【经济学人】Snap市值迅速蒸发丨2017.03.11丨总第830期

WHEN Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, an app popular among teenagers for its disappearing messages, staged a public offering on March 2nd, Evan Spiegel, its 26-year-old boss, became a self-made billionaire. (Only John Collison of Stripe, an online payments startup, rivals him for such youthful tycoonery). Whether public-market investors will strike it rich remains to be seen. In its first day of trading Snap’s shares rose by 44%; they have since fallen by 16% from their peak, meaning around $5bn of market value vanished in days.

因阅后即焚功能在年轻人中大热的应用Snapchat的母公司Snap于3月2日公开上市，该公司26岁的老板埃文·斯皮格尔随即成为白手起家的亿万富豪。（能与之匹敌的如此年轻的企业家，只有在线支付创业公司Stripe的约翰·科利森）。公开市场的投资者能否一夜暴富仍有待观察。首个交易日Snap股价收涨44%，随后涨幅下滑至16%，这意味着其市值在短短几天内蒸发了大约50亿美元。

• tycoonery n.企业家，商人

The volatility will probably continue. Optimists reckon that Snap’s market value could increase more than fourfold from around $26bn today as it adds users and advertisers. Very few large internet companies have gone public recently, which gives it tremendous scarcity value, says Roger Ehrenberg of IA Ventures, an early-stage investment firm.

市值很有可能继续蒸发。乐观主义者认为，用户数量和广告商的进驻将能使其市值较目前260亿的水平增长超过4倍。早期投资公司IA Ventures的罗杰•依伦伯格指出，近期大型互联网企业甚少上市，这使得Snap具有稀缺性价值。

But sceptics are growing in number. Every analyst who has started covering Snap’s stock has issued a negative rating. They question its high valuation and underline all the challenges. Snap’s growth has slowed in recent months. Its total addressable market is estimated to be 80% smaller than that of Facebook, a social network, and it already has 50% penetration among its potential user base in America, reckons Laura Martin of Needham, an investment bank.

但是持怀疑态度的人越来越多.已开始涉及Snap股票的分析者均发表了负面评级，他们质疑其过高的价值，同时强调了诸多挑战的存在。Needham投资银行的劳拉·马丁认为，最近几个月Snap增长速度减缓，其目标市场总量预计比社交网络公司Facebook少80%，同时它已经进入到 了50%的潜在美国用户。

• penetration n. 贯穿, 渗透度
  

Snap also has an unconventional structure that gives shareholders virtually no power. This week it emerged that a group of large institutional investors had lobbied stock-index providers such as MSCI not to include Snap in their benchmarks for that reason. That will not directly affect share-price performance yet, but being viewed as an outlier on corporate governance does not help.

Snap非常规架构还使得股东实际上没有什么权利，为此本周还发生了大批机构投资者游说明晟（MSCI）等股指提供公司，不要将Snap作为基准包括在内的事情。这不直接影响股价表现，但是被视为公司管理的一个孤立点没有任何帮助。

• benchmark n.基准

• outlier n. 孤立点,离群值
  

Analysts have also drawn attention to Snap’s losses. These could well rise from $515m last year to a whopping $3.7bn in 2017, according to Pivotal Research Group, a research firm. And that does not include huge stock grants to employees. In 2016 Snap had stock-based compensation expenses of around $1.7bn, or roughly $1.4m per employee, compared with Facebook’s average of $230,000 and Google’s $144,000 per employee. These grants dilute investors.

分析者同样关注了Snap的亏损。据市场研究机构Pivotal Reserch Group发现，Snap的亏损从去年的5.15亿骤升至2017年的37亿。这还不包括对员工的大量股票补贴。2016年Snap的股票补偿支出大概在17亿美元，约合每个员工1400万美元，而Facebook平均为23万美元，谷歌则为14.4万美元。这些补贴减少了投资者。

• whopping adj. 异常大的;庞大的

• dilute v.（使）稀释; 削弱;降低;

Before the offering, hopes had been high that Snap would spark a wave of public offerings by tech startups. Even if its shares sink further, many of them could still choose to go public, especially enterprise-software firms, which sell IT tools to other businesses. Their revenues are more reliable than those of Snap. One software company, MuleSoft, is likely to go public next week. Such companies do not attract the relentless public scrutiny that Snap and other tech stars do. Increasingly, that looks enviable.

上市之前，Snap就被寄予厚望能够引领众多科技公司的上市潮流。期待您的翻译，您可以把您的理解留言在文章下面，并关注我们第二日的长难句解析。这类公司的营收相比Snap更为可靠。软件公司MuleSoft很可能下周上市，相比Snap及其他的一些科技公司来说，这类公司并不会招致毫不留情的公众监督，这一点也越来越令人羡慕。

• scrutiny. n.详细的检查(或审查);仔细的观察
  

翻译 ▍Poppin'Z

审核 ▍瞐瞐

编辑 ▍张哼哼