Next month will mark the 10th anniversary of Shopify’s (NASDAQ: SHOP) initial public offering (IPO). During this time, the Ottawa-based company has become Canada’s second-largest company by market capitalization, surpassing $126 billion.
With those kinds of gains, investors who bought the stock 10 years ago have obviously benefited tremendously, but the size of those gains may come as a surprise.
Shopify came to the market on May 21, 2015. Although its offering price was a split-adjusted $1.70 per share, investors would have bought at around $2.56 per share, buying about 390 post-split shares with their $1,000 investment. Today, those shares would be worth just over $38,000!
These gains occurred because Shopify stood out by building a superior e-commerce platform and an ecosystem that offered further customer support. Shopify’s no-code platform allowed people without programming skills to set up an easily customizable e-commerce website. Moreover, Shopify emphasized the speed of transactions, reducing the odds that merchants would lose transactions to a slow, poorly functioning site.
Additionally, Shopify developed an ecosystem that could help online merchants perform support tasks. These include email marketing, social media integration, and payment management.
That led to Shopify’s stock rising to record highs during the pandemic. Unfortunately, Shopify may have taken this ecosystem growth too far when it attempted to build a shipping and fulfillment business. This led to losses and a massive decline in the stock price, prompting the company to later sell that enterprise.
However, Shopify has moved on from that misstep, turning back to profitability and returning the stock to a growth trajectory. Consequently, net income reached $2 billion in 2024, up from just $132 million in 2023. With revenue set to increase at a mid-20s percentage rate this year, profits should continue to climb significantly.
Shopify stock sells at over a 40% discount from that all-time high. Nonetheless, with the company back on a growth trajectory, those 390 shares will likely be worth significantly more than $38,000 in the coming years.
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