requirements could increase significantly, which could seriously harm our business. In addition, our ability to draw on our Credit Facility relies on our lenders under that facility’s continued operation and ability to fund.

Reforming the taxation of international businesses has been a priority for politicians at a global level, and a wide variety of changes have been proposed or enacted. Due to the large and expanding scale of our international business activities, any changes in the taxation of such activities may increase our tax expense, the amount of taxes we pay, or both, and seriously harm our business. For example, legislation commonly referred to as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was enacted in December 2017, significantly reformed the U.S. Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, or the Code. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act put into effect significant changes to U.S. taxation of international business activities, including lowering U.S. federal corporate income tax rates, changing the utilization of future net operating loss carryforwards, allowing certain capital expenditures to be expensed, eliminating the option to currently deduct research and development expenditures and requiring taxpayers to capitalize and amortize U.S.-based and non-U.S.-based research and development expenditures over five and fifteen years, respectively. In August 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, or the IRA, was enacted, the provisions of which include a minimum tax equal to 15% of the adjusted financial statement income of certain large corporations, as well as a 1% excise tax on certain share buybacks by public corporations that would be imposed on such corporations. It is possible that changes or interpretations under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the IRA, or other tax legislation could increase our future tax liability, which could in turn adversely impact our business and future profitability.

In addition, many jurisdictions and intergovernmental organizations have implemented or are in the process of implementing proposals that have changed (or are likely to change) various aspects of the existing framework under which our tax obligations are determined in many of the jurisdictions in which we do business and in which our users are located. Some jurisdictions have enacted, and others have proposed, in each case potentially on a temporary basis pending the implementation of the “two-pillar solution” described below, taxes based on gross receipts applicable to digital services regardless of profitability. In addition, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or the OECD, has led international efforts to devise, and to implement on a permanent basis, a two-pillar solution to address the tax challenges arising from the digitalization of the economy. Pillar One focuses on nexus and profit allocation, and Pillar Two provides for a global minimum effective corporate tax rate of 15%. Pillar One would apply to multinational enterprises with annual global revenue above 20 billion euros and profitability above 10%, with the revenue threshold potentially reduced to 10 billion euros in the future. While it remains uncertain whether Pillar One will be adopted, based on these thresholds, we currently expect to be outside the scope of the Pillar One proposals, though we anticipate that we will be subject to Pillar One in the future if it is ultimately adopted and if our global revenue exceeds the Pillar One thresholds. A number of countries, including the United Kingdom, have enacted legislation to implement core elements of the Pillar Two proposal from the start of 2024. Based on our current understanding of the minimum revenue thresholds contained in the proposed Pillar Two rules, we expect that we may be within their scope and so their implementation could impact the amount of tax we have to pay and we may be required to incur additional material costs and expenditures to ensure compliance with any such rules in each of the relevant jurisdictions within which we carry on our business.

We continue to examine the impact these and other tax reforms may have on our business. The impact of these and other tax reforms is uncertain and one or more of these or similar measures could seriously harm our business.

Our income tax obligations are based on our corporate operating structure and third-party and intercompany arrangements, including the manner in which we develop, value, and use our intellectual property and the valuations of our intercompany transactions. The tax laws applicable to our international business activities, including the laws of the United States and other jurisdictions, are subject to change and uncertain interpretation. The taxing authorities of the jurisdictions in which we operate may challenge our methodologies for valuing developed technology, intercompany arrangements, or transfer pricing, which could increase our worldwide effective tax rate and the amount of taxes we pay and seriously harm our business. Taxing authorities may also determine that the manner in which we operate our business is not consistent with how we report our income, which could increase our effective tax rate and the amount of taxes we pay and seriously harm our business. In addition, our future income taxes could fluctuate because of earnings being lower than anticipated in jurisdictions that have lower statutory tax rates and higher than anticipated in jurisdictions that have higher statutory tax rates, by changes in the valuation of our deferred tax assets and liabilities, or by changes in tax laws, regulations, or accounting principles. We are subject to regular review and audit by U.S. federal and state and foreign tax authorities. Any adverse outcome from a review or audit could seriously harm our business. In addition, determining our worldwide provision for income taxes and other tax liabilities requires significant judgment by management, and there are many

As of December 31, 2023, we had U.S. federal net operating loss carryforwards of approximately $6.7 billion and state net operating loss carryforwards of approximately $4.5 billion, as well as U.K. net operating loss carryforwards of approximately $4.5 billion. We also accumulated U.S. federal and state research tax credits of $816.6 million and $478.9 million, respectively, as of December 31, 2023. Under Sections 382 and 383 of the Code, if a corporation undergoes an “ownership change,” the corporation’s ability to use its pre-change net operating loss carryforwards and other pre-change tax attributes, such as research tax credits, to offset its post-change income and taxes may be limited. In general, an “ownership change” occurs if there is a cumulative change in our ownership by “5% shareholders” that exceeds 50 percentage points over a rolling three-year period. Similar rules may apply under state tax laws. In the event that we experience one or more ownership changes as a result of transactions in our stock, then we may be limited in our ability to use our net operating loss carryforwards and other tax assets to reduce taxes owed on the net taxable income that we earn.

For U.S. federal income tax purposes, net operating losses arising in tax years beginning before January 1, 2018 can be carried forward to the earlier of the next subsequent twenty tax years or until such losses are fully utilized. Net operating losses arising in tax years beginning after December 31, 2017 are not subject to the twenty-year limitation, but our use of such net operating losses in a tax year may not exceed 80% of such year’s taxable income. U.S. federal research tax credits can be carried forward to the earlier of the next subsequent twenty tax years or until such credits are fully utilized, and use of those credits generally cannot exceed 75% of the net income tax liability for such tax year. In the United Kingdom, net operating loss carryforwards can be carried forward indefinitely; however, use of such carryforwards in a given year is generally limited to 50% of such year’s taxable income and may be subject to ownership change rules that restrict the use of net operating loss carryforwards.

Any limitations on the ability to use our net operating loss carryforwards and other tax assets, as well as the timing of any such use, could seriously harm our business.

We currently collect and remit sales and use, value added and other transaction taxes in certain of the jurisdictions where we do business based on our assessment of the amount of taxes owed by us in such jurisdictions. However, in some jurisdictions in which we do business, we do not believe that we owe such taxes, and therefore we currently do not collect and remit such taxes in those jurisdictions or record contingent tax liabilities in respect of those jurisdictions. A successful assertion that we are required to pay additional taxes in connection with sales of our products and solutions, or the imposition of new laws or regulations or the interpretation of existing laws and regulations requiring the payment of additional taxes, would result in increased costs and administrative burdens for us. If we are subject to additional taxes and determine to offset such increased costs by collecting and remitting such taxes from our customers, or otherwise passing those costs through to our customers, companies may be discouraged from purchasing our products and solutions. Any increased tax burden may decrease our ability or willingness to compete in relatively burdensome tax jurisdictions, result in substantial tax liabilities related to past or future sales or otherwise seriously harm our business.

