Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Snap Inc.'s Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to David Ometer Head of Investor Relations.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Snap's Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. With us today are Evan Spiegel, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder; and Derek Andersen, Chief Financial Officer. Please refer to our Investor Relations website at investor.snap.com to find today's press release earnings slides and investor letter. This conference call includes forward-looking statements, which are based on our assumptions as of today. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements, and we make no obligation to update our disclosures. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today as well as risks described in our most recent Form 10-K or Form 10-Q particularly in the section titled Risk Factors. Today's call will include both GAAP and non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations between the 2 can be found in today's press release. Please note that when we discuss all of our expense figures, they will exclude stock-based compensation and related payroll taxes as well as depreciation and amortization and certain other items. Please refer to our filings with the SEC to understand how we calculate any of the metrics discussed on today's call. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Evan.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to our call. Last fall, we embarked on a new chapter for our company with the articulation of the Crucible Moment faced by our business. At that time, we laid out our plans to accelerate and diversify our revenue growth, pivot our business towards more profitable growth and deliver on the commercial launch of Specs in 2026. The impacts of the strategic direction began to manifest in the operating results of our business in Q4, and we are excited to build on this momentum in the year ahead. Over the last 3 years, we have grown monthly active users by more than 150 million, reaching 946 million in the most recent quarter and bringing us within striking distance of our goal to reach 1 billion global monthly active users. We have already achieved immense reach and depth of engagement in many of the world's most attractive advertising geographies, and we believe this affords us a significant opportunity to grow our top line and expand average revenue per user over time. Growing our community in these prosperous geographies remains a priority, and we remain committed to our long-term goal of reaching 1 billion monthly active users, but going forward, we will seek to strike a better balance between the pace of community growth and the rate of top line growth in order to pivot our business to more profitable growth. For the advertising business, our focus will be on 3 core initiatives. The first is fostering direct connections between brands and Snapchatters by leveraging our core product capabilities across Snapchat. The second will be making it easier and more performant for advertisers to connect with Snapchatters by leveraging AI tooling and capabilities end-to-end through our ad platform, including creative development, campaign setup and performance optimization. Finally, we…

Thanks, Evan. Q4 was a pivotal quarter for our business as we began to see the impact of our strategic focus on profitable growth translate into further revenue diversification, meaningful gross margin expansion, elevated flow-through of top line growth to adjusted EBITDA, the achievement of net income profitability and substantially improved free cash flow generation. Total revenue was $1.72 billion in Q4, up 10% year-over-year. Advertising revenue reached $1.48 billion in Q4, up 5% year-over-year, driven primarily by growth in DR advertising revenue. The growth in DR advertising revenue was driven by strong demand for our Pixel Purchase and App Purchase optimization as well as continued strength from the SMB client segment. Other revenue increased 62% year-over-year to reach $232 million in Q4. We with subscribers growing 71% year-over-year to reach 24 million in Q4. Global impression volume increased approximately 14% year-over-year driven in large part by expanded advertising delivery across Sponsored Snaps and Spotlight. Total eCPMs declined approximately 8% year-over-year, with the rate of decline moderating by 5 percentage points quarter-over-quarter driven by growing demand for sponsored snaps that helped boost yields for this new placement. We are encouraged to see our advertising partners experience strong advertising performance alongside the supply growth and that the improvements in pricing and performance are bringing increased demand to the platform. Adjusted cost of revenue was $699 million in Q4, up 4% year-over-year but growing at less than half the rate of our top line. Infrastructure costs per DAU was $0.86 in Q4 and below the top end of our full year cost structure guidance range as we began to experience the initial benefits of better calibrating our cost to serve relative to the long-term monetization potential of the geographies in which we operate. The remaining components of adjusted cost of revenue were…

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

I want to talk about where the initiatives, Evan, with Snap Specs as 1 of the key priorities in the next 1 to 2 years. Can you just go a little bit deeper into what you've built on the platform and the application and use case side? And how you think it feeds into where you want to take the hardware side of the business. When we think about the next 12 to 18 months and how this fits into your broader strategic priorities for the company and more particularly for spatial computing longer term?

