Etsy has grown a loyal customer base—and that group now apparently includes Elon Musk.
On Tuesday morning the Tesla CEO sent out a 6:25 a.m. message to his 43 million Twitter followers that read: “I kinda love Etsy.”
On cue, the online marketplace stock popped as much as 9% in premarket trading (and traded up over 7.5% in early trading) on Tuesday as some Musk followers seemed to take the tweet as a sign to buy the stock.
But even if Musk “kinda” loves Etsy, should you love the stock?
“I suspect the tweet will generate additional interest in the company. It’s free marketing, and is likely to be a boon for sales,” Ruhell Amin, an analyst at William O’Neil, wrote in a Tuesday note. “This creates further upside risk to consensus estimates, in our view.” (Investment firm Jefferies separately raised its price target for Etsy on Tuesday to $245 a share.)
Amin suggests in light of Etsy’s 4th quarter revenue and margin guidance, there could still be upside for investors. “Indeed, traffic to its platform accelerated to ~100% in November and December, from ~60% in October,” he notes. And despite Etsy shares having soared a massive 323% in the past year, he argues “the stock trades at a justifiable premium to the peer group on most valuation metrics,” at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 96 for fiscal year 2021, versus the peer group average of roughly 77, he writes.
Those multiples are certainly heady, and the stock is trading near its all-time highs. As of early morning trading on Tuesday, the sock paired some of its early gains and is trading up roughly 0.2% in late morning trading. In the past month, shares have risen over 17%.
But analysts like William O’Neil’s Amin argue Etsy’s “model is differentiated from peers by the number of unique, handcrafted items on its platform, which Musk alludes to in his tweet,” and believes the “company has a large addressable market, worth $100 [billion] across its six core geographies,” possessing roughly “5% market share currently.” To be sure, the e-commerce space certainly saw a boost during the pandemic as merchants flocked online, while Amin also points to Etsy’s “capital-light business model [which] delivers strong EBITDA and free cash flow (~80% cash conversion rate).”
If you’re inclined to agree with Musk about Etsy, those like Amin point out the stock is “currently trading right at its rising [10 day moving average]; this could be an aggressive entry point.”
