Lightspeed gets bullish new price target from National Bank

In light of impressive numbers from its latest quarter, Lightspeed POS (Lightspeed POS Stock Quote, Chart, News TSX:LSPD) just received a target raise from National Bank Financial. Analyst Richard Tse delivered an update to clients on Thursday, saying while the near term is likely to be rough, Lightspeed’s longer-term prospects are looking great.

Montreal’s Lightspeed, whose cloud-based point-of-sale and analytics platform is now being used by small and medium-sized businesses in over 100 countries around the world, reported its fourth quarter and full-year 2020 financials on Thursday. It completes the first fiscal year for Lightspeed, which had its public listing in March 2019, with revenue for the year at $120.6 million, representing a 56 per cent increase over the previous year, and now 76,500 customer locations worldwide as of March 31 compared to 49,000 a year ago.

“While the effects of COVID-19 will cause some uncertainty for the foreseeable future, we are encouraged by the signs we are seeing for Lightspeed’s solutions and what it signals for our long-term potential,” said Brandon Nussey, CFO, in a press release. “With over $210 million in unrestricted cash we are well positioned to invest smartly through this period and emerge as an even stronger global leader for our customers.”

In his report, Tse said Lightspeed had pre-announced the quarterly numbers on April 9, so there were no top or bottom-line shockers. The revenue of $36.3 million was slightly above his $35.7-million estimate and the adjusted EBITDA loss of $6.2 million was slightly smaller than his negative $6.8-million estimate.

But the analyst said the numbers show Lightspeed has been able to sustain its business at a level that’s better than what most originally thought, including Tse himself, who said LSPD was clearly building momentum up until when the pandemic hit.

“In our view, much of that momentum should be sustainable on the other side of the current health crisis as merchants will more than likely look to future-proof their Point-of-Sale / Omnichannel systems. That said, we think it’s also important to point out that despite those positive datapoints, the next few quarters have the potential to be volatile, as evidenced by the Company maintaining withdrawn guidance given the risk in churn, ability to add new merchants and a potential uptick in business failures,” Tse wrote.

“In our view, that’s why we think investors will need to take a longer-term view through that potential short-term volatility. If you can accept that potential volatility, we’d be buyers of the stock, even off the big upward move,” he said. Tse noted that despite the worldwide lockdown about three-quarters of Lightspeed’s customers are continuing to actively trade, and e-commerce adoption saw a surge of 400 per cent in April compared to February while Lightspeed’s Gross Transaction Volume in April grew by about 50 per cent over March levels.

With the update, Tse has left his rating of “Outperform” unchanged while raising his target from $30.00 to $40.00 per share, which at press time represented a projected return of 34 per cent.