Oppenheimer’s Favorite Stocks For Next 12 Months: Top 32 Stock Picks

9. Maplebear Inc. (NASDAQ:CART)

Share Price Upside: 25%

Number of Hedge Fund Investors In Q2 2024: 56

Average Analyst Share Price Target: $44.54

Maplebear Inc. (NASDAQ:CART) is an American company that focuses on selling groceries online as Instacart. This creates a significant competitive advantage for the firm, as it provides it with exposure to both the high growth eCommerce industry as well as the essential item nature of the grocery industry. Due to this, Maplebear Inc. (NASDAQ:CART)  can benefit from an uptick in economic health by growing its operational base by adding more retailers to the platform. It can also ensure that during a tough economy, revenue keeps flowing as consumers divert their spending towards essential items. As a result, key tenets of Maplebear Inc. (NASDAQ:CART)’s hypothesis are its retailer addition growth, delivery times, and cost control. The firm is also experimenting with new technologies, such as its Caper Carts which allow grocery carts to weigh and price items to enable the customer to skip the checkout process entirely. Maplebear Inc. (NASDAQ:CART) has partnered up with grocery giant Aldi for Caper Carts, and if successful, the platform could see growing adoption in the market. Oppenheimer believes that “Instacart can further leverage its current position as a top-2 player in grocery delivery, and the company has considerably improved its order unit economics since 2019.”

Maplebear Inc. (NASDAQ:CART)’s management shared details for its new technologies during the Q2 2024 earnings call:

“The beauty of all of our In-Store technologies is that they connect directly with Storefronts and with each other, so it’s really a seamless experience for customers to buy from retailers online and In-Store. For example, customers can reorder online what they bought with their Caper Carts in one tap, or bring their online shopping list to the screen of Caper Carts to avoid forgetting ingredients in the store.

This is increasingly important to retailers who are moving away from complex and fragmented point solutions and towards technology partners that can offer a simple and seamless customer experience across all of their channels. Scaling our marketplace and enterprise offerings both online and In-Store is also critical to our strategy because it’s laying the foundation for a massive one-stop-shop, omni-channel retail media network. While it may seem like new retail media networks are popping up left and right, right now, we know that brands have limited time and resources, and they will ultimately want to work with platforms that have scales across all channels. And this is exactly where Instacart ads will shine because of our leading scale, performance, measurement, data, and product capabilities.”