Yelp Inc. Common Stock (YELP) : juste valeur

Thèse ACCE

Yelp runs the local business review platform behind its Yelp.com and mobile apps, earning most of its revenue from advertising that local merchants buy to appear in search results and business profiles, alongside a smaller stream from its Yelp Guest Center and Reservations products. The moat rests on a large base of user-written reviews and a long-established brand in restaurant and home-services discovery, with gross margins of 89.6% showing how little it costs to serve each incremental ad impression. Growth is the problem: revenue is up only 1.4%, so the case depends on monetization gains and margin expansion rather than volume, and the score of 53 out of 100 reflects that stall. The stock trades at 9.8 times trailing earnings and 14.7 times forward earnings, a multiple that implies the market expects earnings to fall, not rise, so the forward figure deserves scrutiny before anyone treats the discount as cheap. With a 12.7% operating margin and an 18.2% return on equity, the business is profitable, but it is not in the index memberships screen, which leaves it in a small-cap value niche where the research burden is to show that revenue can re-accelerate.