Tag Archives: company news

Warren Buffett has been selling INTC–should we? //the INTC dividend

May 16, 2012 By in Dividends, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Buffett’s INTC buy

Institutional money managers are required to disclose their equity portfolio holdings to the SEC each quarter in a filing called a 13F. (The 13F is not to be confused with the 13D, a filing the SEC requires ten days after anyone not an institutional investor acquires a 5% of any class of securities (equity or debt) of a public company).

In its 13F filing for the December 1011 quarter, Berkshire Hathaway indicated that it had bought 11.5 million shares of INTC, worth over a quarter billion dollars, during the period.

In its just-released March 2012 13F, the company says it held only 7.7 million INTC shares at the end of the quarter–meaning it sold a third of its holding in the interim.  As thestreet.com points out, Buffett added roughly the same dollar amount to his holding in IBM.

What’s going on?  Should we follow the Buffett lead?

my thoughts on the recent selling

1.  Mr. Buffett makes no secret of the fact he feels he doesn’t have a deep understanding of technology nor is he comfortable with large tech holdings.  He likes financials like GEICO, instead.  IBM, a steady grower that sells a branded set of services on a recurring subscription basis through a large sales force, is much more his style.

2.  My guess is that, at least implicitly, Buffett has put a dollar size limit on the INTC position because it’s in an industry he’s not an expert in.  He’s trimming to keep the position from getting too big.

3.  Coming at INTC from a slightly different angle, the company is a turnaround story.  To me, at $20 a share, the stock was so cheap that it didn’t matter too much whether the company’s efforts to reinvent the PC ( or at least clone the Macbook Air) and crack the mobile market will be successful.  At $30 a share, in contrast, it seems to me that a buyer/holder is betting that ultrabooks are a hit and that designing bespoke cellphones for carriers will work, as well.

I feel no strong urge to buy at today’s level, but I’m content to wait and see what happens.  Mr. Buffett seems to me to be acting in line with my general analysis.  He wants to continue to make the positive bet–or else he would have sold everything–just not a big one.

4.  Stock picking is like baseball, in that it’s the season’s average that counts, not a given at bat.  Even the most successful professional equity managers are wrong at least 40% of the time (the industry cliché is that 55% right/45% wrong = genius, the reverse proportions = unemployed).  So riding on anyone’s coattails on a single decision is a risky position. Think:  Albert Pujols.

the INTC dividend increase

On May 7th, INTC announced its board of directors had upped the quarterly dividend to $.225 from $.21.

I’m pleasantly surprised.  This is the fourth boost to the payout in less than three years.  My picture has been that 2012 would be a flattish year, before a reacceleration earnings during  2013.  I thought the company might wait until November or December to decide on a dividend increase.  That’s because dividend decisions are never made in anticipation of future profits.  They’re always backward-looking.  They’re made based on what earnings already booked will support.

I take the board action as an indication INTC’s current business is going better than I’d anticipated.

 

a quick look at DIS

May 15, 2012 By in earnings conference calls, economics, Stock ideas, Strategy Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

a little history

I became reacquainted with DIS in late 2009 when the company bid for Marvel Entertainment, which I had been a shareholder of for a couple of years.  Several things struck me about DIS that made the investment case more compelling than I expected:

1.  A new chairman, Bob Iger, was steadily reenergizing a company that had suffered for years under complacent and bureaucratic management, as happens with many mature firms.

2.  Although the price being paid, $4 billion, seemed pretty full to me, I knew Marvel would benefit from DIS’s stronger distribution.  And I also saw that Mr. Iger wanted to build the attractiveness of the Disney brand to boys, so Marvel had an “extra” value to DIS.

3.  The theme parks were suffering from the Great Recession.  I thought results would gradually improve as the economy recovered, first through an increase in foreign tourists, then through a return of US vacationers.

4.  Wall Street didn’t like the Marvel deal, which made DIS even cheaper.  So I bought some more.

I ended up selling most of my DIS stock about a year ago, soon after it popped above $40 a share.  Two reasons:  the stock was up a lot, and I worried that possible strikes by the NFL and/or NBA players would dent the profits of ESPN, which is DIS’s dominant business.

I’ve still kept my eye on DIS, which has been a market outperformer even after my sale.  The media reports of strong theme park business in 2Q12 (ended March 31st) when the company reported results last week caught my eye.  So I thought I’d take a closer look.

