The Federal Reserve aims for an annual inflation rate of 2%, but the consumer price index has come in above that target for 13 consecutive months. The problem started long before the Russia-Ukraine war, though the conflict has certainly been an accelerant. To regain control, the central bank is scrambling to raise interest rates, but many investors are worried the Fed will tighten its monetary policy too quickly, causing a recession.
Those fears have led to a significant drop in stock prices. Of course, it never feels good to watch your portfolio fall, but seasoned investors know that market downturns are typically great times to buy stocks. With that in mind, Adyen (ADYE.Y -2.38%) and Snowflake (SNOW -1.99%) look like smart long-term investments.
Here's what you should know.
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1. Adyen
Adyen is a European fintech company that blends payments and data to help its merchants grow. Its platform supports dozens of popular payment methods, including bank transfers, credit cards like Mastercard, and digital wallets like PayPal. Better yet, its technology integrates with a variety of physical point-of-sale terminals and e-commerce platforms, allowing businesses to manage all payments from a single system.
To that end, Adyen unifies in-store and online transaction data, and it leans on artificial intelligence to surface insights, boost conversion rates, and reduce fraud for its merchants. That value proposition has helped the company win customers like McDonald's and Microsoft. More importantly, it has Adyen's business growing at a rapid clip.
In 2021, payment volume surged 70% to €516 billion and revenue climbed 46% to €1 billion. Perhaps most impressive, free cash flow (FCF) jumped 53% to €567 million. That means Adyen's FCF margin exceeds 56%, evidencing the highly profitable nature of its business. To put that in context, PayPal's FCF margin currently sits at 21%, and Mastercard's sits at 46%.
Looking ahead, global payment card volume is expected to reach €52.4 trillion by 2026, according to Nilson. That puts Adyen in front of a massive market opportunity, and its ability to unify data across different payment methods and sales channels should be a powerful growth driver. That's why this monster growth stock is a smart long-term investment.
2. Snowflake
Enterprises have traditionally managed data with multiple point solutions, including data lakes for storage, data warehouses for analytics, and data science tools to build machine learning models. But the Snowflake Data Cloud supports all of those workloads from a single platform. It also provides tools for data-driven application development, and it allows clients to securely share data with employees, customers, and partners.
Snowflake benefits from its cloud-neutral architecture. Unlike Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, the Snowflake Data Cloud is not associated with any infrastructure vendor. Instead, its platform runs across all three major public clouds, allowing clients to work with the vendor (or vendors) of their choice. To that end, Snowflake makes it easy to manage and make sense of big data, and that has fueled monster financial results.
In the past year, revenue soared 106% to $1.2 billion, driven by a 44% uptick in total customers and a 78% uptick in average spending per customer. Snowflake also generated positive free cash flow of $57 million, up from a loss of $94 million in the previous year. Shareholders have good reason to believe that momentum will continue.
To drive adoption, Snowflake has launched a number of industry-specific products. For instance, the Media Data Cloud is tailored to entertainment businesses and advertisers. It connects customers like Electronic Arts and The Trade Desk with industry-specific solutions and data sets, helping them boost engagement and improve marketing outcomes. Snowflake also provides tools tailored to other verticals, including healthcare and life sciences, financial services, and retail.
As a whole, Snowflake's broad utility, cloud-neutral architecture, and growing number of industry-specific solutions should help it capitalized on its $90 billion addressable market. That's why this growth stock is a smart long-term investment.