Eric, thanks so much for the question. We're super excited about what's ahead this year with the launch of specs and obviously, graduating from the R&D phase of Specs to broader consumer adoption. In preparation of that, we've been working on several prior versions of Specs, including most recently, the version released in 2024 to developers who can subscribe to Specs and start building Lens experiences. We've seen some people build really spectacular things, whether it's utilities or new educational tools, for example, like at-home chemistry lab, you can have an augmented reality to even some of the more interesting work we've been doing with the browser and the ability to stream video on a virtual screen grounded in the real world through your glasses. So it's been really exciting to see all the new use cases that developers are building for Specs with the current version released back in 2024. And those will be able to run on the upcoming or the forthcoming version of specs released later this year. So I think we'll be able to launch with a really wide variety of compelling experiences, which I think is so important for the early success of a product like this. And we're just really focused on getting the hands of early adopters. We're so fortunate to have this passionate base of developers, hundreds of thousands of developers who've used Lens Studio to build lenses. And I think they're really excited about this forthcoming product. So really trying to engage them and early adopters with specs later this year is super exciting. And I think as we look out to future generations of the product through the end of this decade, we've got a really clear path here to lightweight, affordable and incredibly powerful glasses that can deliver immersive experiences in the real world.

The next question comes from Ross Sandler with Barclays.

High end of the range. And also -- can you hear me? .

We can now go ahead.

Okay. Sorry. Okay. The 1Q guide assumes a pickup in growth at the high end, and you guys mentioned that there's no perplexity in there. Could you just talk about what's driving that between DR and brand and how you're kind of expecting trends in 2026 in the ad business to play out?

Thanks for the question. On the ad side, the biggest focus is continuing to generate additional demand by demonstrating the strong performance of the Ad Platform. So at the top of that, we're seeing really strong growth in active advertisers. They were up 28% year-over-year in Q4 as we continue to invest and scale our SMB go-to-market operations. And that's something you're going to see us build on into 2026. That's part of the investment plan for the year ahead is to continue to scale that out so that we can build on the momentum we have there. We've seen especially strong growth in the medium customer segment globally with medium customers in North America, in particular, being the largest contributor to absolute dollar growth there, which is good to -- that's the kind of momentum we want to build on in '26. We do continue to face some headwinds in the North America large customer business, but there are some bright spots there, including the U.S. LCS financial services vertical as well as autos. We have new leadership in place over the North America LCS segment. We've got new products to connect brands with Snapchatters, including Sponsored Snaps and Promoted Places to build with their and smart campaign solutions to make it easier for advertisers to leverage the full set of Snapchat placements to make those connections easy and performance. So those will be big themes that we'll be building on in '26 as well. In terms of the guide for Q1, the macro operating environment has thus far remained relatively stable compared to what we saw in Q4. There's a lot of quarter left to go in Q1, of course, but our guidance range is built on the assumption that the macro environment continues to be stable. I hope that extra color helps a little bit.

SP1 The next question comes from Rich Greenfield with LightShed Partners.

A couple of questions. First, the subscription side, which I know, Evan, if I go back to your letter a while ago, you sort of marked the importance of subscription. It seemed like it really accelerated this quarter. And I'm curious, are you marketing it differently? Are there new features that you added? I know you've talked about sort of charging for memories and other things that will add to this. But just in terms of what happened in Q4, it would be great to better understand what's happening inside of that Snap? And then -- the other thing, I think, 2 years ago, Evan, you got on this earnings call and you talked about the fact that you were sort of refocusing user growth efforts from Android developing markets to the bigger markets like the U.S. where the meat of your monetization was. And if I look at sort of where U.S. users -- or sorry, North American users have fallen to a $94 million do you need to put even more effort into those efforts to sort of drive U.S. users or North American users? Just what's happening in the North American user market would be great to just better understand, given your focus there?

