Aterian's Quarter Was Not Good Enough to Stop Its Decline
In early 2021, e-commerce company Aterian (NASDAQ: ATER) was flying high. Aterian had leveraged its artificial intelligence and data gathering algorithms to quickly and effectively produce and bring to market products to sell on websites like Amazon. Shares reached a high of $47.66 on Feb. 17 and at that point the stock was up 177% on the year, compared to the S&P 500's 4% gain. It's been an entirely different story since then. At the time of this writing, Aterian is trading for $4.08 and is trailing the S&P 500 by about 95 percentage points year to date.
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The big trouble began with Aterian's Q2 results, which were reported on Aug. 9. Year-over-year revenue growth slowed to 14%, following the previous four quarters where growth was between 44% and 96%. Additionally, contribution margin, net income, and free cash flow were all down from the year-ago quarter, and the company withdrew its guidance. These results were an abrupt change in direction for the company and the market responded harshly, with shares dropping 50%.
Source Fool.com
