Magic Markets #163: Airbnb and Shopify

This episode of Magic Markets is brought to you by data and process automation specialists B2IT. The company makes robots so that people don’t have to be robots. If you hate it, automate it by visiting the B2IT website.

Platform businesses are fascinating things that can make a great deal of money at scale. This week in Magic Markets Premium, we covered Uber and its emergence as a financial butterfly in literally the last year. To keep the platform theme going, we decided to cover Airbnb and Shopify in this week’s free Magic Markets show, made possible by B2IT.

The Finance Ghost tackled Airbnb, with the company making a lot of noise about expanding beyond the core business this year. As yet, they haven’t released any details of what this actually means. If Airbnb just focuses on what it does best, the growth runway remains very long and interesting. It seems as though the platform is close to running at scale-level margins, so any efforts to add more products to the platform could be the growth burst that the story needs – especially at the current valuation.

Mohammed Nalla delved into Shopify, a company we’ve also covered on Magic Markets before. The company is growing, but goodness knows they have to grow to get anywhere close to justifying the current revenue multiple – one which makes the rest of the tech sector look positively cheap.  There are question marks around the sustainability of the recent positive free cash flow trend as well, so the valuation of Shopify seems to still be running ahead of the story.

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