Yes. Definitely excited about what we're seeing on the subscriber side of the business. Certainly, memory storage plans were a big driver of the subscriber growth that we've seen recently and also have helped improve retention rates overall. So that definitely has been really helpful to the subscription business. And we've got some other great features on debt coming up this year for the direct pay segment of our business. So really excited about that overall, and I think really helps support our efforts to diversify our revenue in addition to the small and medium customer growth that Derek mentioned. So overall, really excited about the progress on subscriptions and the diversification of our revenue -- as it pertains to user growth, I think if you take a step back and look at the growth overall of the platform, monthly active users, now 946 million. So we're pretty close to our goal of 1 billion monthly active users. And I think, as you know, over the past 3 years, our community growth has really outpaced our revenue growth and ARPU has actually declined, while we simultaneously increased the cost to serve. By which has put downward pressure on our margin. So as we look at this crucial moment and the pivot to profitability, we have immense daily reach and engagement in many of the most valuable advertising markets, including in North America. And we think we can strike a much better balance between pursuing community growth and also growing average revenue per user. So in addition to that, obviously, we're working through some of the regulatory landscape and some of the shifting user engagement patterns as we focus on organic growth. But I think taking that all in totality, we've made some choices to reduce community growth marketing spend to adjust the cost to serve and to roll out additional paid features like the Memory Storage Plans that we just discussed. And all of those can cause headwinds to user engagement. So those changes actually free up more resources to focus on our most valuable geographies so that we can continue innovating and delivering great customer experiences, which really believe is the most important driver of long-term growth.

The next question comes from Dan Salmon with New Street Research.

Evan, I wanted to just talk a little bit more about, as you called it, the sort of litigation or regulatory risk caused by changes in age verification policies, sort of broader teen smartphone and social media restrictions. You obviously commented on the actions that you took in Australia following the ban going into place there. But what I'm particularly interested to hear a little bit more about is the potential for those types of actions to impact North America. Obviously, a $4 million step down in the DAU this quarter. I'm curious just maybe to unpack a little bit of what drove that more and what the outlook could be there during the year based on some of those litigation risks or regulatory risks you mentioned.

We're certainly aware of some pending legislation. Obviously, there's quite a bit working its way to the court system right now that would further restrict the use of Snapchat for our community. I think as we look at, for example, global ad revenue from impressions served to users under the age of 18, that revenue is not material. . So I think looking at sort of the revenue generating potential of the business looking forward, we're not overly concerned about the changing regulatory environment. I will say one of the things that's very interesting is that if you look at the research studies that look at Snapchat specifically as separate from some of the studies that look at social media in totality. I think what we continue to see, which makes us proud of the service we've developed is that Snapchat actually has a positive impact on people's well-being and people's friendships. And that's actually in contrast to other services that don't necessarily have that positive impact. But I think we have had quite a bit of trouble as we look at the regulators, explaining how different Snapchat is because there is really this moment where people are expressing concern about use of social media. So we have to continue making the case that Snapchat and its orientation around your close friends and your family can have a really positive impact. I think that's backed up by the research. But certainly, it's going to take time to prove that out, and especially as these regulations sort of work their way through the court system.

The following comes from Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo.

Maybe first, I'll touch on Specs. Could you talk about maybe, Evan, could you talk about the kind of synergy between specs and Snap services more broadly and the audience and kind of the developer base. And then talk about the right way to capitalize that entity? I mean, if there's -- if you have confidence in the end product -- how do you think about appropriately capitalize on that? Can it -- does it -- should it happen all within Snap, should there be outside partners? And how do you accelerate kind of the development and the deployment of specs throughout the ecosystem. I'll stop there.

