Category Archives: margins

Jim Paulsen on the US stock market

September 11, 2015 By in Constructing a Portfolio, Current Market Thoughts, inflation vs deflation, Inventory Cycle, margins, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action, stock market, Strategy Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Yesterday’s Financial Times contains a guest column by Jim Paulsen, strategist for Wells Capital, a part of Wells Fargo.  I find Mr. Paulsen’s work to be orignal, thoughtful and, for me, thought-provoking.  On the other hand–a warning–he and I share the same generally optimistic view on markets and have tended to agree on most basics.

Here’s what he has to say:

–the current market swoon may have been triggered by worries about the Chinese economy, but its real cause is to be found in the dynamics of the US economy/stock market

–US stocks were, and still are, trading at an unsustainably high price-earnings multiple.  The final bottom for stocks in this correction will be around 1800 on the S&P 500, or about 3% below the low of a few days ago.  That’s where stocks will be on a more reasonable 15x PE

–full employment in the US, i.e., where we are now, creates a series of problems for the economy and stock market.  Employers wishing to expand are forced to find new workers by bidding them away from other firms.  Since inflation in advanced economies is all about wage increases, poaching creates inflation.  In the short term at least, a higher wage bill means lower margins–and therefore lower profit growth.  The Fed responds to the inflation threat by raising interest rates, which exerts downward pressure on PEs

–investors don’t get this yet.  They’re “more calm and confident than at any other time in this recovery.”

–the combination of high PE, higher interest rates and slowing growth mean that equity investor focus will shift from the US to more fertile fields abroad.  These areas are more prospective because, unlike the US, they don’t face the need, caused by achieving full employment, to rein in the pace of domestic economic growth. I presume, although Mr. Paulson isn’t more specific, that this means the EU (it may also mean US stocks with high exposure to non-US economies).

my thoughts

Mr. Paulsen is in touch with institutional equity investors every day.  So he has a much better sense of the current thought processes of US professionals than I do.  He seems to feel his customers are only beginning to believe that the set of issues that come with full employment are at our doorstep–and are only now starting to discount them into stock prices.  Hence the correction.  While it’s risky to think you know more than the other guy–in this case, that the other guy slept through his elementary economics classes–I’m willing to go along and say it’s true.

Mr. Paulsen has previously made the point that interest rates are going to rise in an economy that doesn’t have much business cycle oomph left in it.  Therefore, he argues, past instances of cyclically rising rates, during which stocks generally were flat to up, may not be good guides to what will happen today.  I look at the situation in a different way.  If we ask where long Treasuries will be at the end of Fed tightening, the answer is that they’ll likely be yielding less than 4%.  If we think that the yield on Treasuries and the earnings yield (1/PE) on stocks should be roughly equivalent, then the implied PE on the S&P is 25x.

One might argue that the idea of the equivalence of earnings yield and interest yield arises from a long period in which Baby Boomers preferred stocks to bonds.  As Boomers have aged, that preference has reversed itself, meaning that yield equivalence between stocks and bonds may be too rosy a view for stocks.  If we assume that stocks trade at a 20% discount to this yield parity, however, the implied PE at the end of rate hikes is still 20.

Both results are a long way from the 15x that Mr. Paulsen proposes for the S&P.

It’s often the case that a significant drop in stocks often signals a leadership change.  I think it makes a lot of sense to reverse portfolio polarity away from an emphasis on earnings coming from the US to profits generated abroad.  How exactly to carry this idea out is the key, though.

 

 

why does Wall Street care about sales gains and not just earnings gains?

October 22, 2012 By in margins, Portfolio management, reasons analysts mis-estimate company earnings, sales/share vs. earnings/share Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

…after all, what ultimately matters is how much profit a company’s management is making for its shareholders, isn’t it?

Yes, and no.

two special cases

Let’s deal with two special cases before getting to the main topic.

–Investors who focus a lot of their attention on startups that are not yet making money will typically use sales growth as their major metric.  There are no profits yet.

–Value investors will be drawn to mature companies with lots of sales and little or no earnings because of their turnaround potential.  This is especially true if they can see other firms in the same industry who are comfortably profitable with similar levels of sales.

Neither is an example of the phenomenon we are now seeing as some companies report 3Q12 results.

strong earnings, weak sales

When earnings meet/beat the consensus estimates of brokerage house analysts–and sales don’t, the stock in question often goes down, sometimes by a lot.

Why?

it’s all about recurring earnings

1.  Investors typically look for recurring gains when they buy stocks, not one-off profits.

Consider this oversimplified example:

A company reports earnings per share of $1 for the current quarter.  If you know that this is all the profit the firm will ever make, then–assets (if any) aside–you won’t pay more than $1 for a share of stock.  (In fact, you’d probably pay less, since the $1 of profits is in the hands of management, not in yours.)