Here’s what I found.

DIS’s 2Q12 results

Excluding unusual items, earning per share were up 18% year on year, at $.58 vs. $.49 in 2Q11.

parks and resorts

Disney cruise line bookings were up 30% yoy.

Domestic theme park attendance was up 7% yoy, with spending per person up 5% in addition.

Occupancy in park hotels was up 2% yoy at 82%.  Room rates were up by about 5% as well.

Disneyland set a new 2Q attendance record.

The strength in the domestic theme park business comes from two sources:

–foreign tourists, especially from Latin America and Asia, and

–reviving interest from in-state residents in California and Florida.

Out of state domestic visitation to the parks was about flat, yoy.

Operating income from the worldwide Parks and Resorts business was up 53% yoy at $222 million.  The comparison is skewed by the closing of Tokyo Disneyland last year after the mid-March nuclear reactor accident in Japan, combined with a $15 million business interruption insurance payment made in the current quarter.  Ex these factors, the theme park business was probably up a bit over 20%.

To me, the most encouraging news is that residents of two of the areas hardest hit by the domestic housing crisis–southern California and Florida–are starting to come back to the Disney parks.

studio entertainment

Currently, this business is a tale of two movies.  John Carter, which may have made a $100 million loss, is certainly the main reason Studio Entertainment operating results dipped into the red by $84 million in 2Q12.  The other is The Avengers, which reportedly cost $220 million to make but which has had box office of over $1 billion in the first three weeks.  So 3Q12′s results in this segment will doubtless be eye-popping.

consumer products

Avengers-related merchandise sales are going much better than DIS had planned for.  A change of actors appears to have even breathed back life into the Hulk.

media networks

This segment is two-thirds of DIS’s operating income and is driven mostly by ESPN.  Changes in affiliate contracts and the differences in  timing/number of sporting events make year-on-year comparisons particularly hard for an outsider to interpret.  The reported you gain in operating income is 13%.  DIS says an apples-to-apples comparison would be more like half of that.

my thoughts

I find the implications for the US economy in DIS’s results to be encouraging–and consistent with what other companies who appeal to a broad range of Americans are saying.

DIS shares aren’t expensive.  They’re trading at 15x the Wall Street earnings consensus of $3.00 a share for fiscal 2012.  Trend growth is probably around 15% a year.  My guess is that they’ll be mild outperformers over the year ahead, with their best relative showing coming in uncertain days like these.

 


 

 

Facebook: my take

May 11, 2012 By in Facebook, Industry Analysis, internet Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

how is FB describing itself to the financial community?

I think the roadshow video is very instructive.

First of all, it is very expertly and painstakingly scripted and filmed.  A great deal of time, energy and thought went into it, in my view.  Therefore, it should be taken seriously as saying how FB wants to position itself in the minds of investors.

What are the main messages?  I think there are three:

1. FB is as much a social cause as a company.  And, by implication, we all now have a chance to be a part of the movement by becoming owners.

Mark Zuckerberg says both in the video and in a letter in the prospectus that he didn’t initially intend for FB to be a company.  He created it (I think I see a slight change in his delivery as he says this on the video) because it needed to be done.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company.  It was built to accomplish a social mission–to make the world more open and connected…There’s a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future…We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other,” he writes.

2.  FB is in a unique position among internet companies. 

Everyone else has succeeded only in creating the “raw tools” that FB is cementing together into a comprehensive communications network.  Because of this unique position, future applications developers will doubtless build their products on the FB infrastructure, giving the company huge profit expansion potential.

3.  FB is only at the start of its “rewiring” of the way people communicate with one another.

There’s very little discussion of current operations in the video–despite the fact it’s a half-hour long.  You’ll see why below.  To me, the implication is that the concept of a possible future is much more important than the present.  It’s a sort of “If you build it, they will come” message.

what about current operations?

Here are the numbers I find most interesting:

users

As of March 31, 2012, FB had 901 million registered users worldwide who have interacted with Facebook in some fashion at least once over the prior month.

As of the same date, it was averaging 526 million registered users who have some interaction with Facebook on a given day.

Of monthly active users, 83 million use mobile devices exclusively to interact with Facebook; 405 million others use both computers and mobile devices.  This is a big change.  Mobile usage grew by 69% over the past year.  It contributed most of the gains shown in North America.

