I have held since mid teens, trimmed ahead of these results as I...

I have held since mid teens, trimmed ahead of these results as I thought the market was being over optomistic, that covid would have a bigger impact on growth. Happy to be wrong and still have a large holding, very pleased with the growth they have achieved during a very stressful time for SMEs.

I am a tad concerned that the market is reading too much into the increased profitability though, as it sounds like (from the webinar) the increased profit was not the plan and post covid they will go back to tipping all their profits back into customer acquisition, business acquisition and product developement. This is great of course, I love the long term mindset they have and their ability to reinvest in themselves at high ROI is what makes them so valuable and increase in value every year. I especially think expansion into adjacent verticles by leveraging their data and increasing ARPU will be key to further value creation. I doubt however, that the market will appreciate decreasing EBITDA, NPAT and FCF figures in future reporting periods. I don't expect them to ramp S&M back up until the outlook for SMEs has improved which may be another 3-6 months, so maybe we won't see earnings retract until 1H22. Hopefully the profits Xero has displayed here will be a good insight for investors to give perspective for future revenue growth with the absense of growing profits.

It sounds like Xero are really interested in global domination, becoming the accounting standard and not giving up until they have very high penetration globally, perhaps eventually or gradually using their scale to challenge Intuit in USA. I'm sure this commitment and the necessary investment will pay off for them over the next 10-20 years however how will the market interpret it over the next 5?

For me, from here, Xero looks like a company I want to be invested in in my super where I will be invested for the next 20 years but in my personal portfolio I wonder if I will make more money elsewhere in the medium term. How do you guys think the market would react to flat or declining earnings in future with total revenue growth close to 30%? Do you think analysts are extrapoling growing npat and fcf or are they smarter than that?