Shares of graphics-chip company NVIDIA tripled in 2016, and they've gained another 60% this year. Not only is the core gaming business booming, but NVIDIA's bets on deep learning, self-driving cars, and other enterprise applications for its graphics chips have produced incredible growth. Combine rock-solid performance with euphoria from investors, and you get a blockbuster stock.
Is it possible to predict which stock will be the next NVIDIA? Probably not. But what you can do is invest in stocks that have the potential to produce NVIDIA-like returns. Three of our Foolish investors have identified Shopify (SHOP -2.55%), Impinj (PI -0.18%), and JD.com (JD 2.47%) as stocks that could provide incredible returns for investors. Read on to find out more.
Image source: NVIDIA.
Buying into a colossal trend
Danny Vena (Shopify): Finding a stock that could produce even greater gains than NVIDIA is a formidable task, but there's potential that this cloud-based, multi-channel provider of e-commerce platforms could do just that. Shopify debuted as a public company just 27 months ago, and has since taken the world by storm, providing online stores, payment solutions, and order tracking to over 500,000 businesses in 175 countries.
Shopify has only begun to scratch the surface of its potential customer base. At the time of its IPO, the company believed its annualized revenue per merchant would reach $1,000, and estimated its total addressable market (TAM) to be $46 billion worldwide. With trailing-12-month revenue of $444 million, the company has reached just 1% of its potential customers.
The company was also likely conservative in its original estimates. In 2016, Shopify achieved average annual revenue per user (RPU) of $1,243, far exceeding its original forecast. Substituting its actual results from last year increases the company's TAM to over $57 billion.
Finally, Shopify's focus had been on the small- to medium-sized business market. With the addition of Shopify Plus in mid-2015, the company set its sights squarely on enterprise customers, as well. These larger merchants now account for 18% of the company's monthly recurring revenue. Shopify's addition of enterprise customers increases its potential market even further.
Shopify is tapped into the emerging trend of e-commerce, which currently represents only 8.2% of total U.S. retail sales. As that percentage grows, so does Shopify's potential customer pool. The e-commerce market in the U.S. alone is projected to reach $485 billion by 2021. That puts Shopify in the sweet spot of an enormous and growing trend.
With all that potential, investors should go shopping for Shopify.
Major growth potential
Tim Green (Impinj): Shares of Impinj, a provider of radio-frequency identification chips and solutions, tumbled earlier this month after the company slashed its outlook for the year. Large customers delaying planned rollouts forced the company to cut its guidance for IC endpoint shipments to a range of 7.0 billion to 7.2 billion for 2017, down from a previous range of 7.8 billion to 8.0 billion.
While the stock is down nearly 50% from its all-time high reached in June, the potential of the company's technology hasn't changed. RFID chips, costing as little as pennies each, could eventually be used to keep track of hundreds of billions or trillions of objects in industries like retail, logistics, and manufacturing. In retail, for example, having a real-time view of merchandise availability and location can make fulfilling online orders directly from stores simpler, more efficient, and less error prone.
Impinj isn't a cheap stock, trading for around 5 times sales. But the company could sell many times more units in the coming years than it will in 2017, assuming the delays at large customers isn't indicative of a deeper problem. While there's no guarantee that Impinj will produce NVIDIA-level returns, it certainly has the potential.
Being No. 2 makes you try harder
Rich Duprey (JD.com): Although Alibaba (BABA 2.54%) is often compared to Amazon.com, it's really more like eBay in that it's a platform for third-party sellers to sell their goods. While Amazon also has a marketplace for third-party sellers, the e-commerce king also sells its own wares, and that's why JD.com is a closer comparison than rival Alibaba.
And now JD.com is building out a luxury goods marketplace. According to The Wall Street Journal, Chinese consumers account for nearly a third of global luxury sales. In an attempt to capture more of those sales, JD.com has partnered with U.K.-based luxury-brand marketplace Farfetch, while expanding its product offerings from multiple international high-end brands, including Swiss luxury-watch brand Zenith, Austrian brand Swarovski, and eyeglass maker Essilor. In June, French luxury-haircare brand Rene Furterer opened a flagship store on JD.com's platform.
Of course, the Chinese e-tailer also has a continuing partnership with Wal-Mart. The two teamed up this month to create a new shopping extravaganza in China they called 8.8 (August 8), which they hope will eventually rival Alibaba's Single's Day sales event in November (11.11). Wal-Mart reported combined transaction volume on the sales day was 13 times greater than in the previous 24-hour period, and total orders of Wal-Mart products through JD.com's crowd-sourced delivery joint venture, JD Daojia, were triple the average daily order volume in July.
JD.com is a stock that could continue soaring for years to come and turn into a spectacular multibagger for investors.
