What happened
Shares of freelancer marketplace specialist Fiverr (FVRR -2.00%) rose 66% in May 2020, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. The company posted strong first-quarter results on May 7, kicking off a long rise with a 29% single-day jump.
So what
Fiverr saw its first-quarter sales rise 44% year over year, landing at $34.2 million. The company's platform enjoyed double-digit percentage increases in both the number of service buys and the average size of each transaction. Adjusted net losses shrank from $0.20 to $0.08 per share. Your average Wall Street analyst would have settled for a net loss near $0.13 per share on revenue in the neighborhood of $33.2 million.
The company also offered second-quarter and full-year revenue guidance well ahead of the consensus analyst view at the time.
Image source: Getty Images.
Now what
Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman saw order flows accelerating during the COVID-19 lockdown period as businesses of every stripe reached out to find freelancers on the company's task-oriented platform. He expects the coronavirus-based gains to have legs in the long run as clients on both sides of the freelancer-customer equation are exposed to this online marketplace idea.
"A lot of businesses are taking this opportunity to move from offline to online. I don't think that this is going away," Kaufman said in Fiverr's first-quarter earnings call. "What we're seeing from our data right now is very consistent with a very resilient activity of our customers across all cohorts, including new ones."
Fiverr has been around for a decade, but it joined the public stock market in June 2019. The young stock has now doubled in three months and tripled year to date, like a classic high-octane growth stock.
