(Bloomberg) -- Instacart posted strong revenue in the third quarter, a sign of resilience in its core grocery delivery business. However, it forecast adjusted earnings in the current period that fell short of analysts’ expectations.
Revenue for the three months ending Sept. 30 grew 12% to $852 million, the San Francisco-based company said Tuesday in a shareholder letter. Analysts were expecting $843.6 million, according to Bloomberg-compiled estimates. Its gross transaction value of $8.3 billion in the quarter also exceeded the high end of its own guidance range.
Shares of Instacart fell as much as 12% in New York on Wednesday, their biggest intraday drop since November 2023.
The results mostly show the strong consumption power of its US customers, even as order growth has slowed from pandemic highs. They come on the heels of similarly robust demand reported by US delivery rival DoorDash Inc., which beat Wall Street expectations on virtually every key earnings metric in its third-quarter results late last month.
Instacart said fourth-quarter gross transaction value will be between $8.5 billion and $8.65 billion, with the midpoint landing slightly ahead of the average analyst estimate. That would represent a deceleration of growth from the third quarter.
It partly attributed that forecast to a recent web outage reported by one of its retail partners, Royal Ahold Delhaize NV, which owns grocery chains Stop & Shop, Food Lion, Giant and Hannaford in the US.
Instacart said it expects fourth-quarter adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $230 million to $240 million. Wall Street was looking for $244.4 million.
Jefferies analysts, who initiated a hold rating on the stock in October and are maintaining its recommendation after Tuesday’s results, wrote in a note that “flat advertising penetration and higher marketing investments contributed to a disappointing Ebitda outlook.” They also “came away without visibility into the sustainability” of gross transaction value growth or a pathway for further gains in the advertising business, which they view as “key tenets” of Instacart’s story.
The company, which publicly trades as Maplebear Inc., has in the past year explored various ways to drive growth, including partnering with Uber Technologies Inc. to offer restaurant delivery on Instacart. Those efforts have begun reaping benefits, Chief Executive Officer Fidji Simo said in the letter on Tuesday.
“Early data shows that on average, customers who place restaurant orders are ordering groceries more frequently and spending more on grocery orders than they did prior,” she said in the letter.
Over the past year, the firm has also reshuffled executives and teams as it ventures further into higher-margin areas such as advertising and e-commerce software for grocery stores. Those businesses now accounts for nearly 30% of its revenue.
Simo said in an interview in September that the company’s technical integration with grocery retailers is a “much better predictor of growth and where we’re headed in the future” than simply comparing the number of retailers exclusively on Instacart’s platform to those on its competitors’ sites.
(Updates with share move in the third paragraph and analyst comment in the eighth paragraph.)
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