Class A common stockholders have no voting rights, unless required by Delaware law. As a result, all matters submitted to stockholders will be decided by the vote of holders of Class B common stock and Class C common stock. As of December 31, 2023, Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy control over 99% of the voting power of our capital stock, and Mr. Spiegel alone may exercise voting control over our outstanding capital stock. Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy voting together, or in many instances, Mr. Spiegel acting alone, will have control over all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval. In addition, because our Class A common stock carries no voting rights (except as required by Delaware law), the issuance of the Class A common stock in future offerings, in future stock-based acquisition transactions, or to fund employee equity incentive programs could prolong the duration of Mr. Spiegel’s and Mr. Murphy’s current relative

Although other U.S.-based companies have publicly traded classes of non-voting stock, to our knowledge, we were the first company to only list non-voting stock on a U.S. stock exchange. Some indexes have since determined that they will exclude non-voting stock, like our Class A common stock, from their membership. For example, FTSE Russell, a provider of widely followed stock indexes, requires new constituents of its indexes to have at least five percent of their voting rights in the hands of public stockholders. The S&P Dow Jones, another provider of widely followed stock indexes, previously excluded companies with multiple share classes, but subsequently reversed course to remove that exclusion. As a result, our Class A common stock is not eligible for stock indexes with these or similar restrictions. We cannot assure you that other stock indexes will not take a similar approach to FTSE Russell in the future. Exclusion from indexes could make our Class A common stock less attractive to investors and, as a result, the market price of our Class A common stock could be adversely affected. Additionally, the exclusion of our Class A common stock from these indexes may limit the types of investors who invest in our Class A common stock and could make the trading price of our Class A common stock more volatile

Because our Class A common stock is non-voting, significant holders of our common stock are exempt from the obligation to file reports under Sections 13(d), 13(g), and 16 of the Exchange Act. These provisions generally require periodic reporting of beneficial ownership by significant stockholders, including changes in that ownership. For example, we believe that Tencent Holdings Limited, together with its affiliates, may hold greater than 10% of our Class A common stock based in part on Tencent Holdings Limited’s public reporting. As a result of our capital structure, holders are not obligated to disclose changes in ownership of our Class A common stock, so there can be no assurance that you, or we, will be notified of any such changes. Our directors and officers are required to file reports under Section 16 of the Exchange Act. Our significant stockholders, other than directors and officers, are exempt from the “short-swing” profit recovery provisions of Section 16 of the Exchange Act and related rules with respect to their purchases and sales of our securities. As such, stockholders will be unable to bring derivative claims for disgorgement of profits for trades by significant stockholders under Section 16(b) of the Exchange Act unless the significant stockholders are also directors or officers.

Since our Class A common stock is our only class of stock registered under Section 12 of the Exchange Act and that class is non-voting, we are not required to file proxy statements or information statements under Section 14 of the Exchange Act, unless a vote of the Class A common stock is required by applicable law. Accordingly, legal causes of action and remedies under Section 14 of the Exchange Act for inadequate or misleading information in proxy statements may not be available to holders of our Class A common stock. If we do not deliver any proxy statements, information statements, annual reports, and other information and reports to the holders of our Class B common stock and Class C common stock, then we will similarly not provide any of this information to holders of our Class A common stock. Because we are not required to file proxy statements or information statements under Section 14 of the Exchange Act, any proxy statement, information statement, or notice of our annual meeting may not include all information under Section 14 of the Exchange Act that a public company with voting securities registered under Section 12 of the Exchange Act would be required to provide to its stockholders. Most of that information, however, will be reported in other public filings. For example, any disclosures required by Part III of Form 10-K as well as disclosures required by the NYSE for the year ended December 31, 2023 that are customarily included in a proxy statement are instead included in our Annual Report. But some information required in a proxy statement or information statement is not required in any other public filing. For example, we are not required to comply with the proxy access rules or the “pay versus performance” disclosure rules under Section 14 of the Exchange Act. If we take any action in an extraordinary meeting of stockholders where the holders of Class A common stock are not entitled to vote, we will not be required to provide the information required under Section 14 of the Exchange Act. Nor will we be required to file a preliminary proxy statement under Section 14 of the Exchange Act. Since that information is also not required in a Form 10-K, holders of Class A common stock may not receive the information required under Section 14 of the Exchange Act with respect to extraordinary meetings of stockholders. In addition, we are not subject to the “say-on-pay” and “say-on-frequency” provisions of the Dodd–Frank Act. As a result, our stockholders do not have an opportunity to provide a non-binding vote on the compensation of our executive officers. Moreover, holders of

The trading price of our Class A common stock has been and is likely to continue to be volatile. From January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2023, the trading price of our Class A common stock ranged from $7.33 to $47.71. Declines or volatility in our trading price could make it more difficult to attract and retain talent, adversely impact employee retention and morale, and has required, and may continue to require, us to issue more equity to incentivize team members which is likely to dilute stockholders. The market price of our Class A common stock may fluctuate or decline significantly in response to numerous factors, many of which are beyond our control, including:

In addition, extreme price and volume fluctuations in the stock markets have affected and continue to affect many technology companies’ stock prices, including ours. Often, their stock prices have fluctuated in ways unrelated or disproportionate to the companies’ operating performance. In the past, stockholders have filed securities class-action litigation following periods of market volatility. For example, in November 2021, we, and certain of our officers, were named as defendants in a securities class-action lawsuit in federal court purportedly brought on behalf of purchasers of our Class A common stock. The lawsuit alleges that we and certain of our officers made false or misleading statements and omissions concerning the impact that Apple’s ATT framework would have on our business. We believe we have meritorious defenses to this lawsuit, but an unfavorable outcome could seriously harm our business. Any litigation could

Our board of directors has in the past and may from time to time in the future authorize stock repurchase programs, pursuant to which repurchases of Class A common stock may be made either through open market transactions (including pre-set trading plans) or through other transactions in accordance with applicable securities laws. Any repurchase programs may be modified, suspended, or terminated at any time. Any failure to repurchase stock after we have announced our intention to do so may negatively impact our reputation and investor confidence in us and may negatively impact our stock price.

The existence of a stock repurchase program could cause our stock price to trade higher than it otherwise would be and could potentially reduce the market liquidity for our stock. Although stock repurchase programs are intended to enhance long-term stockholder value, there is no assurance they will do so because the market price of our Class A common stock may decline below the levels at which we repurchased shares and short-term stock price fluctuations could reduce the effectiveness of any such program.

Repurchasing our Class A common stock reduces the amount of cash we have available to fund working capital, capital expenditures, strategic acquisitions or business opportunities, and other general corporate purposes, and we may fail to realize the anticipated long-term stockholder value of any stock repurchase program.

