Business
StoneCo Reports First Quarter of 2021 Financial Results
GEORGE TOWN, Grand Cayman, June 01, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- StoneCo Ltd. (Nasdaq: STNE) (“Stone” or the “Company”), a leading provider of financial
About this update from Stoneco Ltd.
[{"type":"text","content":"GEORGE TOWN, Grand Cayman, June 01, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- StoneCo Ltd. (Nasdaq: STNE) (“Stone” or the “Company”), a leading provider of financial technology solutions that empower merchants to conduct commerce seamlessly across multiple channels, today reports its financial results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2021. “Dear Shareholders, As the pandemic unfolded in Brazil in the first quarter and up to May, we continued to work hard to stay close to our clients and bring to them the best service and solutions. We monitored their level of activity closely, as well as how vaccinations and economic activity evolved in Brazil and in other countries. Based on (i) our learnings with lockdowns last year, (ii) recent client transactional data and (iii) learnings from the dynamics of countries where vaccines are widespread, we expect that once vaccination scale (which we think will happen in the second half of 2021), the economic recovery will be fast and - although delayed - Brazil is moving in the right direction. For these reasons, we have made an informed decision to be ready for recovery by investing in growth. In the first quarter, we decided to increase our salesforce headcount by 24%, marketing investments by 33%, customer service and logistics headcount by 32% and technology headcount by 20%, in order to be the fastest player when our economy comes back to normal levels. We have a high quality and solid core business in terms of growth, profitability and cash flow generation that continues to scale both in terms of client base, TPV and engagement of clients with new solutions, that we build on our new Financial Operating System for SMBs. Our SMB core business presented strong growth metrics in the quarter and to date: our active payments clients in SMBs grew 67% in the quarter versus last year, achieving 857.8 thousand active clients. Additionally, 257 thousand clients are active in our digital account and of those, 188 thousand use it as their banking domicile, settling all of their transactions in the Stone Account. Overall SMB TPV grew 45% in the first quarter versus last year, with strong acceleration in the second quarter to date: TPV grew 122% in April and 111% in May up to May 20th. While April and May compare to weaker comps due to lockdowns in the second quarter of 2020, we still see strong growth acceleration...