What happened
Shares of Wix.com (WIX -0.69%) soared on Thursday, following the website builder's excellent fourth-quarter results and multiple analyst price target hikes.
By the close of trading, Wix's stock price was up 13.9%.
So what
Wix's revenue jumped 38% year over year to $282.5 million. The website-creation platform added 185,000 net premium subscriptions in the fourth quarter, bringing its total subscriber count to 5.5 million as of the end of 2020. Wix's total registered user base, meanwhile, climbed 19% to 196.7 million. "The demand for a web presence is higher than ever before," CFO Lior Shemesh said in a press release.
Wix.com's shares rose sharply on Thursday. Image source: Getty Images.
To meet its users' urgent need for e-commerce tools, Wix is spending aggressively to develop new products and bolster its customer support services. These growth investments are weighing on Wix's profitability; it produced an adjusted net loss of $1.6 million. But Wix's free cash flow generation remained strong, to the tune of $23.1 million in the fourth quarter and a total of $129.2 million in 2020.
Now what
Wix co-founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami painted a tantalizing picture of Wix's future for investors. "Wix will now strive to become the main engine of the internet, democratizing access and providing a place where the majority of people will build their web presence," he said. "My goal and belief is that at this rate of growth, in the next 5-7 years, 50% of anything new built on the internet will be done on Wix."
Wall Street is buying into Abrahami's vision. On Thursday, Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein and Wedbush analyst Ygal Arounian boosted their price forecasts for Wix's stock to $340 and $360, respectively.
