Deliver

Square falls 7% — and it's selling Caviar to DoorDash for $410M

Snacks / Friday, August 02, 2019

Switch hitters are rare... Square's winning a batting title with its consumer and small biz facing businesses, processing your latte purchase from the neighborhood spot. The digital payments icon announced revenues rose 44% to $1.2B (sounds pretty good). But Square spent so much on growth that it suffered a $7M loss. Here are its 3 areas of focus.

  1. Business biz: Square's "seller ecosystem" is for companies. Its software and card-swiping tech helps businesses collect payment for that buddha bowl. Once Square gets to know companies' payments, it can even lend to them.
  2. Consumer biz: Square's Cash App is the alt-Venmo that also trades Bitcoin. The peer-to-peer payment app makes up just under a quarter of company revenues, but its physical card can be used anywhere. Plus, it's the #1 free finance app 2 straight quarters.
  3. Delivery: Square acquired restaurant delivery app Caviar to get you your chicken curry and process the payment. But now it's making a change...

Who ordered the Caviar?... DoorDash. Square is selling Caviar to another food delivery app. Square CEO Jack Dorsey is busy building payments ecosystems (+side-hustling as Twitter's CEO) — no time to fight in food delivery wars. It's not a bad return though: Square bought Caviar in 2014 for $90M. Now it's selling to DoorDash for $410M of cash and shares.

This is a rare miss for Square... The stock had risen 40% so far in 2019, and had more than tripled in the past two years. Becoming the best money friend of businesses was already an accomplishment. Then its Cash App came out of nowhere, becoming the best friend of fantasy football league coordinators who need to track down league dues.

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