On the other hand, if you thought the company would earn $1/share every three months for the next ten years, you could be willing to pay up to $40 for a share of stock.

So there’s a huge difference between the value to investors of recurring and non-recurring profits.

2.  If a company reports higher earnings without what analysts consider an appropriate increase in sales, investors assume that the firm has achieved its profit target through cost-cutting of some type.  They argue, correctly in most cases, that the profit increase isn’t sustainable.

More than that, they view the slower sales increase as a leading indicator of slowing profit growth that will emerge in subsequent quarters.  They can see the train coming at them, as it were, so they don’t wait to get off the track.  They sell now.

Their picture is this:

Suppose the company has been spending $1 million a quarter on marketing up until now, but cuts the budget to $500,000 for the just-reported quarter.  That produces just enough extra margin that the company reports $1/share in earnings instead of $.90, thus meeting consensus eps expectations.

The worst case is that the reduced marketing is a mistake that will negatively affect sales and profits in coming quarters.  But even in the best case–that this is a true savings–the company can only cut marketing expense once.  

Yes, the company will also report an extra $.10 in eps for the next three quarters.  But that’s it.  This is really no longer a company earning $1 a share per quarter for as far as the eye can see.  It’s a company that’s earning $.90 a quarter + a non-recurring $.10 now and for the next three reports.

If you were previously willing to pay $40 for $1 a share in quarterly earnings, you should (at most) pay $36 for $.90 a quarter profits.  Add (at most) $.40 for the non-recurring earnings.

The main point is that cost-cutting has to end relatively quickly–and should not be mistaken for a permanent element of a company’s profitability.

3.  Some managements won’t be inclined to call attention to this information and will just show it somewhere in the financials (in the hope analysts won’t bother to read the fine print).  The cost-cutting could also be a bunch of little things, significant in the aggregate but not big enough individually to require disclosure.   If so, the slowdown in sales is the only clue to what’s really going on.

4.  For multi-line companies, the situation isn’t so simple. Sometimes, a firm may be phasing out a line of business where it earnings little or no profit, so it’s sales growth sags while profits advance smartly.  Here, “Shoot first, ask questions later,” may be the wrong strategy.  But it’s what short-term traders always do.  And, in my experience, “Shoot first…” is right more often than not.

the Intel (INTC) 3Q12 preannouncement: studying operating leverage

September 12, 2012 By in Constructing a Portfolio, margins, operating leverage, Portfolio management Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

the preannouncement

As I wrote about yesterday, INTC preannounced weaker than expected 3Q12 earnings.  The main culprit?  …worldwide general economic slowdown.

The company said it now expects revenues of $13.2 billion for the quarter, down by 7.7% from the $14.3 billion it guided to when it announced 2Q12 earnings two months ago.  The gross margin will come in at 62% instead of 63%.  Virtually all other cost items will remain the same.

looking at leverage

This isn’t much data.  But it’s enough for us to see two things about the company, manufacturing leverage and leverage on SG&A (Selling, General and Administrative) expenses.

manufacturing leverage

two kinds of costs

In the simplest terms, in every accounting period employees get paid and the accountants apportion costs for the use of the factory and the machinery in it, whether or not anything gets build.  So, in a sense these are indirect costs of manufacturing.  In the short run, they’re relatively fixed.

In addition, there’s the cost of the materials–electricity, gas, silicon, who knows what else–that get used up in making INTC chips.  These are direct costs.   Their total in any period is variable, depending on how many chips get made.

Accountants assign each chip a total cost that depends on two factors:  the out-of-pocket cash (variable cost) spent making it plus its share of indirect costs, a figure that depends on how busy the factories are.

gross margin

Total cost ÷ sales price = gross margin.

separating the two

Is there a way to find out how much of the total cost is variable and how much depends on how well sales are going in a given quarter?  In INTC’s case, yes.

Management has just told us that sales will be $1.1 billion less than anticipated and that this fact will lower the gross margin by a percentage point.  That’s not because the variable cost of making a chip has changed; it’s because the indirect (or fixed, or overhead) costs of running the factories are being distributed over a smaller number of chips.  (It’s a little more complicated than that, but not a worry in this case.)

Another way of saying this is that in order to get to the new, lower, sales and operating profit estimates, INTC has subtracted the sales price of the extra chips it won’t sell and only the variable cost of making those chips.  If we calculate the change in estimated gross profit and divide by the change in sales, we’ll get a variable cost margin for those “extra” chips.

