Of course, we’ve all by now born witness to the meteoric rise of Jeff Bezos Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a company which has by now not only become the world’s dominant online retailer, but is also one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world, bar none.
But sometimes it pays to go the less conventional route, as Bezos arguably did when he started Amazon out of his garage in back in the summer of 1994.
With that in mind, here are three Canadian-based, TSX-listed companies, each of which are deeply entrenched in the rapidly expanding world of e-commerce, but which may have flown under the radar of many Foolish readers until now.
Over the past 20 years, Cargojet Inc (TSX: CJT) has followed a strong entrepreneurial culture that has helped it grow into Canada’s number one cargo airline.
Not only is its network now capable of reaching 90% of the Canadian population, but at present, the airline is also responsible for over 90% of Canada’s domestic overnight shipments, making it the defacto enabler of our country’s overnight e-commerce ecosystem.
Enabling online retailers to fulfill their time-sensitive delivery promises is becoming an increasingly important feature of retailers’ differentiation strategies, and it’s also something that the company prides itself on — and a trend which it hopes it can continue to deliver on for its customers.
Intertape Polymer Group (TSX: ITP) is another slightly smaller company, trading at a market capitalization of just over $1.1 billion, but all that may be about to change over the next couple of years.
ITP specializes primarily in the manufacture and distribution of tapes used for carton sealing and industrial purposes — a key element in how our e-commerce shipments ultimately make the way to our front doors and mailboxes.
Management is hoping it can grow revenues to $1.5 billion annually by 2022, thanks in large part to some major capital investments its made in recent years to expand its production capacity.
Over the next couple of years investors are hoping that capital spending should start to run off, paving the way for an accelerated pace of increases to its annual dividend, currently yielding 3.89%.
Shopify Inc (TSX: SHOP)(NYSE:SHOP), meanwhile, is the wildly successful brain-child of two Canadians who decided to invent their own e-commerce platform back in the summer of 2006 after becoming dissatisfied with the lack of available options on the market.
There’s basically been no looking back for the company since, which now boasts more than 800,000 businesses on its platform globally across more than 170 countries and generating an estimated $41.1 billion in gross merchandise volumes in 2018.
There’s been no time to look back for the company’s shareholders either, with the SHOP stock having more than 1250% since its May 2015 IPO.
