Investing in tech stocks has been emotionally challenging this year as many of their stocks are getting hammered despite their associated businesses continuing to do well. The sentiment in the markets has been going against growth stocks that are still building out their operations and aren't yet profitable.
Once sentiment shifts and Wall Street evaluates tech companies based on their potential again, some of these otherwise high-quality businesses will again become stock market favorites. That means now is the time to evaluate these companies anew and put some cash in the stocks that have the potential to recover quickly. Two hyper-growth tech stocks -- Airbnb (ABNB 0.10%) and Confluent (CFLT 0.04%) -- look like bargains today for those with a long-term investing mindset. Let's examine why these two companies have lots of room to run.
1. Airbnb
Airbnb is coming off a hot first quarter when revenue soared 70% year over year to $1.5 billion and its net loss hovered near zero. It reported 102 million nights and experiences booked in its first quarter, which was up 59% year over year and up 26% over 2019 levels. AirbnbIt capitalized on the surge in travel demand, and the hospitality company expects to have an even more lucrative summer lined up.
The U.S. Travel Association reported $101 billion spent on travel during May 2022, a record high since the start of the pandemic. Concerns about gas prices seem to be easing a bit as 41% of Americans now say that rising gas prices will impact their decision to travel in the next six months, a rate which is down substantially from 59% the month prior.
While the short term looks appealing, Airbnb also seems poised to succeed over the long term. Not only does it have over 6 million active listings -- giving vacationers a large choice of stays -- but these accommodations are also known for being unique. Therefore, Airbnb has gained a reputation in the industry for offering individuality at an unrivaled scale.
The company is investing heavily into its platform to ensure high customer satisfaction and low friction. Most recently, it launched features for vacationers to search homes by category and split their stays between multiple homes. With almost $2.9 billion in trailing-12-month free cash flow, the company can continue investing in its platform for a while.
Airbnb trades at 21 times free cash flow, substantially lower than traditional hospitality companies like Marriott International and Hilton Worldwide Holdings. Given this cheap price, your future self might thank you if you pick up a few shares of this disruptor today.
2. Confluent
After shares dropped 68% so far in 2022 alone, Confluent looks appealing at 15 times sales given the company's impressive expansion rates and its potential.
Confluent helps companies analyze data instantly by operating the leading managed Kafka service. Apache Kafka is an open-source solution that helps enterprises analyze data in real-time. It is used by over 70% of the Fortune 500, but it has two problems.
First, the Kafka platform wasn't built for the cloud. Second, it can be hard to manage at scale across an entire enterprise. Confluent provides the abilities of Kafka on a cloud-based platform, allowing businesses to easily scale their processing capabilities -- an opportunity that Confluent believes will be worth $91 billion by 2024.
As one of the best solutions on the market, Confluent has seen impressive adoption. It has over 4,100 customers, 791 of which spend over $100,000 annually, which helped revenue jump 64% year over year in the first quarter to $126 million.
And its cloud-native and fully managed solution, Confluent Cloud, is seeing even faster growth. Cloud revenue jumped 180% year over year to $39 million. This might seem small now, but management sees it as a significant contributor to the business in the future.
Apache Kafka is the industry standard for real-time data analysis, making Confluent relatively resistant to an economic downturn. Yes, the company could see slower new-customer expansion during a downturn, but Confluent is becoming a staple within those reliant on Kafka. This is evident in the company's remaining performance obligations -- contracted promises to spend money on Confluent in the future -- which soared 96% year over year to $551 million in the first quarter.
The main risk is the company's lack of profitability. In the first quarter alone, Confluent had a $111.5 million operating loss and a free cash flow burn of over $58 million. If it sees stagnating adoption, this unprofitability could intensify. That said, the business has almost $2 billion in cash and securities on the balance sheet to cover losses for a long time.
As Confluent sees increasing adoption and can pull back its marketing spend, this should become less of an issue. This hypergrowth company could appeal to investors willing to buy and hold for the long haul.
