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Why Axis

Lightspeed looks beyond point-of-sale for future growth

Lightspeed, just over two years after going public, doesn’t want to be just a point-of-sale company. On Thursday, the Montreal-based company’s shareholders voted to approve a name change from Lightspeed POS to Lightspeed Commerce, reflecting its growing suite of products beyond its payment terminals for brick-and-mortar retailers.

Why Axis

Lightspeed looks beyond point-of-sale for future growth

By Jon Victor
Lightspeed POS CEO Dax Dasilva at the company's head office in Montreal in September 2019.
Lightspeed CEO Dax Dasilva in Montreal in September 2019. Photo: Christinne Muschi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Aug 5, 2021
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Lightspeed, just over two years after going public, doesn’t want to be just a point-of-sale company. On Thursday, the Montreal-based company’s shareholders voted to approve a name change from Lightspeed POS to Lightspeed Commerce, reflecting its growing suite of products beyond its payment terminals for brick-and-mortar retailers.

“Point-of-sale is one part of what we do for our customers,” CEO Dax Dasilva told The Logic. “We are a one-stop commerce platform.”

The vote comes as Lightspeed’s reported results for its first quarter that surpassed analysts’ expectations, benefiting from the reopening of many economies around the world and growth in its payments business. Shares hit an all-time high on Thursday, rising more than eight per cent to $121 on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Here are some highlights from the earnings report:

  • Total revenue in the quarter was US$115.9 million, a 220 per cent increase year over year, driven by a combination of organic growth and acquisitions of NuOrder and Ecwid, the latter of which is seen as a potential competitor to Shopify. The revenue beat analysts’ consensus estimate of US$92.8 million.
  • Net loss widened to US$49.3 million, from US$20.1 million. On an adjusted basis, Lightspeed lost US$6.9 million, or six per cent of revenue, compared with 7.5 per cent the previous year.
  • Transaction-based revenue, which includes revenue from payments, was US$56.5 million, up 453 per cent.

On a call with analysts Thursday morning, Lightspeed’s management team highlighted its success in payments and lending over the last quarter. About 10 per cent of the total volume Lightspeed processed went through payments, a rapidly growing business segment for the company. 

It eventually wants to have half of its customer base using its payments product, giving it more transaction-based revenue on top of the subscription fees that customers pay to use its products. This week, Lightspeed announced it’s launching payments in five additional markets in Europe—Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands—after launching in the U.K. in April. The company expects to become more profitable in proportion with the number of customers using payments.

Lightspeed said its lending business, Lightspeed Capital, is beginning to gain traction. The company made almost 430 loans to its customers in the quarter, with revenue from Lightspeed Capital up 68 per cent from the previous quarter, the company said. 

“Lightspeed Capital had its best quarter so far, and we are starting to see numbers that are becoming meaningful,” Dasilva said on the earnings call. “We believe capital can become a very meaningful driver of growth, and especially profitability, in the long term.”

Lending and payments are just a part of what could eventually be an even larger stable of financial-services products Lightspeed offers its customers. Dasilva told The Logic that Lightspeed is considering how to offer tax services and payroll to its customers, either through acquisitions or partnerships. That said, the company’s next acquisition would likely be focused on technology rather than scale, president JP Chauvet said. Lightspeed spent nearly US$1 billion acquiring Ecwid and NuOrder this year, which allowed it to expand into e-commerce and supply-chain management.

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As for making a foray into the rapidly growing buy-now, pay-later sector, Chauvet said Lightspeed won’t roll out anything in the next 12 months. Still, the company is gauging interest in BNPL through its partnerships with PayBright and Affirm, Dasilva said. Rival point-of-sale provider Square said this month that it was acquiring Australia-based Afterpay for US$29 billion, giving it a foothold in the BNPL market.

Lightspeed also signed some big deals in the most recent quarter:

  • SpaceX and Telluride Ski Resort in Colorado are among the largest customers that have signed up to use Lightspeed for their operations.
  • Lightspeed struck a partnership with OpenTable, allowing restaurant customers to make reservations that go directly into Lightspeed’s system. The integration also gives restaurants access to customer data such as the last dish they ordered, which business owners can use to tailor their customer experience, Dasilva said.

The strong results came with a note of caution: The spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19 could complicate Lightspeed’s operations in the near term. Still, the company is optimistic that the reopening will continue at an accelerated pace. It raised its outlook for its 2022 fiscal year to between US$510 million and US$530 million in revenue, from between US$430 million and US$450 million, and its adjusted EBITDA loss to roughly US$35 million, from US$30 million.

#Dax Dasilva #Lightspeed

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Lightspeed POS CEO Dax Dasilva at the company's head office in Montreal in September 2019.

Photo: Christinne Muschi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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