Scalper1 News
Shopify ( SHOP ) reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday morning and provided guidance above expectations, sending the stock upward. Shopify reported revenue of $70.2 million, up 99% year over year and beating the consensus estimate of $61.2 million, as polled by Thomson Reuters. It reported a 1 cent per-share loss, minus items, where analysts had expected a 5 cent loss. The company reported a 3 cent per-share loss in the year-earlier quarter. Shopify stock jumped as much as 21% in early trading in the stock market today , but it pared the advance to a 7% gain, near 22, by midday Wednesday. Shopify raised $131 million with its May 2015 initial public offering that priced shares at 17. Shares popped 55% on their first day of trading and peaked in June at above 42. Shopify provides a cloud-based e-commerce platform that businesses use to build websites and sell goods online and across multiple sales channels, including mobile and social media. Shopify says it was among the first e-commerce providers to add the ability to sell over the leading social media platforms, including Facebook ( FB ) and Twitter ( TWTR ). More than 25% of Shopify merchants have enabled social media selling. In November, Shopify announced a partnership with Facebook that lets shoppers buy Shopify merchants’ products through their Facebook pages. In September, Amazon.com ( AMZN ) selected Shopify to be its preferred platform for helping small and midsize retailers build and manage online stores. The plan lets Shopify businesses use Amazon’s payment system and other services, part of a plan that Amazon announced a year ago to ultimately shut down its Amazon Webstore business, which provides a similar service. More than 243,000 merchants use the Shopify platform, the company says. For Q1, Shopify expects revenue of $65 million to $67 million, above the analyst consensus of $62.1 million. At the midpoint, that would be a 76% increase from the year-earlier quarter. It expects an adjusted operating loss of $6.5 million to $7.5 million. For 2016, Shopify expects revenue of $320 million to $330 million, where analysts had modeled $286.7 million. “Over the holiday season, our merchants collectively sold almost $3 billion worth of products, a huge increase from the year before,” Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke said in the company’s the earnings release. Scalper1 News
Scalper1 News