Global-E Earnings Shows Tremendous GMV/Revenue Growth in 2022, 2023 Expenses Will Tell the Story
If you didn't listen to the asterisks, you would think there are no flaws in the Global-E business. Let's start with a few takeaways:
* Right now Global-E is a growth play. Unquestioned cross-border leader.
* 66% GMV growth in Q4, 69% growth full year
* 69% Revenue growth in Q4, 67% growth full year
* Gross margins for this business seem consistently 37% for full year, and 40% for Q4.
* Profitability is more of a question. They like to focus on Adjusted EBITDA. I don't. (Didn't anyone learn from Wework "community adjusted EBITDA"?).
* Net Operating Margin -25% in Q4, and -46% full year
-46% operating margin is not good. Expenses in 2022 were full 85% of revenue. Given gross profit is 40%, that is not recommended ;-)
This 85% is above the historical 65% of revenue that expenses were in 2021 FY. Let's call 65% their previous baseline.
Basically they are saying Borderfree acquisition was much less profitable than the existing business. We will see the impact of this shortly.
In 2023, they guided to 39.5% revenue growth reaching $570.5M.
Assuming consistent 40% gross margins, this would generate $228M gross profit.
For 2023, the company guided "Adjusted EBITDA" to 12.7% adjusted margin, which is essentially the midpoint between 2021 of 13.2% (pre-Borderfree) and 2022 of (11.9%) post-Borderfree.
Given this, doesn't it seem likely that the company will come in between 2021 and 2022 net operating margin, of which the midpoint for that number is -36% net operating margin for all of 2023?
Other tidbits:
* Whenever Global-E referred to the Shopify partnership, they referred to small and medium businesses (SMB revenue) as distinguished from Global-E's. Given that Shopify is going up-market, seems like a messaging difference.
* Shopify Markets is not powered by Global-E.
* Shopify Markets Pro is powered by Global-E, and will be publicly available in Q2 in the United States.
* Going forward the US will be a much larger and faster growth market than the UK and Europe for Global-E, both due to exposure of Flow and Global-E and also macro conditions. If that's the case, they really better hope the dollar goes lower.
* Global-E is integrating in to a Shopify checkout solution Global-E called "Shoipfy Checkout One". Is that the new one-page checkout? They indicated it was available in February? that doesn't line up to Shopify's guidance if so. Asking?
