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Pinterest Inc. shares rocketed more than 35% in premarket trading Friday after the social-media platform beat expectations across the board with its second-quarter results and gave a cheery forecast for the current quarter.
As the COVID-19 crisis pressured marketing spending, Pinterest PINS, +0.96% grew revenue 4% in the second quarter, but it’s on a better trajectory since then. The company expects about 50% revenue growth for July based on performance through July 29 and anticipates that overall revenue growth for the quarter could be in the high-30% range.
“We are encouraged by the performance of our business in July, but a tremendous amount of uncertainty remains given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and other factors,” the company said in its release.
Pinterest is an image sharing and social media service where people can find lifestyle ideas that drives traffic to products and services for sale.
The pandemic brought a rush of new users to the Pinterest platform, allowing the company to easily exceed expectations for monthly active user growth. Pinterest had 416 million monthly active users in the quarter, up from 367 million in the March quarter, while analysts surveyed by FactSet had been projecting 379 million.
“The people who began using Pinterest during COVID-19 continued to have high levels of engagement even after shelter-in-place restrictions were eased,” the company disclosed in its shareholder letter. “In fact, new users in the COVID-19 cohort are currently more engaged than a cohort of new users during the same period last year.”
Engagement peaked in mid-April and early May before it “subsided somewhat as lockdowns ended,” but the company is still seeing engagement levels above where they were prior to the pandemic. The company saw traction for features that let users shop for products they see on the platform, buoyed by an integration with Shopify Inc. that became widely available in May.
“In a world where it’s harder and harder for consumers to discover new ideas in physical stores (due to lockdown orders as well as pre-existing pressure on onine retailers), Pinterest is quickly becoming a compelling digital analog,” the company said in its shareholder letter.
Revenue increased to $272.49 million from $261.25 million a year prior, while analysts surveyed by FactSet had been expecting $250 million. The company generated average revenue per user of 70 cents globally in the quarter, down from 88 cents but ahead of the 67 cents that analysts surveyed by FactSet had been predicting.
The company posted a net loss of $100.7 million, or 17 cents a share, compared with a loss of $1.16 billion, or $2.62 a share, a year before. On an adjusted basis, Pinterest lost 7 cents a share, compared with 6 cents a share in the year-earlier quarter. Analysts were expecting a 14-cent per-share adjusted loss.
Pinterest’s report follows those from social ad giants Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc. a day earlier. Facebook saw a 11% bump in revenue for the second quarter, while Alphabet’s revenue declined slightly after removing traffic-acquisition costs.
Shares of Pinterest are up 22% over the past three months, as the S&P 500 SPX, -0.37% has climbed 11%.
