Investing in solid growth stocks is one of the best ways to grow your wealth and better prepare yourself for retirement.
It’s important to select the right type of growth stocks to avoid disappointment.
These businesses should deliver sustainable returns while providing you with peace of mind.
Here are four US growth stocks that could sit comfortably within your portfolio.
Applied Materials (NASDAQ: AMAT)
Applied Materials is a materials engineering company with solutions to produce almost every new chip and advanced display in the world.
The company’s expertise is in modifying materials at the atomic level and at scale to deliver what customers want.
Applied Materials has demonstrated steady growth over the years.
Revenue increased from US$23.1 billion in fiscal 2021 (FY2021) ending 30 November to US$26.5 billion in FY2023.
Net profit climbed from US$5.9 billion to US$6.9 billion over the same period.
The materials expert also saw its free cash flow improve from US$4.7 billion in FY2021 to US$7.6 billion in FY2023.
The company’s earnings momentum has carried over into the first nine months of fiscal 2024 (9M FY2024).
Revenue inched up 1.7% year on year to US$20.1 billion while operating profit improved by 2.4% year on year to US$5.8 billion.
Net profit jumped 12.2% year on year to US$5.4 billion.
Applied Materials also generated a positive free cash flow of US$5.3 billion for 9M FY2024.
Back in July, the company unveiled chip wiring innovations or more energy-efficient computing.
Applied Materials is the first to use ruthenium in high-volume production for copper chip wiring to be scaled to 2 nm and to reduce resistance by as much as 25%.
PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL)
PayPal offers a payments portal that connects customers with merchants and facilities secure, quick, and efficient payments.
The company is present in around 200 markets globally.
PayPal delivered a commendable performance for the first half of 2024 (1H 2024).
Revenue rose 8.8% year on year to US$15.6 billion while operating profit climbed nearly 17% year on year to US$2.5 billion.
Net profit improved by 10.5% year on year to US$2 billion.
Free cash flow did even better, soaring more than fourfold year on year for 1H 2024 to US$3.1 billion.
PayPal reported healthy activity metrics for the second quarter of 2024 (2Q 2024).
Monthly active accounts rose 3% year on year to 222 million while the number of payment transactions increased by 8% year on year to 6.6 billion.
Just last week, PayPal announced an expansion of its global strategic partnership with Shopify (NYSE: SHOP) in the US.
PayPal will become an additional credit and debit card processor for Shopify Payments on Shopify’s platform.
With this collaboration, PayPal wallet transactions will be integrated into Shopify Payments in the US.
S&P Global Inc (NYSE: SPGI)
S&P Global is a data provider and supplies governments, businesses, and individuals with the appropriate data, technology, and expertise for important decision-making.
The company released a strong set of earnings for 1H 2024 with revenue rising 12% year on year to US$7 billion.
S&P Global saw year-on-year revenue increases across all five of its divisions, with its Ratings division seeing the strongest revenue increase at 31% year on year.
Operating profit surged by 38% year on year to US$2.8 billion while net profit shot up 53% year on year to US$2 billion.
The business also saw its free cash flow generation soar by 87.7% year on year in 1H 2024 from US$1.3 billion to US$2.4 billion.
A quarterly dividend of US$0.91 was approved, taking the annualised dividend per share to US$3.64.
This quarterly dividend was a slight year-on-year increase from the prior year’s US$0.90.
S&P Global plans to continue investing in new and enhanced products with new releases in Market Intelligence and Commodity Insights.
The company will also deploy new generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
Its acquisition of Visible Alpha closed in 2Q 2024 while the divestment of Fincentric is expected to be completed by 3Q 2024.
Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG)
Datadog operates a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications.
Its software-as-a-service platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, and log management, among other tasks.
Datadog handed in a robust financial report card for 1H 2024.
Revenue jumped 26.8% year on year to US$1.26 billion.
The SaaS company generated an operating profit of US$24.6 million and its net profit weighed in at US$86.5 million because of a jump in interest income.
Datadog’s free cash flow for 1H 2024 also climbed 28.1% year on year to US$330.5 million.
The business also had 3,390 customers with more than US$100,000 in annual recurring revenue, representing an increase of 13% year on year.
The company continued to add many new features for its platform such as Live Debugger, a tool that enables developers to step through mountains of code to find the exact cause of coding errors.
It also announced Datadog On-Call, a call experience to make incident management workflows seamless.
Attention Growth Investors: Our latest report, “The Rise of Titans,” gives you a front-row seat on the 7 most influential US stocks today. If you’re passionate about tech and growth, you can’t go wrong with our research. Downloading this FREE report could be the most strategic move you make this year. Click here to get started now.
Follow us on Facebook and Telegram for the latest investing news and analyses!
Disclosure: Royston Yang does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned.