Overall user growth was 33%.

geography

FB breaks out active users into four geographical areas:  US and Canada, Europe, Asia, and Rest of World.

US/Canada

20.7% of all users

average quarterly revenue/user = $2.86, up 14% year on year

user growth was +91% two years ago, +46% last year, +15% this year

biggest boost to growth appears to have been through mobile devices

Europe

27.9% of all users

average quarterly revenue/user = $1.40, up 18% yoy

user growth +94% two years ago, +46% last year, +20% this year

Asia

25.5% of all users

average quarterly revenue/user =$.53, up 23% yoy

user growth +268% two years ago, +93% last year, +47% this year

RoW

26.9% of all users

average quarterly revenue/user = $.37, up 19% yoy

user growth +137% two years ago, +58% last year, +33% this year

what these figures mean

To me, they suggest that the North American market is maturing rapidly and that Europe may be only a year or so behind.  Not surprising, given that Facebook users in North America already outnumber non-users.

The two regions make up three-quarters of FB’s revenue.   So, if it isn’t already, emphasis in North America has got to shift away pretty soon from grabbing as many new users as possible (to prevent rivals like Google+ from snatching them us) to raising revenue per user.  How that will go is unclear (to me, anyway).

income statement

FB has two sources of revenue:  advertising and payments, the latter mostly generated by microtransactions in games. During calendar 2011, FB collected $3.154 billion in ad revenue and $557 million as its share of payments (the lion’s share of that from Zynga).  That was an 88% yoy gain.  Net income was up by 66%.

For the latest quarter, however, net was down yoy, despite a 45% yoy rise in revenue to $1.058 billion.  How so?

Expenses rose by 97% yoy during the period.  R&D was up by 168% to $153 million, marketing by 134% to $159 million, spending on infrastructure by 65% to $277 million.

I interpret this as FB’s recognition that to continue to grow it has to do so in a new way.  It either has to sign up a whole big bunch of low-revenue users outside the US and Europe, or find new ways to raise average revenue per user in its more affluent, but more mature markets in North America and Europe.

It’s conceivable that during this transition time, eps growth will be nothing to write home about.  It’s also not 100% clear FB will be successful, although it is in a very powerful position in the social networking arena.

conclusions

FB’s IPO materials tell two different stories.

–one, portrayed in the video, is of a unique company with boundless potential in an increasingly interconnected world.

–the other, from the numbers in management’s discussion of operations in the prospectus, is of a company that has already picked most of the low-hanging fruit and which is ramping up spending to fend off slowing revenue growth.  The price of this ramp may be lackluster profit growth for at least a while.

Which story to believe?

Here I have no strong opinion.

On the plus side,…

…good growth companies tend to reinvent themselves every few years.  For example:

–Microsoft was originally the PC operating system company.  Then it was the Windows graphical interface company.  Then it was the corporate Office productivity suite company.  Then, a dozen years ago, it stopped growing.

–Apple was the iPod company.  Then it was the “halo effect”/Apple Store company.  Then it was the iPhone company.  Now it’s the iPhone/iPad/iCloud company.

–Amazon, which I think FB resembles the most closely, was originally an Internet “concept” company that sold books in cyberspace and didn’t make much money.  Then it “pivoted”, expanded the range of products it sold itself and began to act as an online sales conduit for third parties.  Profits exploded.

What could go right in this fashion for FB?

Let’s say that corporate advertising on Facebook could double–I’m not sure whether this is an aggressive assumption or an underestimation–over the next two or three years, while FB maintains something like its current cost base.  If so, earnings would rise by about 150%.  Companies would arguably shift ad dollars to FB because it’s cheaper and because customer targeting is better.

Or something really good that’s unexpected by the investment community could develop, as happened in all the cases I’ve cited above.

On the minus side,...

…the valuation, based on current profit levels, is high at 96x earnings per share.  That’s not necessarily a deal-breaker.  LinkedIn, which I don’t think is as promising a company, trades at 686x.  Amazon trades at 186x, with a similar story of heavy investment in new product development.

Priceline.com, clearly a more mature company, trades at 30x.

An “old” warhorse like Apple, where the price earnings multiple has been contracting for the past several years, trades at 14x.

Microsoft, which hasn’t shown any innovative spark so far this century, trades at 11x.

what will professional investors do?

