Snap says it lost nearly $40 million on 300,000 unsold Spectacles

It seems Snap’s spectacles really were just a fad.

Hidden amidst the company’s abysmal third quarter 2017 financial results — that came well under Wall Street’s expectations for the company — was an interesting piece of information.

The social media company’s camera-equipped sunglasses, which were sold both online and via pop-up vending machines, resulted in a loss of nearly $40 million USD for Snap. This is because the company has over 300,000 unsold units sitting unsold in a warehouse.

Snap says that its $40 million write-off is “primarily related to excess inventory reserves and inventory purchase commitment cancellation charges.”

Essentially, it doesn’t look like Snap sold as many Spectacles as the company initially expected. This detail corroborates a report stemming from The Information earlier this month that Snap still has hundreds of thousands of unsold spectacles, which the company’s CEO Evan Spiegel admitted during an interview.

While not at the level of failure of Google’s now-dead Glass initiative, it seems Spectacles didn’t exactly pan out how the social media giant expected. Despite rapidly dropping in popularity, Snap recently officially released its Spectacles connected sunglasses in Canada for $169 CAD. 

New reports have emerged that Snap isn’t giving up on the wearable space just yet, however. The company reportedly plans on releasing more fully-featured AR glasses in the near future.

In the social media giant’s Q3 2017 earnings report, Snap earned $207.9 million in revenue versus the 236.9 the company expected. The company also didn’t hit its daily average user mark of 181.1 million, instead coming close with 178 million average daily users.

Via: The Verge