Over the past few months, inflation, rising interest rates, and other macroeconomic headwinds caused many investors to dump their growth stocks and buy value stocks instead.
However, joining that panicked herd might cause investors to miss out on some big gains in the future. So today let's review four growth stocks that investors should consider buying instead of selling in this volatile market: The Trade Desk (TTD 2.18%), Sea Limited (SE -1.03%), Baozun (BZUN 5.02%), and Fortinet (FTNT 0.58%).
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1. The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk owns the world's largest independent demand-side platform (DSP) for digital ads. DSPs help ad agencies, advertisers, and trade desks bid on the market's available ad inventories.
The company's revenue rose 43% to $1.2 billion in 2021 -- which accelerated from its 26% growth in 2020 -- as its clients spent more money on connected TV (CTV) ads. It generated 40% of its revenue from CTV ads during the year, and the number of advertisers that spent more than $1 million on CTV ad campaigns nearly doubled year over year.
In other words, The Trade Desk will benefit from the slow death of linear TV platforms and the rise of streaming services. Analysts expect its revenue and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) to rise 33% and 20%, respectively, this year.
The Trade Desk's stock isn't cheap at 22 times this year's sales, but its leadership of the DSP market and the secular growth of the CTV market arguably justify that premium and make it a solid long-term investment.
2. Sea Limited
Sea Limited is Singapore's most valuable tech company. It owns Shopee, the top e-commerce marketplace in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, and Garena, the video game company that publishes the hit battle royale game Free Fire.
Sea's revenue rose 128% to $10 billion in 2021, which accelerated from its 101% growth in 2020. Shopee's revenue surged 136% as it continued to grow in Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Latin America. Garena's bookings increased 44% as Free Fire remained the world's most downloaded game.
However, Sea's stock price has been cut in half this year as an abrupt ban on Free Fire in India, sluggish bookings expectations for Garena, and Shopee's back-to-back exits from France and India spooked investors.
Nonetheless, analysts still expect Sea's revenue to grow by more than 30% over the next two years as Shopee continues to grow, Garena rolls out new games, and its fledgling Sea Money fintech unit expands its ecosystem. Sea will likely remain unprofitable for the foreseeable future as it ramps up its spending, but its stock is undeniably cheap at five times this year's sales.
3. Baozun
Baozun is a Chinese e-commerce services company that mainly helps large overseas companies like Nike set up their websites, operate their online stores, fulfill orders, and launch brand campaigns in China. Outsourcing those tasks to Baozun is generally much easier, faster, and cheaper than hiring local teams and starting from scratch.
Baozun's revenue rose 22% in 2020 as more shoppers placed online orders during the pandemic, but grew just 6% to $1.5 billion in 2021 as those tailwinds faded and it faced more macro headwinds.
However, analysts expect its revenue to rise 12% this year, and for its adjusted earnings to more than double as it lets more companies directly ship their products to Chinese customers instead of utilizing Baozun's capital-intensive logistics network.
Those growth rates are solid, but Baozun trades at just 11 times forward earnings and less than one times this year's sales. The regulatory headwinds for Chinese stocks have clearly compressed Baozun's valuations, but its stock could rebound quickly if those issues are resolved.
4. Fortinet
Fortinet is one of the world's largest providers of next-gen firewall appliances. It weaves all of those on-premise appliances together with the "Fortinet Security Fabric," which provides end-to-end protection for on-premise, cloud-based, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Fortinet's revenue grew 21% to $3.34 billion in 2021, which accelerated slightly from its 20% growth in 2020. Back in early February, it had expected its revenue to rise 28%-29% in 2022. Its recent exit from Russia could shave two to three percentage points off that growth, but it might offset those losses by gaining new customers in other countries.
Fortinet's adjusted earnings grew 19% in 2021, and it expects another 22%-25% growth in 2022. Its stock isn't cheap at 70 times forward earnings and 13 times this year's sales, but its robust revenue growth, stable profits, and large customer base of over half a million customers (including most of the Fortune 500) all make it a promising play on the cybersecurity market.
