After surging on their very first day of trading, shares of food delivery app DoorDash (DASH -2.28%) fell more than 25% in their first month or so on the market. But since the calendar has turned to 2021, the stock has surged, up more than 31% at this writing.
But one investor isn't convinced that the company, even with its commanding market share in the food delivery app universe, has the chops to make for a great investment. In the video below, recorded on Dec. 12, Jason Hall, host of "The Wrap" on Motley Fool Live, talks about why he expects DoorDash will prove an underperforming stock.
Transcript:
Jason Hall: I think that, as much as there is that network effect, I think the reality is that there's just zero customer loyalty here. Because there doesn't have to be.
DoorDash has been smart and their growth model, they've put less emphasis on trying to make LA and New York and San Francisco and Miami -- the big cities where there's tons of restaurants and tons of people -- they've made that less of a focus and focused more on secondary markets, where orders are typically a little bit larger because people are ordering food for a family versus maybe just somebody single living in an apartment, also restaurants are farther apart or farther from where people live. There is less competition, so they've done a good job of growing in those areas.
But I don't see this as a business that's going to have the network effect strength of like Visa or MasterCard, where you get married to a platform. The case of Visa, MasterCard, maybe it's because of a rewards program that you get. Just because, again, there is no stickiness there. I know a lot of people, Emily talked about the fact that she will actively shop Grubhub versus Caviar or DoorDash, these different services to find which one's the cheapest before she pulls the trigger. Because it takes an extra two minutes to look on each app and figure out which one is going to give you the best price.
The other thing that concerns me, then we can move on, is lack of control. There are so many parties involved here. I just don't think that there's enough strength of control over any relationship aspects for this business. So it's not in CAPS yet, but as soon as this goes live in CAPS I'm going to give it a thumps down. I'm not a fan for a lot of reasons.