Shares of Shopify Inc. were up more than 5% in premarket trading Wednesday after the e-commerce company delivered better-than-expected quarterly financial results, indicating continued momentum for online shopping even as the broader economy reopens.
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On an adjusted basis, Shopify earned $2.01 a share, up from 19 cents a share a year earlier. Analysts surveyed by FactSet were expecting 74 cents a share in adjusted earnings.
Shopify has been a big winner during the pandemic amid a boom in e-commerce, and the company maintained traction in the first quarter. Revenue for the period more than doubled to $989 million from $470 million; the FactSet consensus called for revenue of $859 million.
“Shopify’s momentum continued into 2021 as digital commerce tailwinds remained strong and merchants took advantage of the range of capabilities offered by our platform,” Chief Financial Officer Amy Shapero said in a release.
The company generated $321 million in subscription-solutions revenue, with growth primarily due to an influx of new merchants joining the platform, as well as $668 million in merchant-solutions revenue, driven mainly by growth in gross merchandise volume, or GMV. Shopify’s GMV rose to $37.3 billion, up 114% from a year earlier.
For the full year, Shopify continues to anticipate that it will continue to grow revenue “rapidly” but at a slower rate than was seen in 2020. The company also continues to expect that the growth rates for its subscription-solutions and merchant-solutions businesses will be more similar to each other than they have been recently, as the company does “not expect the surge in GMV that drove merchant solutions in 2020 to repeat.”
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Shopify anticipates that its first quarter will be the smallest contributor to full-year revenue and that the fourth quarter will be the largest, though it said in its earnings release that “the revenue spread may be more evenly distributed across the four quarters than it has been historically if the rollout of a vaccine shifts more consumer spending to services and offline shopping towards the back half of the year.”