The conversion of some or all of the Convertible Notes may dilute the ownership interests of our stockholders. On conversion of the Convertible Notes, we have the option to pay or deliver, as the case may be, cash, shares of our Class A common stock, or a combination of cash and shares of our Class A common stock. If we elect to settle our conversion obligation in shares of our Class A common stock or a combination of cash and shares of our Class A common stock, any sales in the public market of our Class A common stock issuable on such conversion could adversely affect prevailing market prices of our Class A common stock. In addition, the existence of the Convertible Notes may encourage short selling by market participants because the conversion of the Convertible Notes could be used to satisfy short positions, or anticipated conversion of the Convertible Notes into shares of our Class A common stock, any of which could depress the market price of our Class A common stock.

We may also engage in exchanges, repurchase, or induce conversions, of the Convertible Notes in the future. Holders of the Convertible Notes that participate in any of these exchanges, repurchases, or induced conversions may enter into or unwind various derivatives with respect to our Class A common stock or sell shares of our Class A common stock in the open market to hedge their exposure in connection with these transactions. These activities could decrease (or reduce the size of any increase in) the market price of our Class A common stock or the Convertible Notes, or dilute the ownership interests of our stockholders. In addition, the market price of our Class A common stock is likely to be affected by short sales of our Class A common stock or the entry into or unwind of economically equivalent derivative transactions with respect to our Class A common stock by investors that do not participate in the exchange transactions and by the hedging activity of the counterparties to our Capped Call Transactions or their respective affiliates.

We and our subsidiaries may incur substantial additional debt in the future, subject to the restrictions contained in our current and future debt instruments. We are not restricted under the terms of the Indentures governing the Convertible Notes from incurring additional debt, securing existing or future debt, repurchasing our stock, making investments, paying dividends, recapitalizing our debt, or taking a number of other actions that could have the effect of diminishing our ability to make payments on the Convertible Notes when due.

Our ability to pay our debt when due or to refinance our indebtedness, including the Convertible Notes, depends on our financial condition at such time, the condition of capital markets, and our future performance, which is subject to economic, financial, competitive, and other factors beyond our control.

The Convertible Notes are convertible at the option of the holder. In the event the conditions for optional conversion of the 2025 Notes, 2026 Notes, 2027 Notes, or 2028 Notes by holders are met before the close of business on the business day immediately preceding February 1, 2025, May 1, 2026, February 1, 2027, or December 1, 2027, respectively, holders of the applicable Convertible Notes will be entitled to convert the Convertible Notes at any time during specified periods at their option. If one or more holders elect to convert their Convertible Notes, unless we elect to satisfy our conversion obligation by delivering solely shares of our Class A common stock (other than paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we may settle all or a portion of our conversion obligation in cash, which could adversely affect our liquidity. In addition, even if holders do not elect to convert their Convertible Notes, we could be required under applicable accounting rules to reclassify all or a portion of the outstanding principal of the Convertible Notes as a current rather than long-term liability, which would result in a material reduction of our net working capital and may seriously harm our business.

In connection with the issuance of the Convertible Notes, we entered into certain hedging positions with certain financial institutions. These hedging positions are expected generally to reduce potential dilution of our Class A common stock on any conversion of the Convertible Notes or offset any cash payments we are required to make in excess of the principal amount of such converted Convertible Notes, as the case may be, with such reduction or offset subject to a cap.

The counterparties to these hedging positions or their respective affiliates may modify their hedge positions by entering into or unwinding various derivatives with respect to our Class A common stock or purchasing or selling our Class A common stock in secondary market transactions prior to the maturity of the Convertible Notes (and are likely to do so during any observation period related to a conversion of Convertible Notes or following any repurchase of Convertible Notes by us on any fundamental change repurchase date or otherwise). This activity could cause or avoid an increase or a decrease in the market price of our Class A common stock or the Convertible Notes. In addition, if any such hedging positions fail to become effective, the counterparties to these hedging positions or their respective affiliates may unwind their hedge positions, which could adversely affect the value of our Class A common stock.

Our certificate of incorporation and bylaws contain provisions that could depress the trading price of our Class A common stock by acting to discourage, delay, or prevent a change of control of our company or changes in our management that the stockholders of our company may deem advantageous. These provisions include the following:

Any provision of our certificate of incorporation, bylaws, or Delaware law that has the effect of delaying or deterring a change in control could limit the opportunity for our stockholders to receive a premium for their shares of our common stock, and could also affect the price that some investors are willing to pay for our Class A common stock.

Furthermore, certain provisions in the Indentures governing the Convertible Notes may make it more difficult or expensive for a third party to acquire us. For example, the Indentures require us, at the holders’ election, to repurchase the Convertible Notes for cash on the occurrence of a fundamental change and, in certain circumstances, to increase the conversion rate for a holder that converts its Convertible Notes in connection with a make-whole fundamental change. A takeover of us may trigger the requirement that we repurchase the Convertible Notes or increase the conversion rate, which could make it more costly for a third party to acquire us. The Indentures also prohibit us from engaging in a merger or acquisition unless, among other things, the surviving entity assumes our obligations under the Convertible Notes and the Indentures. These and other provisions in the Indentures could deter or prevent a third party from acquiring us even when the acquisition may be favorable to holders of the Convertible Notes or our stockholders.

If our existing stockholders, including employees and service providers who obtain equity, sell, or indicate an intention to sell, substantial amounts of our Class A common stock in the public market, the trading price of our Class A common stock could decline. As a result of our capital structure, holders who are not required to file reports under Section 16 of the Exchange Act are not obligated to disclose changes in ownership of our Class A common stock, so there can be no assurance that you, or we, will be notified of any such changes. All of our outstanding shares are eligible for sale in the public market, except shares held by directors, executive officers, and other affiliates that are subject to volume limitations under Rule 144 of the Securities Act. Our employees, other service providers, and directors are subject to our quarterly trading window closures. In addition, we have reserved shares for issuance under our equity incentive plans. We may also issue shares of our Class A common stock or securities convertible into our Class A common stock from time to time in connection with a financing, acquisition, investment, or otherwise. When these shares are issued and subsequently sold, it would be dilutive to existing stockholders and the trading price of our Class A common stock could decline.

The trading market for our Class A common stock is influenced in part by the research and reports that securities or industry analysts may publish about us, our business, our market, or our competitors. If one or more of the analysts initiate research with an unfavorable rating or downgrade our Class A common stock, provide a more favorable recommendation about our competitors, or publish inaccurate or unfavorable research about our business, our Class A common stock price would likely decline. If any analyst who may cover us were to cease coverage of us or fail to regularly publish reports on us, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which in turn could cause the trading price or trading volume to decline. Since we provide only limited financial guidance, this may increase the probability that our financial results are perceived as not in line with analysts’ expectations, and could cause volatility to our Class A common stock price.

We have never declared or paid cash dividends on our capital stock. We currently intend to retain any future earnings to finance the operation and expansion of our business, and we do not expect to declare or pay any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. As a result, you may only receive a return on your investment in our Class A common stock if the market price of our Class A common stock increases. In addition, our Credit Facility includes restrictions on our ability to pay cash dividends.

