The CEO of Lightspeed Commerce Inc. says the public market is a “good place” for the Montreal-based company, but its board of directors has a responsibility to evaluate all strategic options, including privatization.

Dax Dasilva, who founded the fintech company that makes point-of-sale software for businesses, told BNN Bloomberg that he’s focused on finding operational efficiencies in Lightspeed’s business model to create better value for shareholders.

“I've been really focussed on looking at all aspects of the business and working with the team to be able to present some of the near-term things we can do,” he said in a Wednesday television interview.

“Then we want to do a capital markets day in the fall where we have a three-year outlook on what those efficiencies are going to be… the market's valuing profitability, and we've got two profitable quarters under our belt but there's much more that we can do.”

Dasilva made the comments two days after he told Montreal-based news publisher La Presse that Lightspeed is “always open” to discussions around a possible private buyout.

In the interview, Dasilva said those discussions were spurred by reports earlier this month that fellow Montreal-based payment tech company Nuvei had formed a special committee to evaluate interest from potential buyers.

“I think over at Nuvei, they've weighed whether they can execute their strategy better as a private company or as a public company; I think they went public around the same time we did,” he said on Wednesday.

“Our board has a fiduciary duty to always evaluate all the strategic opportunities in front of us… I believe that the public market is a good place for Lightspeed, but I think we have to focus on being that profitable growth story.”

Lightspeed 'going to be much more investable'

Lightspeed went public in 2019 at $16 per share, and eventually climbed to $155 in 2021 as investors favoured several speculative tech stocks.

But following a negative report from short seller Spruce Point Capital Management in September of that year, the stock fell sharply and has yet to recover, closing at $18.11 on the Toronto Stock Exchange last week.

Dasilva, who returned as CEO on an interim basis last month after his appointed successor stepped down, said he’s met with dozens of shareholders in recent weeks to get a sense of their expectations for the company going forward.

“They want to see operational efficiencies and they want to see capital allocation done well; we have a lot of cash in our balance sheet,” he said.

“Since we're not focusing on acquisitions, how are we thinking about use of our capital? There's lots of those kinds of discussions about what this next phase of Lightspeed looks like, and how we become even more competitive and a great public company that's more profitable.”

Dasilva said he’s taken that shareholder feedback and is focused on creating a longer-term growth plan for Lightspeed that the company will present to investors in the fall.

“We're starting to think about the three-year plan, and that's got to be the focus. I think we will be rewarded in the public markets if we're able to continue to optimize and be able to have a cleaner business model,” he said.

Dasilva said that in his meetings with shareholders, many of them told him that they have struggled to make sense of the business following the nine acquisitions the company made since going public.

“Once we're able to make that more rational in terms of pulling out some of that cost and those layers, I think it's going to be much more investable, and that's what we hope to present at the investor day in the fall,” he said.

With files from Bloomberg News