E-commerce platform Shopify (SHOP -2.37%) has come a long way since its 2015 IPO. The company has gone from about 162,000 merchants on its platform to more than a million. Even more impressively, Shopify's revenue has grown more than tenfold since it went public less than five years ago.
With numbers like these, you might think investors who got into Shopify's IPO have been handsomely rewarded for having faith in the business -- and you'd be right. Here's what would have happened if you had invested $10,000 in Shopify's initial public offering, or IPO.
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$10,000 in Shopify's IPO would be worth...
I won't keep you in suspense. Here's what would have happened if you invested $10,000 in Shopify's IPO and held on to your shares.
Shopify went public in May 2015 and priced its IPO at $17 per share. That was above the initially proposed range of $14 to $16.
If you had committed $10,000 of your investment capital to Shopify's IPO and successfully received shares, you would have been able to buy 588 shares of the company's stock. As of Feb. 4, Shopify trades for about $486 per share, for a gain of roughly 2,750% over its IPO price. Your original $10,000 investment would have ballooned in value to almost $286,000.
However, this is a simplified example and assumes that you were able to buy shares in the IPO and not on the public market, which isn't always a possibility. When Shopify started to trade on its IPO date of May 21, 2015, its market price had already soared to $28 per share.
So if you had invested $10,000 in Shopify stock after it started trading, you would have bought 357 shares of the e-commerce company, which would now be worth about $173,500 today. Still not too shabby.
Why has Shopify's stock increased by 2,750% in less than five years?
At the time of Shopify's IPO, it was certainly a successful e-commerce platform. In 2014, the year before the IPO, $3.8 billion in gross merchandise volume passed through Shopify sites and the company generated $105 million in revenue. Both of these metrics had more than doubled from the year before.
Fast-forward to the present day. Based on third-quarter 2019 figures, the most recent available, Shopify's gross merchandise volume (GMV) has reached an annualized pace of nearly $60 billion, and the company is generating about $1.6 billion in annualized revenue run rate. Both are more than 15 times what Shopify produced the year before its IPO.
What's more, growth is still occurring at a breathtaking pace. These revenue and GMV figures represent 45% and 48% growth, respectively, over the same quarter in 2018.
Is there more room for Shopify to grow?
It may seem as if Shopify has been growing at a rapid pace for some time now, and it's only natural to wonder how much longer it can continue. However, at about 38 times trailing-12-month sales and its stock at an all-time high, it's fair to say that Shopify is priced for much more growth in the years ahead.
As mentioned, Shopify's annual revenue run rate was about $1.6 billion in the most recent quarter. However, the company estimates an immediately addressable market that's roughly $70 billion in size, meaning the company has captured a bit more than 2% of its potential customers.
And don't forget that e-commerce continues to take more and more of the retail landscape. E-commerce currently makes up only about 11% of all retail sales according to Census Bureau estimates, which is up from just 4% a decade ago, and it's expected to rise significantly in the years ahead. As it does, Shopify's addressable market opportunity could easily reach $100 billion or more.
In a nutshell, Shopify has been one of the most impressive growth stories in the stock market since its 2015 IPO, but there's no reason to believe there isn't tons of growth runway ahead.