We are required to maintain adequate internal control over financial reporting, perform system and process evaluation and testing of those internal controls to allow management to report on their effectiveness, report any material weaknesses in such internal controls, and obtain an opinion from our independent registered public accounting firm regarding the effectiveness of such internal controls as required by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, all of which is time-consuming, costly, and complicated. If we are unable to comply with these requirements in a timely manner, if we assert that our internal control over financial reporting is ineffective, if we identify material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, or if our independent registered public accounting firm is unable to express an opinion or expresses a qualified or adverse opinion about the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting, investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports and the market price of our Class A common stock could be negatively affected. In addition, we could become subject to investigations by the NYSE, the SEC, and other regulatory authorities, which could require additional financial and management resources.

We are subject to the reporting requirements of the Exchange Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Act, the listing requirements of the NYSE, and other applicable securities rules and regulations. Complying with these rules and regulations have caused and will continue to cause us to incur additional legal and financial compliance costs, make some activities more difficult, be time-consuming or costly, and continue to increase demand on our systems and resources. The Exchange Act requires, among other things, that we file annual, quarterly, and current reports with respect to our business and operating results, and that our independent registered public accounting firm provide an attestation report on the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. Failure to comply with these rules might also make it more difficult for us to obtain certain types of insurance, including director and officer liability insurance, and we might be forced to accept reduced policy limits and coverage or incur substantially higher costs to obtain the same or similar coverage. As a public company we are required to publicly disclose additional details about our business and financial condition information, which may result in threatened or actual litigation, including by competitors, regulators, and other third parties. If those claims are successful, our business could be harmed. Even if the claims do not result in litigation or are resolved in our favor, the time and resources needed to resolve them could divert our management’s resources and harm our business.

Our certificate of incorporation provides that the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware is the exclusive forum for:

This provision would not apply to actions brought to enforce a duty or liability created by the Exchange Act or any other claim for which the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction. Furthermore, Section 22 of the Securities Act creates concurrent jurisdiction for federal and state courts over all Securities Act claims, which means both courts have jurisdiction to entertain such claims. To prevent having to litigate claims in multiple jurisdictions and the threat of inconsistent or contrary rulings by different courts, among other considerations, our certificate of incorporation provides that the federal district courts of the United States will be the exclusive forum for resolving any complaint asserting a cause of action arising under the Securities Act.

These exclusive forum provisions may limit a stockholder’s ability to bring an action in a judicial forum that it finds favorable for disputes with us or our directors, officers, or other employees, which may discourage lawsuits against us

None.

Our engineering security team, led by our Chief Information Security Officer, or CISO, uses a multi-pronged approach to assessing, identifying, and managing material risks from cybersecurity threats. This approach includes identifying and assessing risks through: (1) an enterprise risk management program, which is periodically refreshed and includes an identification of our top risks, including cybersecurity risks; (2) formalized security and privacy reviews designed to identify risks from many new features, software, and vendors; (3) a vulnerability management program designed to identify hardware and software vulnerabilities; (4) an internal “red team” program, which simulates cyber threats, intended to allow us to fix vulnerabilities before threat actors identify them; (5) a threat intelligence program designed to model and research our adversaries; and (6) a privacy and security incident response program designed to investigate, respond to, and remediate known incidents. These processes vary in scope and maturity across the business and are processes we work to continually improve.

Our risk management approach is supplemented by external and internal enterprise risk management audits, which are designed to test the effectiveness of our security controls. We conduct penetration testing on a periodic basis, and have established an external bug bounty program to allow security researchers to help identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in our controls and configurations in our systems. We also maintain a vendor risk management program designed to identify and mitigate potential risks associated with third-party suppliers and business partners. This program includes pre-engagement diligence, use of contractual cybersecurity and notification provisions, and ongoing monitoring of vendors, as appropriate.

We use third-party service providers to assist us from time to time to identify, assess, and manage material risks from cybersecurity threats, including for example professional service firms (including legal counsel), threat intelligence services, and cybersecurity consultants.

The material cybersecurity threats identified through these processes are managed by our CISO and, where appropriate, our risk and compliance committee, in consultation with management. Together, they identify responsive actions for inclusion in our annual strategic planning, or earlier resolution depending on the nature of the risk.

For a description of the risks from cybersecurity threats that may materially affect us and how they may do so, see “Risk Factors” in Part I, Item 1A in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Our board of directors maintains oversight of risks from cybersecurity threats by meeting with and receiving periodic updates from our CISO, via our audit committee, which is assigned oversight of cybersecurity risks. In addition, the chair of our audit committee meets with our CISO on a quarterly basis to discuss cybersecurity threats and incidents, as well as the business’s approach to responding to them. Our incident response plans also provide that our board of directors and audit committee are also notified in the event of a material cybersecurity incident.

Our CISO, Jim Higgins, has over 30 years of experience in the technology sector, including senior leadership roles in product security, information security engineering, and cloud enterprise. Mr. Higgins assisted the Linux Foundation in starting the Open Source Security Foundation to help increase awareness and promote technical solutions to address

Our CISO also regularly meets with our CEO and other members of our management team (or their designees), including our General Counsel, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Communications Officer, and Senior Vice President of Engineering, including as part of the cybersecurity incident response process.

Our CISO, and where necessary our management team and risk and compliance committee, are informed about and monitor the prevention, detection, mitigation, and remediation of cybersecurity incidents, through our security incident response process. We maintain internal aliases, which employees may use to identify a cybersecurity or privacy threat or incident, for escalation, investigation, containment, and remediation. A report to the alias triggers our Security Incident Response Policy and associated plans, which has defined roles for our cross-functional incident response team. The incident response team assesses the severity and priority of incidents on a rolling basis, with escalations of cybersecurity incidents provided to our management team by our CISO and General Counsel (or their designees) and escalations of certain cybersecurity incidents as appropriate to our board of directors. If a cybersecurity incident is determined to be a material cybersecurity incident, our Security Incident Response Policy and associated plans define the process to file a report regarding the incident with the SEC.

Our corporate headquarters are located in Santa Monica, California, where we occupy approximately 718,000 square feet. As of December 31, 2023, our global facilities totaled an aggregate of approximately 1.8 million square feet of leased office space. We also maintain offices in multiple locations in North America and internationally in Europe, Asia, and Australia. We may add additional offices as we expand our business to other continents and countries. We believe that our facilities are sufficient for our current needs and that, should it be needed, additional facilities will be available to accommodate the expansion of our business.

On November 11, 2021, we, and certain of our officers, were named as defendants in a federal securities class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court Central District of California. The lawsuit was purportedly brought on behalf of purchasers of our Class A common stock. The lawsuit alleges that we and certain of our officers made false or misleading statements and omissions concerning the impact that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework would have on our business. Defendants seek monetary damages and other relief. We believe we have meritorious defenses to the lawsuit, and continue to defend it vigorously, but litigation is inherently uncertain and an unfavorable outcome could seriously harm our business.