Here we go:

$13.2 billion x .62  =  $8.18 billion in gross profit

$14.3 billion x .63  =  $9.01 billion in gross profit

The difference is $.83 billion, the gross profit lost from lower sales.   This gross profit   ÷ $1.1 billion in lost sales   =  75.5%.

Therefore, 75.5% is the profit margin from producing/selling an extra chip during the quarter.  That’s the manufacturing leverage INTC gets at current production levels for getting/losing additional sales.

Note, too, that the new operating profit is 9.1% less than the original estimate.  That compares with a 7.7% drop in sales.  So, while there is operating leverage in the manufacturing operation, but at current production levels it’s not huge.

SG&A leverage

INTC has two types of SG&A.  One is R&D.  The other is the typical SG&A that any industrial company has. The two items are roughly equal in size.  This quarter they’ll amount to $4.6 billion.

Let’s subtract that from both the original gross profit estimate and the new guidance.

$8.18 billion  –  $4.6 billion  =  $3.58 billion in operating income

$9.01 billion  –  $4.6 billion  =  $4.41 billion in operating income

Now calculate the percentage drop in operating income that our 7.7% decline in sales produces.

It’s 18.8%!

To recap, the 7.7% fall in sales produces a 9.1% drop in gross profits and an 18.8% contraction in operating profits.  Of the 11.1 percentage point differential, 1.4 comes from the manufacturing process, 9.7 from SG&A leverage.

In other words, the operating leverage at INTC is coming from SG&A, not manufacturing.  If INTC wanted to reduce costs in a way that would affect current reported profits the most, it would attack either R&D or “normal” SG&A.

profit margins: how I look at them

February 10, 2012 By in Constructing a Portfolio, economics, margins, Portfolio management Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

what they are

They’re the portion of revenue, usually expressed as a percentage, that remains after costs of s certain type have been deducted.  The most common types of margins used in financial analysis are:

gross margin, meaning what’s left after deducting the direct costs of providing the goods or services

operating margin, meaning what’s left after deducting both direct costs and sales, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses.  Sometimes depreciation is also considered an operating cost, sometimes not, depending on the convention being used.

pre-tax margin, meaning what remains after deducting all costs other than taxes

after-tax margin, meaning income remaining after all costs, including taxes–but not including preferred stock dividends, if any.

do high margins mean a good company?

Many growth investors, especially tech-oriented ones, look for high margins as proof that a company owns patents, copyrights or other intellectual property that defend it against competition.  MSFT or INTC might be good examples.

Low margins, these investors believe, are indicators that a firm is in a commodity business.  This means that competition forces revenues down to levels very close to the cost of production.  Profits accrue either to no one or mostly to the low-cost operator.  Entrants in such industries are continually in a dog-eat-dog fight to push their costs below those of rivals.  No one stays in the low-cost seat for long.

Value investors, with their customary dour dispositions, take the opposite view.  They think high margins are like waving a red flag in front of a bull.  Firms that demonstrate them are disasters waiting to happen.  Sooner than you’d expect, they opine, competition will emerge, margins will compress and the stock will implode.

I line up more or less with the value guys on this one, even though I don’t agree with them 100%.  There are some perennial high-margin firms, where competition hasn’t proved an issue over decades.  Nevertheless, it’s hard to argue that either MSFT or INTC have been anything but disasters as stocks so far in this century, despite their near-monopoly positions.

taking margins at face value is foolish, in my view

How so?

–If you assume that margins at any level are fixed, you’ll miss perhaps the crucial element in forecasting future earnings–operating leverage.  This is the idea that some costs are fixed and don’t rise in line with unit volume.  As a result, the expense involved in selling an extra unit may be much less than that of selling the average unit.

–Rising margins almost always do invite competition.   Companies like MSFT are the exception, not the rule, in my view.  In most industries, the best companies will reinvest much “extra” margin in lowering their costs, as a way of discouraging new entrants.

–High margins usually aren’t “free.”  Jewelry or furniture companies, for example, have very high margins.  But they have to maintain very high inventories, which they turn only once or twice a year.  That’s risky.  The high margins in these cases don’t signal “free lunch”; they signal risk.

–I think the distribution company model–low margin, high inventory turnover–is attractive.  Distribution companies can be very high growth, high profit firms.  They can also have lost of operating leverage.  WMT in its heyday is an example, as is any industrial wholesaler.  Anyone fixated on high margins will miss this important class of firms completely.

What do I use instead of margins in projecting the income statement?  I break down unit costs–labor, raw materials,…–as much as I can and forecast each.  Some are simple functions of unit volume.  Many, however, like advertising, administration, or sometimes labor, are relatively unchanged as volume increases.  That’s where operating leverage and earnings surprises lie.