Lightspeed Touts Results As It Tightens Its Focus on Restaurants

Few, if any, business sectors are as hotly competitive these days for payments providers as hospitality, and in particular, restaurants. Major firms from Block Inc.’s Square unit to Toast Inc. to Shift4 Payments Inc. have big stakes in this market. But that hasn’t stopped one other entrant, Lightspeed Commerce Inc., from spending the past year reorganizing itself to focus on just two target markets—general retail, on the one hand, and, on the other, restaurants.

Early Thursday, Lightspeed’s chief executive celebrated that dual focus and the early results it’s apparently generating. “To go from nine distinct products to two powerful flagship platforms … has allowed us to simplify our organization, increase our focus on our target customers, and accelerate our innovation engine,” noted chief executive JP Chauvet, in a statement concerning the Montreal-based company’s March-quarter financial results.

One of company’s more recent technologies for restaurants was the launch in October of Lightspeed Advanced Insights, a data platform.

That more concentrated focus helped drive gross dollar volume up 20% in hospitality in the March quarter, compared to the same period last year. That’s better than the 10% overall growth for the company as a whole and well ahead of Lightspeed Retail’s 3% increase. Overall, Lightspeed’s gross transaction volume for the totaled $20.2 billion (U.S.) for the quarter, up 10%.

Lightspeed Retail debuted a year ago with both e-commerce and point-of-sale capability, along with so-called headless-commerce technology. That allows merchants to tweak customer-facing functions without affecting apps on the back-end.

For the quarter, Lightspeed recorded $184.2 million in revenue, a 26% increase over the same period last year. It narrowed its net loss to $74.5 million from $114.5 million a year ago.