It's probably the best growth story on the S&P/ ASX200 (ASX: XJO) in the last few years and buy-now-pay-later juggernaut Afterpay Group Ltd (ASX: APT) is not slowing down.
Today it revealed it processed more than $1 billion in underlying retail sales over the Black Friday-boosted month of November.
On an annualised basis that's $12 billion in underlying sales per year and Afterpay is still growing like nuts.
It reportedly added 0.5 million new customers over November to take the total to 6.6 million active shoppers.
Underlying sales are what Afterpay takes a fixed percentage of from its retail merchant clients.
They make up the vast majority of its revenue other than late payment fees levied on the consumer that have recently been capped in agreement with regulators.
In fiscal 2019 for example it earned total income of $264.1 million minus late payment fees from shoppers of $17.1 million to equal fees from merchants of $247 million on underlying sales of $5,247 million.
A back of the envelope calculation suggests Afterpay charges merchants around 4.7% on each sales ($247m/$5,247) so we can see that on annualised sales of $12 billion it's raking it in assuming a similar fixed fee percentage.
In fact 4.7 per cent of $12 billion is $564 million in revenue or what Afterpay terms 'income'.
This is of course before costs and bad debts, but we can see Afterpay is now a serious business and growing fast.
Around 76 per cent of sales over the Black Friday weekend were via mobile to show how it's also capitalising on structural shifts in consumers' shopping habits.
A lot of professional analysts also expect Afterpay will be able to monetise the data it has on consumer shopping habits to help retailers grow profitable sales further.
It's not hard to see why the stock has gone gangbusters and I wouldn't be surprised to see it even higher this time next year.
Others tech players coming up on the rails to watch include EML Payments Limited (ASX: EML) and PointsBet Holdings Ltd (ASX: PBH).
