Twilio (TWLO) stock gets bump after COO presentation
18:05, 9 December 2021
Twilio (TWLO) stock rose more than 2.6% in premarket trading following a remote presentation on the company’s prospects by the company’s chief operating officer on 8 December at the Barclays Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference.
San Francisco-based Twilio helps companies communicate and engage more effectively with their customers on a variety of channels, including text and WhatsApp messaging, voice, email and video. Software developers can use Twilio’s technology from its cloud communications platform by using its application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits.
Customer base
In the remote presentation, Twilio COO Khozema Shipchandler spoke about how companies are employing Twilio’s technology to communicate more effectively with customers.
“If they are just blasting emails or if they are just blasting messages, that is not very intimate, right? Everybody can do that. But if they are able to deploy use cases in such a way that the individual on the other side of the transaction…feels special and you are doing it with an enterprise that you actually care about, that unlocks a long-term customer commitment. That allows for our customers to increase their revenue while not annoying their consumer base, which is really, really important, in the way that we do it vs perhaps some others. And then we are able to make a buck off that as well,” Shipchandler said.
Companies that use Twilio’s technology include Lyft, Airbnb, Netflix and Instacart. Twilio had over 250,000 active customer accounts as of 30 September.
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Growth forecast
Shipchandler’s presentation was moderated by Barclays software equity research analyst Ryan MacWilliams. He questioned Shipchandler about the five-year forecast of 30% annual revenue growth that Twilio gave as a goal in 2020. That year, Twilio’s 2020 revenue was $1.76bn (£1.33bn), up 55% from the previous year. For the first nine months of 2021, revenue was nearly $2bn, with the first three quarters recording increases ranging from 62% to 67%.
“We have three years left in that story that we constructed last year, and we have very, very high confidence in our ability to deliver those numbers,” Shipchandler said. “Barring some extreme event, and I would suggest that we just went through one with the pandemic, so it would have to be even more extreme than that, we just do not see a scenario in which we are not able to deliver on 30% organic growth over a multiple-year time frame”.
On Thursday, MacWilliams upgraded Twilio’s stock to overweight from equal weight, while maintaining his price target of $375. Twilio’s stock closed yesterday at $274.81 and opened today at $282.05. As trading progressed, the stock price began to drop; it was sitting around $270 at mid-day.
$50m venture fund
Also on 8 December, Twilio announced the launch of Twilio Ventures, a new $50m fund that will “primarily invest in early-stage companies with opportunistic investments in late-stage companies at the intersection of customer engagement and developers”.
Twilio has identified two key areas for investment – companies developing technologies that help promote the success of the Twilio ecosystem and frontier investments in adjacent areas.
“Twilio operates at the customer layer of the internet to solve businesses’ most critical challenge – engaging with their customers,” said Bryan Vaniman, senior vice president of corporate development. “We have deep roots in the developer ecosystem and have been partnering with start-ups for many years. Twilio Ventures will accelerate our ability to empower builders and the start-up community building the future of customer engagement by investing directly in their growth and success”.
Twilio Ventures has already invested in several complementary technology companies this year, including Algolia, Mux, Hyro, Calixa, Well Health and Terazo.
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