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OPINION Criteo: reinvention unjustly unrewarded?

InternetRetailing

We wrote before here about how Criteo has reinvented itself. The most recent quarterly results announcement resulted in a 20% drop in Criteo share price. This must have been particularly annoying for the Criteo leadership as their retail media business had shown growth of 22%.

However, as the advertising tech company reported a slight decline in overall sales, and fell short of investor expectations, they were marked down. Despite retail media revenue rising 22% to $61 million, it is still only 13% of Criteo’s total sales. Meanwhile, the legacy performance advertising segment saw a 5% decrease to $398 million. Net profit for the quarter stood at $6 million.

Criteo shifted its strategy to retail media about 8 years ago, when Retail Media was an emerging area. The list of acquisitions to build a new adtech stack was very impressive:

  • Gradient – 2021
  • Brandcrush – 2021
  • Iponweb – 2021
  • Storetail – 2018
  • Mabaya – 2018
  • HookLogic – 2016

It’s hard to understand why the market is punishing Criteo when the wider stock market is up – and particularly for technology.  There are very few stories of reinvention in technology and software: the ones that have managed to ride the new waves, for example, Adobe, building out its ‘Adobe Experience Cloud’ through a series of acquisitions over 10 years and turning its business into a subscription model – are rare – which makes it all the more impressive.

This makes the lack of reward for Criteo even more strange.

The company recently announced that its CEO, Megan Clarken has indicated that she plans to retire in the next 12 months. Investor confidence now hinges on Criteo’s upcoming presentation on Monday, Nov. 18, where it will outline the future of its retail media business and expansion plans to the financial market.

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