Lightspeed Commerce sees net loss shrink in founder's first full quarter back as CEO

Lightspeed Commerce Inc. CEO Dax Dasilva poses in the company's offices in Montreal, Wednesday, May 8, 2024. (Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press)

Dax Dasilva's first full quarter back at the helm of Lightspeed Commerce Inc. coincided with the business narrowing its net loss and seeing its revenue climb.

The Montreal-based payments technology company revealed Thursday that it recorded a net loss of US$35 million in its first quarter compared with a net loss of US$48.7 million for the same quarter last year.

"Our first-quarter results were characterized by strong revenue growth, increased payments adoption and improved profitability — a trend that I expect to continue through fiscal 2025," Dasilva told analysts on a Thursday call.

On an adjusted basis, Lightspeed reported a net income of US$16.1 million for the quarter ending June 30, up from an adjusted loss of US$2.2 million last year.

Its revenue, meanwhile, totalled US$266.1 million for the quarter, up from US$209.1 million for the same quarter last year.

The period the results span is the first full quarter founder Dasilva spent back in the top job, which he returned to in February on an interim basis after JP Chauvet left the company. Dasilva, who stepped down to give Chauvet the chief executive role in February 2022, came back to the job on a permanent basis in May.

Since then, Dasilva has been working to return the company to profitability, in part by uncovering cost efficiencies.

Under his watch, the business cut about 280 jobs in April, shifted its sales summit from an in-person format to a virtual event and reduced how many days its staff work from the company's offices in order to decrease bills associated with feeding employees.

Dasilva has also promised to accelerate software revenue growth, advance the adopting of Lightspeed’s financial services products, and control costs.

Those efforts have largely hinged on Lightspeed redeploying account managers to upsell clients and focusing on customers that tend to adopt more software.

Though Dasilva said the impact of measures put in place to accelerate that software revenue growth will largely be seen in the second half of Lightspeed's fiscal year, the company has already started to see success.

For example, it recently added fashion brands Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, along with Bally, a Swiss luxury footwear and handbag purveyor, to its customer roster.

"I am always happy to welcome new customers to Lightspeed, but it is sometimes even more satisfying to welcome back customers that have previously left for one of our competitors," Dasilva said.

"Having initially lost wedding dress retailer Emilia Wickstead to one of our cloud-based competitors, we are happy to see them returning to Lightspeed."

To hang onto customers and retain new ones, Dasilva plans to turn to artificial intelligence.

He's previously talked about merchants being interested in using the technology to write product descriptions or forecast how much they need to purchase for their next season.

On Thursday, he said the company had given them the ability to remove the background from images, insert a colour in its place and create "photorealistic" shadows.

"Taking professional-looking photographs of products can be challenging for our merchants," he said.

But by giving them the ability to improve their image quality, he said Lightspeed was having a "significant" impact on boosting sales for merchants.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 1, 2024.