Canada has an abundance of technology investments that are stuffed with long-term potential. Unfortunately, those investments are often discarded by investors, either due to their troubled past or because of one or more factors that paint the company in a less-than-favourable light.
Here are some of those investments and why they make great additions to your portfolio.
BlackBerry (TSX:BB)(NYSE:BB) is a fraction of its former self, but in many respects, the company is a much better investment than it once was. Where BlackBerry was once most known for developing a suite of small-screened smartphones, the company has since evolved to become an IoT heavyweight with a renewed focus on the enterprise segment as well is heavily investing in autonomous driving.
BlackBerry’s QNX platform is already installed in over 120 million vehicles around the world today, powering the infotainment systems in those vehicles. BlackBerry’s hope is to leverage QNX’s security, stability, and scalability for it to act as a central system to run a myriad of other systems in an autonomous vehicle.
BlackBerry is also growing its already impressive enterprise base, where the company can benefit from the recurring revenue that enterprise software can command.
BlackBerry currently trades at just over $13 and is up 12% in the past year and up by 27% over the past two years.
Shopify (TSX:SHOP)(NYSE:SHOP) is another intriguing tech company worthy of consideration. Shopify’s software suite allows companies to set up an online storefront in a fraction of the time that traditional methods were known for. Shopify also provides an extensive list of extensions to storefronts, which provides an element of customization that doesn’t hinder the simplicity of the core product offering.
The ease of use is one of the many reasons why Shopify has attracted a large amount of attention over the past few years and why the company can boast over 600,000 businesses that use the platform and over $72 billion in products that have traversed the platform to date.
Shopify currently trades at $215 with incredible one- and two-year gains of 45% and 270%, respectively.
Online gambling remains a taboo in some circles, but that hasn’t stopped Stars Group (TSX:TSGI)(NASDAQ:TSG) from taking off and becoming a very intriguing long-term investment opportunity. Stars Group provides a series of poker and casino games for its users to gamble, and the opportunity for investment comes in the form of two key points.
First, the market for Stars Group is growing, becoming more diverse, and with that growth comes the potential for new gains. Specifically, Stars Group has expertly diversified away from being over-reliant on poker in recent quarters, has sought out new markets to expand into, and has finally found a viable route to expansion.
Finally, weaker-than-expected results in the most recent quarter weighed down results, which was due to the company’s spending on acquisitions during the quarter. Unfortunately, the results were then followed up with the company announcing it would be issuing 52 million shares to convert any remaining preferred shares, which resulted in the stock dropping.
This latest sell-off provides an incredible opportunity for long-term investors to acquire a great company with massive potential for a very discounted price.
Stars Group currently trades at just over $33, and the stock has dropped 35% over the past three months, but over a longer one-year period the company is actually up by the same amount.
