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Alia Youssef/The Globe and Mail
After the year Shopify Inc. has had, you might expect its co-founder and CEO Tobi Lutke to sound a little…cheerier.
Riding a global surge in pandemic-related e-commerce traffic, Shopify – which makes the software used by more than a million merchants to sell their products online – surpassed Royal Bank of Canada to become Canada’s most valuable company. It now has a market capitalization of US$177-billion, making it only the second Canadian tech company, after Nortel Networks, to reach such heights. It raised billions of dollars from stock sales last year and even posted a rare quarterly profit of US$191-million in October on third quarter on revenues of US$767.4-million – nearly double what they were a year earlier. (Revenue in the second quarter nearly doubled, too.) When it reports its fourth-quarter results next week, analysts expect sales to have increased by more than 80 per cent over 2019, to US$909-million.