Some feared that, after fifteen years of meteoric expansion, growth had reached a plateau. Good news on this point: in the first nine months of the year, sales are still 12% up on the same period last year.
Even more significant: the company is keeping to the commitments it made at the beginning of 2023, and is firmly anchoring its operating accounts in the green. This is the essence of the company's "new phase", since historically, losses have increased as sales have risen.
The transition to maturity has thus been successful, and the viability of the business model confirmed. Still very generous, stock option remuneration - which over the past three years has been almost entirely responsible for operating losses - remains an adjustment variable that could rapidly boost margins with the stroke of a pen.
Wix's ability to turn a profit must also be set against the backdrop of disproportionate inflation in R&D spending - due to new AI technologies - and ever-increasing marketing budgets to keep up with the formidable competition from alternatives such as Wordpress, Squarespace, Webflow or Framer.
To its credit, the market had already taken note of these advances. As it stands, it values Wix shares at nearly sixty times this year's expected earnings. MarketScreener's analysts' model, recently revised, differs here from the analysts' consensus, which for once is more pessimistic than ours.
In fact, one parameter that we feel has been underestimated by our colleagues is user monetization capacity, which at Wix has grown considerably in recent years: the revenue per user of the most recent cohorts is four times higher than that of cohorts who joined the service eight years ago.