(Bloomberg) -- After joining Instacart more than three years ago, Chief Executive Officer Fidji Simo had to earn buy-in from staff about her vision to reimagine the grocery-delivery company as a provider of e-commerce technology for supermarkets. Now, she also needs to convince Wall Street skeptics.
The pandemic-fueled valuation boom that Instacart benefited from has since dwindled as Americans emerged from lockdowns and returned to in-store shopping. The company’s market value has plummeted to just over $10 billion from its pre-IPO peak of $39 billion.
“We were kind of the poster child for an unprofitable company,” Simo, a Facebook executive prior to joining Instacart, said in an interview with The Circuit with Emily Chang at the firm’s San Francisco office. “The way I reset with the company is to say, ‘let’s kind of forget about what the external world is valuing us at, and let’s talk about building a generational company and that means a company that can grow sustainably and that is profitable.’”
Convincing investors of the company’s long-term potential in grocery technology remains an ongoing challenge. More than a year after the firm went public, trading under the name Maplebear Inc., analysts disagree on their recommendation for the stock. Data compiled by Bloomberg shows it has 16 hold ratings and 14 buys.
Last week, Instacart gave a mixed outlook in its latest earnings report, providing weaker-than-expected guidance for fourth-quarter adjusted earnings even though grocery delivery sales remained resilient in the third quarter. The company’s stock dropped by a record 11% the day after the results were announced. Even with that dip, the shares have gained 84% this year.
Simo has made Instacart’s higher-margin enterprise business a bigger priority since taking the top job. Those products include handling last-mile delivery, building white-label websites and selling advertising slots on the Instacart app. It’s also pushed into brick-and-mortar offerings like electronic shelf tags and smart shopping carts for domestic and international supermarket chains.
Part of her faith in equipping a traditionally offline industry with digital tools is rooted in her upbringing in the idyllic port city of Sète in the south of France, where her family, including her father, uncle and grandfather, has participated in the fishing industry for multiple generations.
She recalled that her grandfather, who considered himself one of the best fishermen in the Mediterranean sea, had wondered whether he’d lose his edge with the advent of a new type of machine that could show where other fishermen and fish were located.
“Instead of fearing technology, he thought of it as like, ‘OK, now that this machine is coming, how do I become the best master of this new technology of these new techniques so that I use it to my advantage,’” she told Chang at a seafood market in Sète where her uncle sells fresh catch and the local delicacy, Tielle, or octopus pies.
In a similar vein, Simo wants Instacart to help grocers take advantage of technology, whether it’s to reach more customers by enabling delivery or to help them limit waste by leveraging consumer data to estimate production volumes.
“I want to help the people who are caring for their particular craft right now really be the people still allowed to continue doing their craft even better through technology in the future,” she said.
By positioning Instacart as a technology partner for 1,500 grocers both online and offline, Simo believes this will help the company hold its own against Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., which are also investing in technology designed to digitize grocery shopping.
“The Amazons and Walmarts of the world might get a fair share of people, but if your favorite retailer of choice is a Publix, a Kroger, an Albertsons, we really are the best place for that,” she said. And within the company, she says these new bets have helped her gradually build credibility, an advantage that she didn’t have as non-founder stepping into the role of chief executive.
This episode of The Circuit With Emily Chang premieres Thursday, Nov. 21, at 8 p.m. in New York on the Bloomberg app and Bloomberg.com and on Bloomberg Television at 10 p.m. Check out The Circuit podcast for extended conversations.
To see more episodes of The Circuit, click here.To see more videos from Bloomberg Originals, click here.
(Updates with year-to-date trading in the fifth paragraph.)
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