Shopify Inc. rallied, reversing losses in premarket trading, as Chief Executive Officer Tobi Lutke urged investors to overlook the slowdown in e-commerce and focus on the company’s longer-term growth strategy.
“It’s worth saying it’s a characteristic of innovative companies that they think in bets, in general,” he said. “I know by there’s generally not a lot of appetite for this kind of risk-taking, but I think our company especially is defined by not following some kind of orthodox playbook.” The weaker outlook -- and the company’s decision this week to cut 10 per cent of its workforce -- came with an admission from Lutke that executives had misjudged the durability of the pandemic-related boom in online sales and that company’s rapid expansion was unsustainable.