Yes. Well, I think to just maybe take a step back on why we started working on specs in the first place. When we invented Snap and we worked on things like a femoral messaging or stories that put content in chronological order or even things like opening to the camera, our vision, our work was really designed to make computing or smartphone feel more human. And we think that's quite a really important role in connecting people with their friends and their family. But we also saw a lot of limitations of the smartphone and of computers. And I think today, people are spending something like 7 hours a day in front of a screen. And so I think there is, at this moment, a real opportunity to change what the computer is instead of something that you're constantly operating using a keyboard and a mouse something that now powered by AI can actually get work done for you. And so in that way, it's really a continuation of this vision to try to work to make computing more human for folks. And so I think now that we are exiting the R&D phase of spec development, there's a couple of important things. One is developing a strong stand-alone brand I think Specs the product itself, in many ways, appeals to a different audience segment than the core Snapchat audience, and it's going to be really important for us to develop a stand-alone brand identity for Specs. And then I think longer term, as we look at the rollout and broader deployment of Specs, there may be opportunities to raise additional capital to accelerate balancing that, obviously, with our own sort of ownership interest and any potential dilution. So I think right now, given that we're so close to launch, the key here is really just nailing the launch and making sure that we deliver an extraordinary product. And then I think we have a lot of flexibility to think about how we want to capitalize it moving forward.

The next question comes from Justin Patterson with KeyBanc.

I wanted to talk about agentive coding. We've seen more companies see meaningful improvements in engineering productivity from these tools. How is this thing deployed at Snap today? And how should we think about potential benefits, whether it's product velocity more engagement on the platform, more monetization opportunities or expense efficiency.

Yes. There's just so much opportunity here. Obviously, I think now, something like 40% of new code at Snap is AI generated. We made a ton of headway with trust and safety and customer service. in terms of automating those workflows. I think there's a lot of opportunity for the sales workflow as well to empower our sales team but also to automate quite a bit of that. So certainly, we're seeing gains across the board and how we're operating our business today. I also think this can be a real accelerant for our own creativity. I mean one of the things we love to do is invent new services. And we've got a bunch of ideas for new apps, for example that we could build using these AI tools and deploy very, very quickly, leveraging, of course, the distribution we have, our friend graph, some of the unique assets we have like folks memories, for example. So I think there's a lot of opportunity here for us to think about how we accelerate the growth of our business and actually develop new services quickly using these tools. And I think in addition to that, we're just running as fast as we can to roll out new agents across the enterprise new tools. And it's especially for a small team, like the one we've got at Snap, this is just a massive force multiplier. And I think really will help accelerate a lot of the creative vision we have in terms of turning it into reality.

Our last question comes from Benjamin Black with Deutsche Bank.

Great. Can you talk about the decision to moderate infrastructure spending at a time when others are ramping spend to drive ad performance? Was there sort of slack in the system? Maybe just talk through that decision.

It's a great question. Thanks for asking it. I think the first thing I would say just for context, the big driver in the ramp of infrastructure investment over the last couple of years has been a really significant growth in our ML and AI investment, and that was to both support the rebuild of the Ad Platform and the DR advertising business. and also to support the content business and banking and personalization and all of the work that we've done there. And I think I would say, first and foremost, we intend to continue to invest pretty heavily there. And so that's not an area of focus for pulling back. As it pertains to infrastructure, specifically, there are really 2 big catalysts where we see a lot of opportunity and are already making progress in terms of driving margin efficiency for the business and margin expansion. The first there is just our investments in how we handle cost to serve. And getting that in a place where we're calibrating that better relative to the monetization potential of each of the markets in which we're operating. And there's a lot we can do to optimize that. And that's really about the theme that we've been talking about in terms of getting to profitable growth. And so translating that into the growth in infrastructure really being keyed in against the growth in monetization. The other real opportunity we see here is to take some of the infrastructure things that are cost right now and turn them into revenue-generating investments. And so I think the recent launch of the memory storage plants is a great example of that, where we can take cost and not only find ways to make it more efficient, but then also turn it into a revenue-generating source of top line growth, which is going to help with even further margin expansion. So a lot of this is about efficiency. A lot of it is about being really sensible about our cost to serve relative to monetization potential markets and then scaling efficiently. But those investments in AI and ML will continue to be really important to the performance of the business in both the adds and the content side. So hopefully, that gives a little bit more context there. Thanks for asking.

This concludes our question-and-answer session as well as Snap Inc.'s Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Thank you for attending today's session. You may now disconnect.