Investors sometimes pay too much attention to the price of a stock. It's important to remember that the price of a stock has nothing to do with whether it's expensive or not. For example, Berkshire Hathaway's Class A shares are currently $533,113 per share, while Tesla trades for $266 per share. However, on a price-to-sales basis, Tesla is actually more expensive because it trades for 10 times sales, whereas Berkshire trades for 2.7 times sales.
There are reasons to look for stocks with lower share prices. Some brokerages still don't offer fractional shares, putting some companies with higher share prices out of reach for investors with less capital to put into the market. Fortunately, there are many companies that are fine investments and happen to have low per-share prices. Here are three tech stocks that fit that description.
AT&T
Telecommunications giant AT&T (T 1.02%) reported its second-quarter 2023 earnings recently, and the results were encouraging. Revenue increased slightly, growing by 1% over Q2 2022. Within that revenue metric, the mobility service revenue increased by 5%, and broadband revenue grew by 7%.
Subscriber numbers ticked higher as well. Mobile phone subscribers increased by 3% and fiber subscribers by 17%. These are important metrics to keep an eye on as this constitutes the focus of the company's business strategy.
Perhaps more impressive in this quarter's results were the cash-flow numbers. Operating cash flow grew by 29%, and free cash flow increased by 200%. Management expects to increase cash generation over time while still paying its dividend, which currently yields an impressive 7.6%.
SoFi Technologies
Few companies have grown more quickly than SoFi Technologies (SOFI 3.69%). The financial services company is relatively new to the stock market after going public by way of a special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC) merger in June 2021.
Since its first publicly reported quarter, SoFi has not seen its year-over-year customer or product growth dip below 46%. In Q1 2023, SoFI's lending and financial services products grew 24% and 51%, respectively.
A large part of SoFi's business is loans, including personal, home, and student loans. Of the three, student loans should be a tailwind for the business after the announcement that the moratorium on student loan repayment will be coming to an end.
PayPal
Digital payments company PayPal (PYPL 2.90%) is going through a bit of a transition as it pivots from focusing on user growth to engaging its most active members. The early results suggest this strategy is starting to pay off. Q1 of 2023 was the fifth consecutive quarter that transactions per active account increased, reaching 53 million in the quarter.
This represented a 13% increase year over year and a 17% increase since the end of fiscal year 2021. Over these same five quarters, year-over-year transaction growth has never been below 13%.
While those results are respectable in their own right, it's worth noting that these increases have come even as user growth has slowed. Year-over-year growth in active accounts was 13% in Q4 2021 but has slowed in every quarter since, bottoming out at 1% in Q1 2023. This shows the power of the platform and the potential of its most active users.
Also worth noting is the 12% reduction in total non-transaction operating expenses. Most notably, sales and marketing expenses decreased by 29% in Q1 2023 compared to the year-ago quarter. This helped PayPal's operating margin increase by 320 basis points in Q1 to reach 14.2%.