Value investors will hold onto their MSFT and not touch FB with a ten-foot pole.

Growth investors will probably take all the FB they can get in the IPO.  Knowing that the stock will very soon be part of the NASDAQ index, I think they’ll try to build their positions to the point they have only slight underweights and then await further developments.

For me, the stock would be a roll of the dice–something I try to avoid.  It’s not simply a question of valuation. If I thought FB’s earnings in three years would be close to triple the current level, as a doubling of revenue/user would achieve, I’d be very happy to buy it.  I don’t know the company well enough to have that conviction.  But I believe this is the key question potential investors should have an answer to.

Note:  Since I  wrote this post, two new pieces of information have come out:

–FB amended its prospectus to reflect what was apparently a management answer to a question posed during the roadshow.  FB said that some users were switching to accessing Facebook through mobile devices rather than through computers.  This has a negative effect on revenues, since FB runs fewer ads through mobile devices and advertisers pay less for them.

–apparently demand is strong enough for the issue that FB is talking about raising the IPO price to $34-$38.

Facebook: the IPO process

May 10, 2012 By in Facebook, Industry Analysis, internet, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

going public

Going public is a highly choreographed dance.  FB is in the middle of its own time on “Dancing with the Stars,” vying for a prize of close to $100 billion.

the sequence of events

When a company decides to have its stock publicly traded:

hiring Wall Street

1.  it hires a team of investment bankers

filing with the SEC

2. with the investment bankers’ help, it prepares and files a comprehensive registration statement with the SEC for that agency’s regulatory approval.  Called an S-1, it becomes the preliminary prospectus which is given to potential investors once the SEC gives its ok.  Like any other company’s, FB’s approved S-1 can be found on the SEC’s Edgar website, along with any earlier versions the SEC may have sent back for more work.

The S-1 is legally required to be accurate and complete disclosure of all material information relating to company’s business.

Note:  SEC approval means only that the document is procedurally correct.  The agency doesn’t guarantee that the S-1/prospectus is in fact accurate or complete disclosure.   Nor does it say whether it thinks the stock will be a good investment or not.

the roadshow

3.  it launches a marketing campaign, whose centerpiece is a management roadshow organized by the investment bankers.

The roadshow typically lasts a week or two.  It reaches all the major investment centers and all the important money management firms in the country.

If demand to see and hear the company is high, as it clearly is in this case, management will be broken up into two or more teams (the FB video suggests it may have as many as four).  One will normally be headed by the CEO, another by the CFO.

The schedule is brutal.  Each day begins with a breakfast meeting.  Private meetings–usually an hour long + travel time to the next one–with important money management firms follow.  Then there’s a lunch, often with large numbers of portfolio managers, analysts and the press, none influential enough (read: big enough commission payers) to justify a private meeting.  Then there are private meetings in the afternoon, followed by a dinner presentation–and then possibly a trip to the next city on the list.

Add it all up and management is telling the same story, over and over again, maybe 7x-8x a day.

Since the S-1 must contain all material information about the company, it’s important that management not say anything that’s not contained in it–especially if someone might later on construe this as important.  So the teams are highly scripted and drilled on how to answer questions commonly asked.

In a way, the teams are a bit like actors.  They’re supposed to–if they can–smile and signal to questioners their respect for his penetrating insights and the thought/wisdom behind the query.  All they while they may be thinking, “Not again!” and “Doesn’t anyone read the prospectus?  The information he wants is on the first couple of pages!”

the video

Facebook has made a very artful 30-minute video (my comments tomorrow), available on its website, which I gather it intended to play at every meeting.  Smart move.  It burns up half the meeting time.  It also provides a clear roadmap for predictable follow-up questions–responses to which can be cleared by the legal department and rehearsed in advance.  The WSJ says, however, the video wasn’t played during the big public lunch in Boston after heated complaints about it at the comparable affair in Manhattan.

pricing the offering/allocating stock

4. the investment bankers are gathering feedback from clients throughout this time.  They’re trying to gauge the level of investor interest so they can set final pricing and decide to divide up the IPO stock among investors who place orders.

