Foolish investors should want to buy growth stocks with long runways, but it's also important to pay a price that's reasonable -- or even cheap. Here are three bargain-priced growth stocks.
Zillow Group
Zillow Group (ZG -0.69%) (Z -0.46%) is the largest digital real estate portal in the United States. Its family of brands, which include Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy, HotPads, Naked Apartments, and Out East, received 172.6 million average monthly unique users last year, which included over 200 million during its peak month in July last year. The company's brands also received almost 8.1 billion visits last year.
The most interesting thing Zillow is doing today is trying to reinvent homebuying and selling. Zillow Offers, the company's iBuying business, makes offers directly to homeowners. The company does minor repairs or cosmetic changes before relisting the home. Rather than a home-flipping business, Zillow is essentially acting as a market maker or liquidity provider.
For now, the company intends to break even on the home transaction itself and make money on a variety of adjacent services, like mortgage origination, title insurance, and eventually other services like renovation and moving. If the blistering growth of Zillow Offers continues, the company is likely to be enormously valuable in the future.
Picking up an Amazon package. Image source: Amazon.
Zillow shares have declined from a February high of $66 to under $40 -- more than a 40% decline. Certainly, Zillow's core business of generating homebuyer leads for agents and making those connections is hurting right now since most of us are housebound these days. But that won't last forever. And Zillow almost certainly has the balance sheet to weather this storm. If you believe in Zillow's long-term strategy, today's markdown in its shares appears to be an opportunity.
Amazon.com
People know that Amazon.com (AMZN -1.64%) dominates e-commerce in the U.S. and in many international markets and that its Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the rapidly growing public cloud computing business. But most people still seem to underappreciate the company's culture.
Some think "culture" sounds like a soft, intangible thing that doesn't convey a lasting advantage, but that couldn't be more wrong, especially in Amazon's case. The company is deeply ingrained with a pioneering culture of innovation. That explains how an online bookseller turns into the sprawling business Amazon is today.
But Amazon is just getting started. Despite its already large size, its core e-commerce business probably has about 1% of the global retail market. And AWS generated $9 billion of sales in the fourth quarter, implying a $36 billion annual sales run-rate. That's good enough for about 47% share of this rapidly growing market.
AWS' long-term opportunity appears remarkably big. Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS, said it is targeting the $3.7 trillion global IT market, only 3% of which is now in the cloud. If most of that migrates to the cloud over time, which most industry observers expect, and AWS captures at least a decent chunk of that, the business is going to be massive in the future.
Amazon shares peaked in February at $2,170 and now trade below $2,000 -- more than a 10% decline. This is despite having to hire 100,000 additional warehouse and delivery workers due to overwhelming demand, including for Whole Foods delivery. Amazon is one of the few businesses that appear to be more valuable, not less, because of so many housebound people in the U.S. and around the world.
Spotify
Spotify (SPOT -7.28%) is the world's largest audio streaming platform with 271 million monthly active users, including 124 million premium paid subscribers at the end of last year. Those figures grew by 31% and 29%, respectively, compared with the prior year. Despite that impressive scale, Spotify is only scratching the surface of its long-term subscriber potential. There are over 3 billion payment-enabled smartphones in markets Spotify now operates in or will soon. That's a huge opportunity.
Spotify should also benefit from substantial margin expansion over the long term. It's growing scale is likely to give it more negotiating leverage with the major music labels. And its entry into podcasting and higher-margin advertising and promotional services for labels should drive up margins as well.
It's also likely that Spotify is an indirect beneficiary of the pandemic and the widespread stay-at-home culture it has created. Generally, it seems people should be more likely to stream music from services like Spotify while at home, whether working from home or not, than while at work. That said, podcast listening hours are likely down with fewer people commuting.
Spotify shares were trading as high as $155 in February and are now near $122 -- more than a 20% decline. Smart investors should take advantage.