Beginning on January 20, 2022, we were named as defendants in various federal and state courts by plaintiffs alleging that the design and use of our platform, and those of our competitors, is addictive and harmful to minor users’ mental health. The majority of cases have been consolidated in either a federal Multi-District Litigation pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (“MDL”) or a California Judicial Council Coordinated Proceeding (“JCCP”) pending in the Complex Division of the Los Angeles County Superior Court. On October 13, 2023, the court in the JCCP litigation issued a ruling dismissing some of the claims against us, but allowing the plaintiffs’ negligence claim to proceed. Numerous school districts have filed public nuisance claims based on similar allegations, which also have been consolidated in either the MDL or JCCP. We believe we have meritorious defenses to these lawsuits, and continue to defend them vigorously, but litigation is inherently uncertain and an unfavorable outcome could seriously harm our business.

On October 13, 2022, we were named as a defendant in a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court alleging that we should be responsible for the deaths of young people who died from ingesting fatal doses of fentanyl after communicating on Snapchat with drug dealers concerning drug transactions. Other similar lawsuits were filed on behalf of other families, which were coordinated with the first-filed case and assigned to the same judge. On January 2, 2024, the judge granted in part and overruled in part our demurrer to the lawsuit, allowing several of the claims to proceed. We believe we have meritorious defenses to these lawsuits, and plan to continue to defend them vigorously, but litigation is inherently uncertain and an unfavorable outcome could seriously harm our business.

We are currently involved in, and may in the future be involved in, legal proceedings, claims, inquiries, and investigations in the ordinary course of our business, including claims for infringing intellectual property rights related to our products and the content contributed by our users and partners. Although the results of these proceedings, claims, inquiries, and investigations cannot be predicted with certainty, we do not believe that the final outcome of these matters is reasonably likely to have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, or results of operations. Regardless of final outcomes, however, any such proceedings, claims, inquiries, and investigations may nonetheless impose a significant burden on management and employees and may come with costly defense costs or unfavorable preliminary and interim rulings.

Not applicable.

Our Class A common stock has been listed on the NYSE under the symbol “SNAP” since March 2, 2017. Our Class B common stock and Class C common stock are not listed or traded on any stock exchange.

As of December 31, 2023, there were 937 stockholders of record of our Class A common stock. Because many of our shares of Class A common stock are held by brokers and other institutions on behalf of stockholders, we are unable to estimate the total number of stockholders represented by these record holders. The closing price of our Class A common stock as of December 31, 2023 was $16.93 per share as reported on the NYSE. As of December 31, 2023, there were 74 stockholders of record of our Class B common stock and two stockholders of record of our Class C common stock.

We have never declared or paid cash dividends on our capital stock. We intend to retain all available funds and future earnings, if any, to fund the development and expansion of our business, and we do not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. The terms of our Credit Facility also restrict our ability to pay dividends, and we may also enter into credit agreements or other borrowing arrangements in the future that will restrict our ability to declare or pay cash dividends on our capital stock.

We have paid a stock dividend of our Class A common stock on our capital stock in the past and from time to time in the future may pay special or regular stock dividends in the form of Class A common stock, which per the terms of our certificate of incorporation must be paid equally to all stockholders. Any future determination regarding the declaration and payment of dividends, if any, will be at the discretion of our board of directors and will depend on then-existing conditions, including our financial condition, operating results, contractual restrictions, capital requirements, business prospects, and other factors that our board of directors may deem relevant.

The following table summarizes stock repurchase activity for the three months ended December 31, 2023 (in thousands, except per share data):

None.

Not required.

Our key user metrics and financial results for fiscal year 2023 are as follows:

In 2022, we realigned our priorities and we expect to continue to focus on our three strategic priorities: growing our community and deepening their engagement with our products, accelerating and diversifying our revenue growth, and investing in the future of augmented reality. We believe that we can be successful in our current operating environment, with various macroeconomic factors impacting our business, by rigorously prioritizing our investments and continuing to engage our community with our products while driving success for our advertising partners. However, the impact of this strategic reprioritization is difficult to predict.

Macroeconomic factors such as labor shortages and disruptions, supply chain disruptions, inflation, changes in interest and foreign currency exchange rates, banking instability, and other risks and uncertainties continue to cause logistical challenges, increased input costs, and inventory constraints for our advertisers, which in turn may cause our advertisers to halt or decrease advertising spending on our platform. Such macroeconomic factors may also negatively impact, in the short-term or long-term, the global economy, advertising ecosystem, our customers and their budgets with us, user engagement, other user metrics, and our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

In addition, competition for advertising dollars has increased and demand growth on our advertising platform has slowed. We expect to continue to experience increased competition, which may result in reduced advertising demand, and could adversely affect our revenue growth, pricing, business, financial condition, and results of operations. Demand has also been disrupted by recent changes we made to our advertising platform, and, in the future, we may

continue to experience adverse impacts to our revenue growth as a result of these changes.

Our revenue, particularly in North America, has further been impacted by platform policy changes and restrictions that affected our targeting, measurement, and optimization capabilities, and in turn our ability to measure the effectiveness of advertisements on our services. This has resulted in, and in the future is likely to continue to result in, reduced advertising revenue, especially if we are unable to mitigate these developments.

We compete with other companies in every aspect of our business. We must compete effectively for users and advertisers to grow our business and increase our revenue. These and other risks and uncertainties are further described in the sections titled “Competition” in Part I, Item 1. Business, and “Risk Factors” in Part I, Item 1A in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Trends in User Metrics

We define a DAU as a registered Snapchat user who opens the Snapchat application at least once during a defined 24-hour period. We define ARPU as quarterly revenue divided by the average DAUs. We assess the health of our business by measuring DAUs and ARPU because we believe that these metrics are important ways for both management and investors to understand engagement and monitor the performance of our platform. We also measure ARPU because we believe that this metric helps our management and investors to assess the extent to which we are monetizing our service.

User Engagement

(2)    North America includes Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America.

(3)    Europe includes Russia and Turkey.

In the year ended December 31, 2023, we recorded revenue of $4.6 billion compared to $4.6 billion for the year ended December 31, 2022. We monetize our business primarily through advertising. Our advertising products include Snap Ads and AR Ads.

We measure our business using ARPU because it helps us understand the rate at which we are monetizing our daily user base. ARPU was $3.29 in the fourth quarter of 2023, compared to $3.47 in the fourth quarter of 2022. For purposes of calculating ARPU, revenue by user geography is apportioned to each region based on a determination of the geographic location in which advertising impressions are delivered, as this approximates revenue based on user activity. This differs from the presentation of our revenue by geography in the notes to our consolidated financial statements, where revenue is based on the billing address of the advertising customer.

We generate substantially all of our revenue through the sale of our advertising products, which primarily include Snap Ads and AR Ads, referred to as advertising revenue. Snap Ads may be subject to revenue sharing arrangements between us and the content partner. We also generate revenue from subscriptions and sales of hardware products, net of allowances for returns.

