The 2022 bear market has been most unkind to growth stock investors. Many strong, competitively advantaged businesses have seen their stock prices cut in half or worse. And recent declines suggest more pain could lie ahead for shareholders.
Yet painful drops set the stage for powerful rebounds. Better still, investors are sometimes given the chance to buy shares in great companies at steeply discounted prices. If that sounds appealing, read on to learn about two such profit opportunities available to you in the market today.
Shopify
2022 has been particularly brutal for Shopify’s (SHOP) shareholders. The e-commerce leader’s stock price is down an agonizing 75% year to date, as online retail sales have slowed from their torrid pace of growth earlier in the pandemic.
Yet Shopify’s long-term growth prospects remain attractive. Retail e-commerce sales will increase to nearly $7.4 trillion by 2025, up from roughly $5.5 trillion in 2022, according to eMarketer. Shopify — as a leading provider of online store creation tools, business financing, and payment processing and fulfillment services — is likely to be a prime beneficiary of this global megatrend.
Shopify already serves millions of merchants in 175 countries. Its customers account for more than 10% of retail e-commerce sales in the U.S. Shopify’s share of this large and expanding market has grown exponentially in recent years, fueled by the growth of direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce, a trend the software provider has helped to enable. The DTC trend should help to drive Shopify’s market share even higher in the coming years, particularly in international markets, where the company’s operations are in their nascent stages.
It’s true that Shopify’s growth slowed this year as shoppers returned to traditional retail stores once COVID restrictions were lifted. But trillions of dollars of retail sales are still expected to shift to online channels in the years ahead. This long-term trend suggests that Shopify’s growth story is still in its early innings. And with its stock now trading for only a quarter of the price it fetched just a year ago, long-term investors might want to take advantage of the opportunity to buy shares in this e-commerce leader at a massive discount.
Snowflake
Snowflake’s (SNOW) stock price also fell sharply this year as investors soured on premium-priced growth stocks. After soaring to highs near $400 shortly after its initial public offering (IPO) in late 2020 and again in late 2021, the cloud data specialist’s shares are down nearly 60% in 2022.
Yet, like Shopify, Snowflake still has tremendous long-term growth potential. The data warehousing platform helps customers aggregate and analyze information from a wide array of sources, including public clouds operated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet. By making it easier for its clients to glean valuable insights from their ever-growing amounts of cloud data, Snowflake is becoming an increasingly indispensable tech partner.
The company’s financial metrics bear this out. Snowflake’s revenue surged 67% year over year to $557 million in the third quarter. The gains were driven by strong new account growth and higher sales to existing clients. Snowflake ended the quarter with 7,292 total customers, up from 5,416 in the year-ago period. Moreover, its net retention rate was an impressive 165%, meaning customers spent 65% more on its platform than they did in the prior year.
Investors should note that Snowflake is not yet profitable. It generated an operating loss of $206 million in the third quarter. Yet that’s mainly because the company is more focused on capturing a larger share of its massive market opportunity than near-term profitability. Snowflake’s adjusted product gross margin of 75% provides a glimpse of just how profitable this business can become as it scales its operations.
For its part, management pegs Snowflake’s total addressable market at a whopping $248 billion by 2026. This is one of the reasons why the company expects its annual revenue to soar to $10 billion by the end of the decade, up from roughly $1.9 billion over the trailing 12 months. If Snowflake can achieve that lofty target — and its impressive growth to date suggests it can — investors will likely be well rewarded, particularly those who buy shares at today’s heavily discounted prices.
— Joe Tenebruso
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Source: The Motley Fool