“Renovating Our Bar”: Match Group (NASDAQ:MTCH) Out to Prove the Unlikely With Tinder

Dating service Match Group (MTCH) wants you to know that Tinder is about more than just hookups. Go ahead, take a minute; catch your breath, and when you stop laughing, it will be all the more compelling to discover that Match Group is serious when it says that. That is the word from CEO Spencer Rascoff, who describes an upcoming revamp for Tinder as like “renovating our bar.” Investors were willing to give Tinder the benefit of the doubt, and shares gained nearly 1.5% in Wednesday afternoon’s trading.

The word from the Wall Street Journal made it clear: Tinder wants to be about more than casual hookups, a niche it has almost cheerfully occupied for decades to a point where Family Guy did a musical number about how “Tinder makes you gross.” Rascoff took up the gauntlet at Tinder as well as Match Group, after Fay Iosotaluno announced plans to step down in July.

So what will Rascoff do to shake an image gathered over the years? New product changes, the report noted, along with a larger reliance on artificial intelligence and “…features that boost user safety.” Rascoff even reportedly mentioned plans to offer up a new service called “double dating,” which has been tested in Europe. That feature allows users to get together with friends to find pairs to date, which should, theoretically, make things a bit less awkward. Rascoff even went so far as to warn that these moves were likely to hurt short-term profits.

And With Fewer People, Too

This report comes hot on the heels of another report that noted Rascoff was planning big job cuts at Match Group, as younger singles were apparently giving the real world another try. That, coupled with Rascoff’s plans to revamp Tinder, prompted job cuts of about 13% of the workforce.

A full-on decimation and then some tends to come with some bad news for shareholders attached, and with first-quarter profits dropping against the same time the previously year—down from $123.2 million to $117.6 million, while paid users dropped 5%—it was clear that Match Group and Tinder were going to need to start husbanding cash particularly hard for a while. In fact, reports at the time noted that price cuts and promotional offers were also on the table, which would make sense given that new features are coming out. What better way to lure in subscribers—new and former alike—to try new features than with special pricing?

Is Match Group a Good Stock to Buy?

Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on MTCH stock based on five Buys and nine Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 2.64% rally in its share price over the past year, the average MTCH price target of $33.36 per share implies 8.56% downside risk.

See more MTCH analyst ratings

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