Affirm Holdings’ chairman and CEO Max Livchin told CNBC that despite the market’s poor performance this year, American consumers — and Affirm’s customers — are spending healthily.
“The American consumer is alive and well. They are shopping and buying and paying their loans, at least to be sure well. Overall, things are going according to plan, and the turmoil in the stock markets does seem to have an effect,” said Lifchin in an interview Thursday night on Mad Money. actually on our core business which is doing really well.”
Shares of Affirm rose more than 20% to around $22.50 on Friday, the day after the lender’s last quarterly earnings report, Buy Now, Pay Later, which saw a smaller-than-expected loss. Affirm also beat the top-line estimates and said it’s expanding its partnership with Shopify.
“We’ve been the partner of choice, if you will, for all of these really great companies that fuel American e-commerce and we’ve done really well there. And that’s where all our growth comes in, and yet we also have a program that’s growing fantastically…merchant self-service,” Livchin said, noting that Affirm also has partnerships with Walmart and Amazon.
Affirm opened Friday near $25 per share. But that is still down 85% since its all-time high of $176.65 in November.
Affirm hasn’t released its full-year fiscal 2023 outlook or full-year guidance yet. Plan to present these numbers in the company’s next earnings report.
However, Affirm’s founder, Lifchin, sounded optimistic about the company’s growth prospects.
“Some of our competitors recently posted 15% annual growth rates, and some are not public so I don’t really know. You can see from my numbers that we’re doing a good job and we’re doing it with a really, really high ratio, good returns, and really good unit economics.” “Everyone should switch to buy now, pay later.”