Still pushing hard on its strategy to be more than just a site for daily deals, e-commerce powerhouse Groupon reported its quarterly earnings today, reporting revenues of $757.1 million on non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.03, but a negative EPS of $0.03 on a GAAP basis.
Analysts were expecting a non-GAAP EPS of $0.01 on revenues of $748.76 million. Groupon managed to best expectations, but not by a margin that investors found too compelling.
The company is up a mere 1 percent in after-hours trading:
“We had another record quarter, with worldwide billings increasing 39 percent and reaching their highest level ever,” said Eric Lefkofsky, CEO of Groupon, in a statement. “We also made significant progress in our strategy to become the leading mobile commerce destination, with double-digit growth in our North American Local business, double-digit gross margins in North American Goods and positive Adjusted EBITDA in every segment for the first time in over a year.”
As a point of comparison, Groupon last quarter (Q2) disappointed Wall Street with sales of $751 million, missing their expectations by about $10 million while matching their EPS of $0.01. Its Q3 was up 27 percent on sales a year ago.
The company’s stock was up about 4 percent in trading to just over $6/share today before the results were announced.
Groupon, which has had a lot of ups and downs in its life as a public company. Most recently, its head of product, Parker Barrile, left the company citing personal reasons.
Despite this, Groupon in the last quarter has been continuing its efforts to build out its product portfolio and continue developing its services in a bid to boost its traffic and offset any declines that it may see in daily deals. That has included the launch of individual business pages to rival those of Yelp, a shopping loyalty and couponing app called Snap, and a more flexible model for how it lets businesses list deals based on specific times of day to improve footfall.
It’s slowly making some progress on these fronts. The company says that 100 million people have now downloaded its mobile apps globally.