Description

I believe $WISH will meaningfully outperform the S&P over the coming years.

Wish is a marriage of low-cost shopping (think Dollar Tree) with feed-driven discovery (like TikTok or Instagram).

The company is a platform that matches buyers and sellers (it holds no inventory, like eBay).

The company has 107 million MAUs, 550k+ merchants, 50k+ local delivery partners (stores where customers can pick up their merchandise). 

2020 revenues were $2.5 billion, up 34% YoY.

If you open the app and try to buy something I guarantee you'll be disappointed, but that's because you're used to shopping on Amazon or DTC companies on Shopify. These are premium experiences for high earners.

Wish has tradeoffs. The merchandise is lower quality, but it's dramatically cheaper. Shipping takes a week or two, not a day or two. 

Wish also partners with local stores to provide local pickup points. This is an interesting point of differentiation, as it creates physical pickup spots that benefit Wish's customers, but it also benefits these local stores, who now have additional foot traffic. Beyond that, Wish is allowing these local store owners to upload their inventory to Wish's platform for free, essentially creating an online store for them.

What today looks like a toy will look very different in the future.

Wish is onboarding more and more brands to the platform. More and more of its merchants are from the US rather than China. If you squint, you can see a marketplace with lower-quality merchandise move up-market over time, all while preserving the feed-driven discovery aspects of shopping that made Wish successful in the first place.

Rather than copying a bunch of stats, take a look at the Q4 presentation:

https://ir.wish.com/static-files/7d2d0d40-45be-40e8-9ef2-e02d6682198d

And the S-1:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001822250/000119312520319302/d82777d424b4.htm

My hypothesis is that the company will continue to grow revenues and reinvest in technology and engineering and continue to spin its flywheel:

Valuation

Right now the company is running at close to FCF breakeven, but has guided to LT EBITDA margins of 20-30% and gross margins of 70-75%. I think these are achievable. The company also has 2 bn of cash.

The street expects 2022 revenues of 4 bn. I'm penciling in only 3.3 bn (20% CAGR until then). At 20% operating margins and 20x earnings the stock would be at $27. 

So >100% return in 1 year.

This is just illustrative; I'm not investing for one year, and I don't expect them to reach those mature margins next year, but this is just to illustrate how cheap this is. 

Catalyst

Flywheel keeps spinning.