Zip Co Ltd (ASX: Z1P) released its Q4 update this morning, revealing record quarterly revenue and continued growth.
Zip provides customers with a revolving line of credit to finance their retail purchase with its brands of Zip Pay, Zip Money, and Pocketbook. It is one of the largest buy now, pay later (BNPL) providers in Australia. Some of its biggest clients include Bunnings Warehouse, Rebel Sport, EB Games and Officeworks. At the end of 1H20, Zip Co had around 21,000 retail partners and 1.8 million customers.
Unpacking Zip’s Q4 report
Zip reported Q4 transaction volume of $570.7 million, which translates to $2.3 billion on an annualised basis. This exceeded Zip’s annualised transaction volume target of $2.2 billion.
Customers transacted 2.9 million times during the quarter, with significant growth seen across online, everyday spend and home categories.
Full-year FY20 revenue came in at $161.2 million, up 91% on FY19, with record quarterly revenue of $46.4 million achieved in the fourth quarter.
Meanwhile, Zip added 197,000 active customers during the quarter, growing its total by 61% year-on-year (YoY) to 2.1 million. On the other side of the equation, the company now has 24,500 merchants on its platform, up 51% YoY, and 60,000 points of presence across Australia and New Zealand where Zip is accepted as a payment method.
Finally, app downloads for the company’s Zip mobile application jumped more than 100% YoY to 2.1 million downloads. Transactions by users grew over 120%, driven by increased merchant acceptance, brand awareness and improved mobile user experience.
Credit performance
The company’s ever-important net bad debts metric stood at 2.24% at the end of Q4. Zip said this was in line with its expectations and “significantly” outperformed the market. However, this continues a trend in rising net bad debts for Zip, up from 1.84% in the third quarter and 1.63% in the same period last year.
Nonetheless, Zip highlighted the measures it put in place back in March to tighten credit as a result of COVID-19. Specifically, the company adjusted its application underwriting algorithms and leveraged its real-time portfolio management tools to actively monitor account behaviour and adjust limits accordingly.
This resulted in receivables increasing by only 2% over the quarter to $1.1 billion, despite strong transaction volumes.
“Zip’s market-leading credit-decision technology continues to demonstrate resilience and drive superior receivables performance,” the company said.
Zip accelerates global expansion
At the beginning of last month, Zip announced the acquisition of New York-based BNPL provider, Quadpay for $403 million.
QuadPay delivered a strong set of numbers in the fourth quarter, benefiting from the surge to online. It processed more than 1.4 million transactions in the quarter, which led to total transaction volume (TTV) of $233 million and revenue of $16.4 million. Customer numbers also continued to increase, with more than 325,000 customers added in the quarter. This brings QuadPay’s total customers to 1.8 million.
The QuadPay deal is still subject to a number of customary closing conditions, including shareholder approval at an EGM which is expected to be held next month. As such, Quadpay’s figures haven’t been included in Zip’s results. Post completion, Zip will have pro-forma annualised TTV of $3.2 billion, annualised revenue of $252 million and 3.9 million customers.
Management commentary
Zip CEO and co-founder Larry Diamond said: “The business model was tested during COVID-19 and proved extremely resilient – in terms of transaction volume, strong revenue mix and outstanding customer repayment performance.”
“Our product differentiation, strong proprietary credit platform and penetration into defensive, everyday spend categories delivered in spades. Zip is well funded and uniquely positioned to continue to trade and grow in the current environment,” he added.
Now what?
BNPL shares are all the rage right now, with peers Sezzle Inc (ASX: SZL) and Afterpay Ltd (ASX: APT) making headlines in recent weeks on the back of respective capital raisings. Remarkably, despite nearly doubling so far this year, Zip’s share price performance has been lagging that of its rivals. This is a trend that doesn’t appear to be changing today. Despite opening more than 6% higher, Zip shares are down 0.85% to $6.98 at the time of writing.
There’s a lot of momentum that’s driven the prices of BNPL shares to lofty heights in recent months, so I’d prefer to invest elsewhere right now. For some examples of shares I currently have my eye on, grab a copy of the free report below.
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