Cost of revenue consists of payments to third-party infrastructure partners for hosting our products, which include expenses related to storage, computing, and bandwidth costs, and payments for content, developer, and advertiser partner costs. In addition, cost of revenue includes third-party selling costs and personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits, and stock-based compensation expenses. Cost of revenue also includes facilities and other supporting overhead costs, including depreciation and amortization, and inventory costs.

Research and development expenses consist primarily of personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits, and stock-based compensation expense for our engineers, designers, and other employees engaged in the research and development of our products. In addition, research and development expenses include facilities and other supporting overhead costs, including depreciation and amortization. Research and development costs are expensed as incurred.

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits, commissions, and stock-based compensation expense for our employees engaged in sales and sales support, business development, media, marketing, corporate partnerships, and customer service functions. Sales and marketing expenses also include costs incurred for advertising, market research, tradeshows, branding, marketing, promotional expense, and public relations, as well as facilities and other supporting overhead costs, including depreciation and amortization.

General and administrative expenses consist primarily of personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits, and stock-based compensation expense for our finance, legal, information technology, human resources, and other administrative teams. General and administrative expenses also include facilities and supporting overhead costs, including depreciation and amortization, and external professional services.

Interest income consists primarily of interest earned on our cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities.

Interest expense consists primarily of interest expense associated with convertible notes and commitment fees related to our revolving credit facility.

Other income (expense), net primarily consists of gains and losses on strategic investments, marketable securities, and foreign currency transactions.

We are subject to income taxes in the United States and numerous foreign jurisdictions. These foreign jurisdictions have different statutory tax rates than the United States. Additionally, certain of our foreign earnings may also be taxable in the United States. Accordingly, our effective tax rates will vary depending on the relative proportion of foreign to domestic income, use of tax credits, changes in the valuation of our deferred tax assets and liabilities, and changes in tax laws.

We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss), excluding interest income; interest expense; other income (expense), net; income tax benefit (expense); depreciation and amortization; stock-based compensation expense; payroll and other tax expense related to stock-based compensation; and certain other items impacting net income (loss) from time to time. We consider the exclusion of these items in calculating Adjusted EBITDA to provide a useful measure for period-to-period comparisons of our business and for investors and others to evaluate our operating results in the same manner as does our management. See “Non-GAAP Financial Measures” for additional information and a reconciliation of net loss to Adjusted EBITDA.

The following table sets forth our consolidated statements of operations data:

Revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023 increased $4.3 million compared to the same period in 2022. In 2023, subscription revenue increased, partially offset by a reduction in advertiser spend and auction-based advertising demand.

Cost of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023 increased $298.8 million compared to the same period in 2022. The increase was primarily driven by increased infrastructure costs attributable to DAU growth and investments in machine learning and AI, partially offset by lower content and advertising partner costs and $20.6 million relating to restructuring charges in the prior period.

Research and development expenses for the year ended December 31, 2023 decreased $198.9 million compared to the same period in 2022. The decrease was primarily driven by lower cash- and stock-based compensation expenses due to decreased headcount compared to the prior period and $78.9 million relating to restructuring charges in the prior period.

General and administrative expenses for the year ended December 31, 2023 decreased $95.8 million compared to the same period in 2022. The decrease was primarily driven by lower personnel expenses, including cash- and stock-based compensation expenses compared to the prior period, and $58.7 million relating to restructuring charges in the prior period.

Interest income for the year ended December 31, 2023 increased $109.8 million compared to the same period in 2022, primarily due to higher interest rates on U.S. government-backed securities, offset by a lower overall invested cash balance.

Interest expense for the year ended December 31, 2023 increased $0.6 million compared to the same period in 2022. Interest expense for all periods consists primarily of amortization of debt issuance costs and contractual interest expense.

Net loss for the year ended December 31, 2023 was $1,322.5 million, compared to $1,429.7 million for the same period in 2022. Adjusted EBITDA for the year ended December 31, 2023 was $161.6 million, compared to $377.6 million for the same period in 2022. The decrease in Adjusted EBITDA was attributable to increased cost of revenue and sales and marketing expenses, partially offset by decreased research and development and general and administrative expenses.

For a discussion of the limitations associated with using Adjusted EBITDA rather than GAAP measures and a reconciliation of this measure to net loss, see “Non-GAAP Financial Measures.”

Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities were $3.5 billion as of December 31, 2023, primarily consisting of cash on deposit with banks and highly liquid investments in U.S. government and agency securities, publicly traded equity securities, corporate debt securities, certificates of deposit, and commercial paper. Our primary source of liquidity is cash generated through financing activities. Our primary uses of cash include operating costs such as personnel-related costs and the infrastructure costs of the Snapchat application, facility-related capital spending, and acquisitions and investments. There are no known material subsequent events that could have a material impact on our cash or liquidity. We may contemplate and engage in merger and acquisition activity that could materially impact our liquidity and capital resource position.

In October 2023, our board of directors authorized a stock repurchase program of up to $500.0 million of our Class A common stock. During the fourth quarter of 2023, we repurchased 18.4 million shares of our Class A common stock for an aggregate of $189.4 million, including costs associated with the repurchases. As of December 31, 2023, the remaining availability under the stock repurchase authorization was $310.8 million.

In May 2022, we entered into a five-year senior unsecured revolving credit facility, or Credit Facility, with certain lenders that allows us to borrow up to $1.05 billion to fund working capital and general corporate-purpose expenditures. Loans bear interest, at our option, at a rate equal to (i) a term secured overnight financing rate, or SOFR, plus 0.75% or the

In February 2022, we entered into a purchase agreement for the sale of an aggregate of $1.5 billion principal amount of convertible senior notes due in 2028. The net proceeds from the issuance of the 2028 Notes were $1.31 billion, net of debt issuance costs and the 2028 Capped Call Transactions discussed further in Note 7. The 2028 Notes mature on March 1, 2028 unless repurchased, redeemed, or converted in accordance with their terms prior to such date. The sale price requirement for conversion was not satisfied as of December 31, 2023 and as a result, the 2028 Notes will not be eligible for optional conversion during the first quarter of 2024.

In April 2021, we entered into a purchase agreement for the sale of an aggregate of $1.15 billion principal amount of convertible senior notes due in 2027. The net proceeds from the issuance of the 2027 Notes were $1.05 billion, net of debt issuance costs and the 2027 Capped Call Transactions discussed further in Note 7. The 2027 Notes mature on May 1, 2027 unless repurchased, redeemed, or converted in accordance with their terms prior to such date. The sale price requirement for conversion was not satisfied as of December 31, 2023 and as a result, the 2027 Notes will not be eligible for optional conversion during the first quarter of 2024.

In April 2020, we entered into a purchase agreement for the sale of an aggregate of $1.0 billion principal amount of convertible senior notes due in 2025, of which $284.1 million remains outstanding as of December 31, 2023. The net proceeds from the issuance of the 2025 Notes were $888.6 million, net of debt issuance costs and the 2025 Capped Call Transactions discussed further in Note 7. The 2025 Notes mature on May 1, 2025 unless repurchased, redeemed, or converted in accordance with their terms prior to such date. The sale price requirement for conversion was not satisfied as of December 31, 2023 and as a result, the 2025 Notes will not be eligible for optional conversion during the first quarter of 2024.

