Etsy stock falls 14% after company’s buyer base doesn’t grow as expected
Etsy Inc. stock fell 14% in after-hours trading Wednesday after the online marketplace company reported quarterly sales and profit above Wall Street forecasts, but had fewer active buyers than investors expected.
Etsy ETSY,
Sales rose 23% to $529 million, the company said.
Analysts polled by FactSet expected the company to report GAAP earnings of 64 cents on sales of $526 million.
Etsy said its marketplace got about 11.9 million new and reactivated buyers who hadn’t purchased in a year or more. Its number of active buyers rose 50% to 90.49 million, while the FactSet consensus called for 91.05 million active buyers for the quarter.
Etsy anticipated a decline in new-buyer growth due to the pandemic, but still added 8 million new buyers to its platform, nearly double the number of new buyers acquired in the second quarter of 2019, the company said.
“Habitual buyers, those with six or more purchase days and $200 or more in spend in the trailing 12 months, grew 115% year-over-year, continuing to be our fastest growing buyer segment,” it said.
Chief Executive Josh Silverman said the company expects mid-single-digit growth in gross merchandise sales for its core Etsy Marketplace in the third quarter, and mid-teens GMS growth excluding facemasks, an important sales driver in the second quarter of 2020.
Shares of Etsy ended the regular trading day up 6.1%. So far this year, its shares have risen about 14%, compared to an advance of 17% for the S&P 500 index SPX,