Airbnb Q4 & Full Year Financials — 2020

Airbnb results for the quarter beat the analyst expectations by a huge margin but the full-year loss was higher than expected due to IPO expense & expenses around stock-based compensation.

Here’s how the company performed compared to Wall Street’s expectations for Q4 2020:

• Revenue: $859 million vs. $739.7 million expected
• Adjusted EBIDTA loss: $21 million vs. $132.8 expected
• Net loss: $3.9 billion vs. $3.1 billion expected

Few other highlights from the earning announcement & Investor Call:

- Most growth in domestic came from

• People who traveled between 0–50 miles (0–80kms)
• Second was people who traveled between 50–300 miles (80–480 kms)

- People traveled to smaller cities

• Sicily over Florence and Venice
• Devon over Oxford & Cambridge
• Due to the changing travel patterns, no city was more than 1.1% of Airbnb’s revenue. This goes to show the strength in their distributed inventory

- Consumers & Hosts

• The advance travel purchase window is collapsing further as the future is very uncertain. People are making quicker decisions to just take the trip as the postponed trip might end up getting canceled due to restrictions
• 40% of people who searched on Airbnb have been flexible in their dates & location
• An avg. host on Airbnb makes < $10k/year. This happens because they host people occasionally, so a lot of scope to increase the productivity of the hosts
• “Making Possible by Hosts” & “Made Possible with Hosting” are two major global campaigns by Airbnb for 2021 to encourage more people to host
• 70% of the hosts leave a review on the traveler. Airbnb, therefore, has data on good behavior by travelers
• 5.6m live listing for the quarter with 4m hosts, 90% of the hosts are individuals with 55% being women.

- Traffic

- PR is top of the funnel with 0.5m articles in 2020

- Brand marketing is going to be key

- Experiences:

Occupancy is not the best measure of performance for Airbnb as you don’t want to usually drive up the home usage throughout the year for individual hosts — Brian Chesky

Link to Investor Call Transcript — http://bit.ly/3uzJw5f

Link to Investor Presentation — https://bit.ly/3uIbSKP

Link to Letter to Shareholders — http://bit.ly/2MsGhvf

That’s all for this update!

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Originally published at https://ankitsawant.com on March 1, 2021.