We believe our existing cash balance is sufficient to fund our ongoing working capital, investing, and financing requirements for at least the next 12 months. Our future capital requirements will depend on many factors including our growth rate, headcount, sales and marketing activities, research and development efforts, the introduction of new features, products, and acquisitions, and continued user engagement. We continually evaluate opportunities to issue or repurchase equity or debt securities, obtain, retire, or restructure credit facilities or financing arrangements, or declare dividends for strategic reasons or to further strengthen our financial position.

As of December 31, 2023, approximately 3% of our cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities was held outside the United States. These amounts were primarily held in the United Kingdom and are utilized to fund our foreign operations. Cash held outside the United States may be repatriated, subject to certain limitations, and would be available to be used to fund our domestic operations. However, repatriation of funds may result in additional tax liabilities. We believe our existing cash balance in the United States is sufficient to fund our working capital needs.

The following table sets forth the major components of our consolidated statements of cash flows for the periods presented:

Net cash provided by operating activities was $246.5 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, compared to net cash provided by operating activities of $184.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, resulting primarily from our net loss, adjusted for non-cash items, including stock-based compensation expense of $1.3 billion and depreciation and amortization expense of $168.4 million. Net cash provided by operating activities for the year ended December 31, 2023 was also driven by a $95.0 million increase in accounts payable and a $62.1 million increase in accrued expenses and other current liabilities, primarily due to the timing of payments, partially offset by a $98.1 million increase in accounts receivables due to the timing of collections and an increase in billings in the period.

Net cash provided by investing activities was $571.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, compared to net cash used in investing activities of $1.1 billion for the year ended December 31, 2022. Our investing activities in the year ended December 31, 2023 consisted primarily of maturities of marketable securities of $2.4 billion and sales of marketable securities of $459.5 million, partially offset by purchases of marketable securities of $2.0 billion and purchases of property and equipment of $211.7 million. Our investing activities for the year ended December 31, 2022 consisted of purchases of marketable securities of $3.5 billion, partially offset by maturities of marketable securities of $2.5 billion.

Net cash used in financing activities was $458.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, compared to net cash provided by financing activities of $306.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2022. Our financing activities for the year ended December 31, 2023 consisted primarily of $189.4 million of repurchases of our Class A common stock and $270.4 million of deferred payments for acquisitions completed in prior periods. Our financing activities for the year ended December 31, 2022 consisted primarily of net proceeds of $1.5 billion from the issuance of the 2028 Notes, offset by the purchase of the 2028 Capped Call Transactions of $177.0 million and repurchases of our Class A common stock for an aggregate of $1.0 billion.

Free Cash Flow was $34.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, compared to $55.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2022. Free Cash Flow in all periods was composed of net cash provided by operating activities, resulting primarily from net loss, adjusted for non-cash items and changes in working capital. Free Cash Flow also

To supplement our consolidated financial statements, which are prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP, we use certain non-GAAP financial measures, as described below, to understand and evaluate our core operating performance. These non-GAAP financial measures, which may be different than similarly titled measures used by other companies, are presented to enhance investors’ overall understanding of our financial performance and should not be considered a substitute for, or superior to, the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP.

We use the non-GAAP financial measure of Free Cash Flow, which is defined as net cash provided by (used in) operating activities, reduced by purchases of property and equipment. We believe Free Cash Flow is an important liquidity measure of the cash that is available, after capital expenditures, for operational expenses and investment in our business and is a key financial indicator used by management. Additionally, we believe that Free Cash Flow is an important measure since we use third-party infrastructure partners to host our services and therefore we do not incur significant capital expenditures to support revenue generating activities. Free Cash Flow is useful to investors as a liquidity measure because it measures our ability to generate or use cash. Once our business needs and obligations are met, cash can be used to maintain a strong balance sheet and invest in future growth.

We use the non-GAAP financial measure of Adjusted EBITDA, which is defined as net income (loss); excluding interest income; interest expense; other income (expense), net; income tax benefit (expense); depreciation and amortization; stock-based compensation expense; payroll and other tax expense related to stock-based compensation; and certain other items impacting net income (loss) from time to time. We believe that Adjusted EBITDA helps identify underlying trends in our business that could otherwise be masked by the effect of the expenses that we exclude in Adjusted EBITDA.

We believe that both Free Cash Flow and Adjusted EBITDA provide useful information about our financial performance, enhance the overall understanding of our past performance and future prospects, and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by our management for financial and operational decision-making. We are presenting the non-GAAP measures of Free Cash Flow and Adjusted EBITDA to assist investors in seeing our financial performance through the eyes of management, and because we believe that these measures provide an additional tool for investors to use in comparing our core financial performance over multiple periods with other companies in our industry.

These non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered in isolation from, or as substitutes for, financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. There are a number of limitations related to the use of these non-GAAP financial measures compared to the closest comparable GAAP measure. Some of these limitations are that:

The following table presents a reconciliation of Free Cash Flow to net cash provided by (used in) operating activities, the most comparable GAAP financial measure, for each of the periods presented:

The following table presents a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to net loss, the most comparable GAAP financial measure, for each of the periods presented:

We have non-cancelable contractual agreements primarily related to the hosting of our data processing, storage, and other computing services, as well as lease, content and developer partner, and other commitments. We had $3.0 billion in commitments, as of December 31, 2023, primarily due within three years. For additional discussion on our leases, see Note 9 to our consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

We prepare our financial statements in accordance with GAAP. Preparing these financial statements requires us to make estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, revenue, expenses, and related disclosures. We evaluate our estimates and assumptions on an ongoing basis. Our estimates are based on historical experience and various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances. Our actual results could differ from these estimates.

The critical accounting estimates, assumptions, and judgments that we believe to have the most significant impact on our consolidated financial statements are described below.

Revenue Recognition

We determine revenue recognition by first identifying the contract or contracts with a customer, identifying the performance obligations in the contract, determining the transaction price, allocating the transaction price to the performance obligations in the contract, and recognizing revenue when, or as, we satisfy a performance obligation.

Revenue is recognized when control of the promised goods or services is transferred to our customers, in an amount that reflects the consideration we expect to receive in exchange for those goods or services. We determine collectability by performing ongoing credit evaluations and monitoring customer accounts receivable balances. Sales tax, including value added tax, is excluded from reported revenue.

We generate substantially all of our revenues by offering various advertising products on Snapchat, which include Snap Ads and AR Ads, referred to as advertising revenue. AR Ads include Sponsored Lenses, which allow users to interact with an advertiser’s brand by enabling branded augmented reality experiences.

The substantial majority of advertising revenue is generated from the display of advertisements on Snapchat through contractual agreements that are either based on the number of advertising impressions delivered or on a fixed fee basis over a period of time. Revenue related to agreements based on the number of impressions delivered is recognized when the advertisement is served. Revenue related to fixed fee arrangements is recognized ratably over the service period, typically less than 30 days in duration, and such arrangements do not contain minimum impression guarantees.

