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Shift4 Payments (FOUR) is seeing steady consumer spending across key sectors like restaurants, hotels, and entertainment, despite broader economic pressures.
Coming off of better-than-expected first quarter earnings results, Shift4 President and future CEO Taylor Lauber joins Market Domination to break down the company’s revenue growth.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here.
Shift4 payments just posted a strong quarter earlier this week, beating expectations on revenue and payment volume and continuing its rapid global expansion. It also processes more than $260 billion in payments each year, but beyond the numbers, the company's navigating some strategic shifts including the potential departure of its founder and CEO, Jared Isaacman, who has been nominated to lead NASA. We're now joined by Taylor Lauber, Shift4's current president and future CEO. Taylor, uh welcome here. So, coming off of uh earnings here, what um, what are you seeing? I mean, we we're hearing about all of these sort of broader economic pressures here. I was surprised on your comments call how sanguine you guys sounded. So talk me through that sort of seeming disconnect here.
Yeah, sure. So I think it's important to maybe baseline the types of merchants we serve when you're thinking about our view into the consumer. We support about a third of the table service restaurants in the United States, uh about two-thirds of the hotels, and a disproportionate number of the sports and entertainment venues, theme parks, etc. And through that lens, we've seen a consumer that's actually um been very consistent over the last kind of 18 months or so. And what I mean by that is it's a consumer that is spending modestly below um what they were in the previous year, but but very modestly, like 1% down and in some cases flat uh to the previous year. So, um we're not seeing any immediate cause for concern inside the consumer. It's not to say that we don't as a business think about what the next uh what the road ahead could look like, but um, you know, the the push and take to serving these verticals is that in order for us to grow as a business, and you know, we posted 40% revenue growth over the last year, we need to add a lot of customers. We can't spend a lot of time focused on same store sales. But when we do look at the data, it tells us that um at least for our vantage point, our our merchants are doing okay for now.