At the same time, money managers will want to get a sense of how “hot” the offering is.  Usually that’s expressed in terms of how many times the books are covered–that is, by how many times the requests for stock exceed the shares available for sale.  FB is a relatively large offering, so 3x or 4x would be impressive.  My guess is that the number is already high than that.  Of course, this can be a self-reinforcing process.  When money managers believe an offering is “hot,” they may request double or triple (or more) the stock they really want, in the hope they’ll end up with a bigger allocation after everyone’s order is cut back.

More tomorrow.

 

Facebook (FB): preliminaries

May 9, 2012 By in Constructing a Portfolio, Facebook, Industry Analysis, internet, Stock ideas, Technology Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

FB’s corporate structure

FB has two classes of common stock, A shares and B shares.  The two are identical, except for:

1.  A shares, which are the kind being sold in the public offering, have one vote each on matters of corporate policy

B shares, which are held by Mark Zuckerberg and other insiders, and which can’t be sold, have ten each.  This way insiders continue to control the company while raising money from outsiders.

2.  B shares are freely exchangeable into As, giving holders of the Bs a way to turn their holdings into cash.  But when insiders sell they don’t give “extra” votes to the buyer.

Any investor in internet companies–from Google to LinkedIn–is familiar with this structure.  It has been around a lot longer than that, though.  Hershey has a similar structure, for example, as do the New York Times and News Corp.

the offering

FB plans to sell 337, 415,352 shares in the offering.

Of that, 180 million will be new shares issued by the company.  The rest will come from employees cashing in stock grants they received as part of their compensation, and from venture capital investors cashing in stock they bought in private financing transactions.

Assuming the stock is sold at the mid-point of the announced pricing range of $28-$35 a share, the IPO will raise $10.6 billion and will imply that the entire company is worth just under $100 billion.

$5.6 billion of the proceeds will go to FB; the rest will go to selling shareholders–VCs and present/past employees.

overallotment

IPOs routinely line up commitments by sellers to provide an additional amount of stock for sale in the IPO if demand proves exceptionally strong.  In this case, FB has agreed to sell 6 million shares more, selling shareholders another 44.6 million.

why is FB going public?

In the Use of Proceeds section of the prospectus, FB says:  “…we do not currently have any specific uses of the net proceeds planned.”  The company also already has $3.9 billion of cash on the balance sheet.  So, why?  Two reasons:

–from Microsoft three decades ago, to Google, to Facebook and Linked In, tech companies have attracted highly talented workers despite relatively low salaries and the risky nature of any job with a startup.  In fact, prospective employees seek these companies out.  The financial motivation is the chance at a huge payout on stock options or restricted stock sold in a successful IPO.  The same holds true for venture capital investors.

So FB has an obligation–implied, or possibly specified in contracts with VCs–to have an IPO.

–ultimately the money will be spent on R&D, and to accelerate FB’s expansion to mobile devices and in markets outside North America.

expiring lockups

When they bought FB shares, venture capitalists may have agreed not to resell them until after the IPO.  Such agreements are called lockups. 

The selling shareholders have also made further lockup agreements with the underwriters not to sell more stock for specified periods after the IPO.

The clock starts ticking on them as soon as the IPO takes place.

–171.8 million shares become eligible for sale after 90 days

–another 137 million are freed up in the following three months

–another 235 million leave lockup in the six months after that.

The lockups mean holders can’t sell during the period the shares are restricted.  It doesn’t mean holders have to sell once the restrictions are lifted.

This is a glass-half-empty/glass-half-full sort of thing.  As long as the stock price is at least stable, history says few will feel rushed to sell once their lockup expires.

NASDAQ listing

Although Facebook picked a ticker symbol with two letters, something more closely associated with the NYSE (most NASDAQ stock symbols have four letters), it has chosen to list on NASDAQ.

One possible inducement for FB to choose NASDAQ–the exchange has just reduced the “seasoning” requirement for a new stock to enter the NASDAQ benchmark indices to a mere 90 days.  It seems to me that FB will become an index constituent as soon as possible.

This is important.  It means that every index mutual fund or ETF that tracks NASDAQ indices will be compelled to buy FB shares.  It also means that any active manager whose performance is measured using NASDAQ as a benchmark will have to think twice about “flipping” (immediately reselling) any shares garnered in the IPO.  In fact, if the manager takes a positive view on the stock, he may have to buy a lot more, in order to have a higher-than-benchmark weighting.

the IPO video

It’s part of the IPO roadshow.  Check it out.

More tomorrow.

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