UPDATED 13:07 EST / NOVEMBER 20 2020

APPS

Wish and Roblox release IPO filings, revealing rapid growth

Mobile e-commerce unicorn Wish, officially ContextLogic Inc., today revealed that it has more than 100 million monthly active users who helped it generate $1.7 billion in revenue during the first nine months of 2020.

Wish shared the figures in a filing released today for its upcoming initial public offering. The filing was released shortly after Roblox Corp., the maker of a highly popular video game of the same, published its own IPO paperwork on Thursday.

San Francisco-based Wish operates a mobile e-commerce app that enables users to browse millions of items from more than 500,000 merchants. Wish’s hallmark feature is a personalized feed of shopping suggestions that users can scroll through to find products without having to use the search bar. The company said in its IPO filing that more than 70% of sales on its platform don’t involve a search query.

Wish claims 100 million-plus monthly active users worldwide who on average spend more than nine minutes per day in the service. Those users drove revenue of $1.7 billion for the company in the first nine months of 2020, up 32% year-over-year. 

Wish’s recent 32% growth rate represents a big improvement over the 10% revenue increase it logged in 2019. The accelerating momentum is partially the fruit of intensified investments in customer acquisition, which in turn led to Wish’s net loss increasing from $129 million during 2019 to $176 million during nine months ended Sept. 30, 2020. The company cautioned in its IPO filing that losses “may continue to increase in the future as we increase our efforts to expand our user base.”

Wish will go public on Nasdaq. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. are serving as underwriters.

Roblox, for its part, has also been seeing accelerated business momentum recently that its IPO filing stated was partially because “our users have been online more as a result of global COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies.” Roblox is the developer of a popular video game of the same name that enables users to program their own custom games and share them with other players. Roblox makes money through in-app purchases.

The company’s revenue jumped 68%, to $588.7 million, in the nine months ended Sept. 30. That’s up from a growth rate of 61% in the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2019, and a 56% growth rate during the full 2019 fiscal year. Roblox’s recent sales boost came from increased user engagement: Its active daily user count surged 82% year-over-year, to surpass 31 million, in the first nine months of 2020.

Like Wish, Roblox is spending heavily to keep up its growth. The company’s net loss rose to $203.2 million in the first nine months of 2020, from $46.3 million a year ago, and it plans to continue prioritizing growth over profitability going forward. “We expect our costs and expenses to increase in future periods as we intend to continue to make significant investments to grow our business,” Roblox’s IPO filing stated.

The company intends to go public on the New York Stock Exchange with Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley as the underwriters. It has set a fundraising goal of $1 billion, though the figure could potentially change before the IPO. 

Photo: Unsplash

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