In arrangements where another party is involved in providing specified services to a customer, we evaluate whether we are the principal or agent. In this evaluation, we consider if we obtain control of the specified goods or services before they are transferred to the customer, as well as other indicators such as the party primarily responsible for fulfillment, inventory risk, and discretion in establishing price. For advertising revenue arrangements where we are not the principal, we recognize revenue on a net basis. For the periods presented, revenue for arrangements where we are the agent was not material.

Business Combinations and Valuation of Goodwill and Other Acquired Intangible Assets

We estimate the fair value of assets acquired and liabilities assumed in a business combination. Goodwill as of the acquisition date is measured as the excess of consideration transferred over the net of the acquisition date fair values of the assets acquired and the liabilities assumed. While we use our best estimates and assumptions to accurately value assets acquired and liabilities assumed at the acquisition date, our estimates are inherently uncertain and subject to refinement.

Significant estimates in valuing certain intangible assets include, but are not limited to, future expected cash flows from acquired technology, useful lives, and discount rates. Although we believe the assumptions and estimates we have made in the past have been reasonable and appropriate, they are based in part on historical experience and information obtained from the management of the acquired companies and are inherently uncertain. During the measurement period, which may be up to one year from the acquisition date, we record adjustments to the assets acquired and liabilities assumed with the corresponding offset to goodwill. On the conclusion of the measurement period or final determination of the

Loss Contingencies

We are involved in claims, lawsuits, tax matters, government investigations, and proceedings arising in the ordinary course of our business. We record a provision for a liability when we believe that it is both probable that a liability has been incurred and the amount can be reasonably estimated. When there appears to be a range of possible costs with equal likelihood, a liability is recorded based on the low-end of such range. However, the likelihood of a loss is often difficult to predict and determining a meaningful estimate of the loss or a range of loss may not be practicable based on the information available, the potential effect of future events, and decisions by third parties impacting the ultimate resolution of the contingency. It is also not uncommon for such matters to be resolved over multiple reporting periods. During this time, relevant developments and new information must be continuously evaluated to determine both the likelihood of potential loss and whether it is possible to reasonably estimate a range of potential loss. We also disclose material contingencies when we believe that a loss is reasonably possible.

Significant judgment is required to determine both probability and the estimated amounts of loss contingencies. Such claims, suits, and proceedings are inherently unpredictable and subject to significant uncertainties, some of which are beyond our control. Should any of these estimates and assumptions change, it could have a material impact on our results of operations, financial position, and cash flows.

Income Taxes

We are subject to income taxes in the United States and numerous foreign jurisdictions. Significant judgment is required in determining our uncertain tax positions.

We recognize tax benefits from uncertain tax positions only if we believe that it is more likely than not that the tax position will be sustained on examination by the taxing authorities based on the technical merits of the position. Although we believe that we have adequately reserved for our uncertain tax positions, we can provide no assurance that the final tax outcome of these matters will not be materially different. We make adjustments to these reserves when facts and circumstances change, such as the closing of a tax audit or the refinement of an estimate. To the extent that the final tax outcome of these matters is different than the amounts recorded, such differences may affect the provision for income taxes in the period in which such determination is made and could have a material impact on our financial condition and results of operations.

See Note 1 to our consolidated financial statements included in “Financial Statements and Supplementary Data” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K for recently adopted accounting pronouncements and recently issued accounting pronouncements not yet adopted as of the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

We are exposed to market risks in the ordinary course of our business. These risks primarily include interest rate risk and foreign currency risk as follows:

We had cash and cash equivalents totaling $1.8 billion and $1.4 billion at December 31, 2023 and December 31, 2022, respectively. We had marketable securities totaling $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion at December 31, 2023 and December 31, 2022, respectively. Our cash and cash equivalents consist of cash in bank accounts and marketable securities consisting of U.S. government debt and agency securities, publicly traded equity securities, corporate debt securities, certificates of deposit, and commercial paper. The primary objectives of our investment activities are to preserve principal and provide liquidity without significantly increasing risk. We do not enter into investments for trading or speculative purposes. Due to the relatively short-term nature of our investment portfolio, a hypothetical 100 basis point change in interest rates would not have a material effect on the fair value of our portfolio for the periods presented.

In February 2022, we issued the 2028 Notes with an aggregate principal amount of $1.5 billion, the full amount of which is outstanding as of December 31, 2023. We carry the 2028 Notes at face value less the unamortized debt issuance

In April 2021, we issued the 2027 Notes with an aggregate principal amount of $1.15 billion, the full amount of which is outstanding as of December 31, 2023. We carry the 2027 Notes at face value less the unamortized debt issuance costs on our consolidated balance sheets. The 2027 Notes do not bear regular interest; therefore, we have no financial statement risk associated with changes in interest rates with respect to the 2027 Notes. The fair value of the 2027 Notes changes when the market price of our stock fluctuates or market interest rates change.

In April 2020, we issued the 2025 Notes with an aggregate principal amount of $1.0 billion, of which $284.1 million remains outstanding as of December 31, 2023. We carry the 2025 Notes at face value less the unamortized debt issuance costs on our consolidated balance sheets. The 2025 Notes have a fixed interest rate; therefore, we have no financial statement risk associated with changes in interest rates with respect to the 2025 Notes. The fair value of the 2025 Notes changes when the market price of our stock fluctuates or market interest rates change.

In August 2019, we issued the 2026 Notes with an aggregate principal amount of $1.265 billion, of which $838.5 million remains outstanding as of December 31, 2023. We carry the 2026 Notes at face value less the unamortized debt issuance costs on our consolidated balance sheets. The 2026 Notes have a fixed interest rate; therefore, we have no financial statement risk associated with changes in interest rates with respect to the 2026 Notes. The fair value of the 2026 Notes changes when the market price of our stock fluctuates or market interest rates change.

For all periods presented, our revenue and operating expenses were predominately denominated in U.S. dollars. We therefore have not had material foreign currency risk associated with revenue and cost-based activities. However, due to fluctuations in exchange rates, we have experienced, and may in the future experience, negative impacts to our revenue and operating expenses denominated in currencies other than the U.S. dollar. The functional currency of our material operating entities is the U.S. dollar.

For the periods presented, we believe the exposure to foreign currency fluctuation from operating expenses is immaterial as the related costs do not constitute a significant portion of our total expenses. As we grow operations, our exposure to foreign currency risk will likely become more significant.

For the periods presented, we did not enter into any foreign currency exchange contracts. We may, however, enter into foreign currency exchange contracts for purposes of hedging foreign exchange rate fluctuations on our business operations in future operating periods as our exposures are deemed to be material. For additional discussion on foreign currency risk, see “Risk Factors” elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

/s/ Ernst & Young LLP

See Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements.

Snap Inc.

Consolidated Statements of Operations

Snap Inc.

Snap Inc.

Consolidated Balance Sheets