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In the sixth issue of QGQ we feature articles, videos and letters from Charlie Munger, Fiduciary Management on PACCAR as a Quality-Compounder, Michael Mauboussin, Simon Steele of Fiera Capital, Lindsell Train, the ‘Pret Index’ on London’s Finance Hub 88% return to pre-pandemic norms versus NYC’s 55%, a Fundsmith letter with a post-mortem on Unilever + GSK Consumer, a Third Point letter on Amazon’s near doubling of fulfilment capacity in 2 years – plus articles on the unit economics of EV batteries and Spotify and 7 other articles.
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“That’s another thing that’s coming: we have a new bunch of Emperors and they’re the people who vote the shares in the index funds. Maybe we could also make Larry Fink or the people at Vanguard Pope? All of a sudden we’ve had this enormous transfer of voting power to these passive index funds. That is going to change the world and I don’t know what the consequences are going to be but I predict that it will not be good. I think the world of Larry Fink but I’m not sure I want him to be my Emperor.”
“The company reports three principal segments – Truck, Parts, and Financial Services…In 2020, Truck and Other were 71% of sales and 37% of pretax profit; Parts was 21% of sales, 49% of pretax profit…Although the truck industry is cyclical, PACCAR has been profitable for 82 consecutive years…the parts business has grown at a 6% CAGR over the last 15 years and should continue to grow as PACCAR increases proprietary content on trucks and enhances the distribution network. Ultimately, we believe PACCAR is a quality compounder at an attractive valuation and have added to our position on the stock’s weakness.”
“Superforecasters and successful investors share a lot of the same qualities. They seek to anticipate outcomes in a probabilistic world by understanding what has happened in the past, properly updating their views to reflect new information, and working hard. These skills do not come naturally to many, and the research suggests that how we think is more important than what we think. Beyond a commitment to learning and engagement, superforecasters share some common characteristics (see exhibit 2). It takes little effort to see how these concepts apply to investors.”
“We would suggest that Value, which is a very broad cohort and needs to be treated carefully, might not perform as well as some might expect in this environment. Value, while broad, does carry a high share of low return, highly levered, mature and cyclical stocks. And large swaths of ‘value’ do face structural challenges in their ability to drive acceptable economic profitability…Furthermore, stocks that have higher leverage and require external capital are much more susceptible to higher interest rates through costs and increased competition for capital. From a financial perspective our companies are in the main self-funding, more profitable, less levered and are better able to deal with higher rates or tighter capital conditions.”
“It’s not often that you get to buy shares in a high-quality company at the low end of its valuation range ahead of a meaningful reacceleration in growth at a 30%-40% discount to its present intrinsic value with an almost unlimited runway of potential to compound in value…long-term secular growth drivers for the company—cloud adoption and eCommerce penetration—remain firmly intact…Fixed cost leverage should improve after a large investment cycle that effectively doubled the fulfilment capacity of the company over the past two years.”
“A very important aspect of the rationale for investing in this smaller and more rarefied category is the fact that alcohol brands with a premium or luxury positioning tend to be highly differentiated, with a greater ability to increase prices over time than a “value” or mass market brand – even in downturns or periods of turbulence. Over time, these inflation-busting protective qualities usually result in considerable value creation: in January this year, against a backdrop of a sharp increase in input cost prices, Diageo reported increased operating profit margins – crucially, driven by price increases rather than cost savings – and indicated an expectation of operating profit growth of between 6 and 9% to 2025. Such an outlook would not be possible without a portfolio of beverages enjoying substantial pricing power.”
“London’s financial districts are getting busier and busier as life returns to normal in the capital. That’s reflected in sales of Pret A Manger Ltd coffee and sandwiches, which last week soared to a pandemic high in the City and Canary Wharf. Transactions are 88% of pre-Covid-19 levels there, according to Bloomberg’s Pret Index. The figure puts banks’ return-to-office efforts in London well ahead of New York’s, with Pret’s sales in the cluster that includes Wall Street standing at 55% of pre-pandemic levels last week.”
“If Unilever was to improve the performance of the GSK business which it simply had to in order to justify the price to be paid this can presumably only have come from one or both of two sources: raising profit margins and/or accelerating revenue growth. Reckitt Benckiser’s OTC Health business which is similar to GSK’s had margins of 21.8% in 3Q21 whereas GSK’s are 25.9%. There does not appear to be much scope for improvement in the profitability of the GSK business.”
“The British circulated counterfeit bills by providing Patriot deserters and British loyalists with counterfeit bills to spend at local businesses. Britain’s counterfeiting operation became so large and successful that the penalties for counterfeiting were significantly escalated. American officials put out bounty rewards for counterfeiters, and in one case a deserter from Pennsylvania’s 8th Regiment captured with counterfeit bills was sentenced to death by George Washington. Britain’s counterfeiting successfully devalued America’s currency and provoked inflation. As shown below, the U.S. Consumer Price Index hit 13.4% in 1778 and remained above 10% from 1777 through 1781.”
“In the end, much like the Holy Grail, the quest to identify ‘Holy Compounders’ is an elusive goal. But given the potential these companies have to generate value over long periods of time, this three-step evaluation framework provides guideposts for separating expensive, speculative investments from those with the ingredients of genuine compounders.”
“If all we cared about is money, which it is not, for anyone who knows me – but okay we’re a company so let’s just simplify it down to that. Then would we want people to use the services more? Yes. But then you get to the second question which is ‘does getting people agitated make them more likely to use the services more?’ And I think from looking at other media in the world, especially TV, there’s the old news adage ‘if it bleeds it leads’ and I think there are a bunch of reasons why someone might think that kind of provocative content would be the most engaging. But what I’ve found is that what grabs someone’s attention in the near-term is not something that they’re going to necessarily appreciate having seen or going to be the best over the long-term. What a lot of people get wrong is that I’m not building this company to make the most money or to get people to spend the most time on things for the next quarter or the next year – I’ve been doing this for 17 years at this point, I’m still relatively young and I have a lot more that I want to do over the coming decades.”
“Healthcare companies are leveraging advances in technology—like miniaturized electronics/semiconductors, biosensors, algorithms based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and cloud-based software applications— to make smarter and smaller medical devices. This digitalization of devices is transforming medicine, enabling earlier diagnosis and better treatment of disease.”
“Components outside of the cathode make up the other 49% of a cell’s cost. The manufacturing process, which involves producing the electrodes, assembling the different components, and finishing the cell, makes up 24% of the total cost. The anode is another significant component of the battery, and it makes up 12% of the total cost—around one-fourth of the cathode’s share…Although battery costs have been declining since 2010, the recent surge in prices of key battery metals like lithium has cast a shadow of doubt over their future.”
“This micropayment structure is different from what the recording industry experienced a generation ago.When somebody bought a CD in 1999, they were essentially paying an upfront cost for a lifetime of listening, according to Eric Drott, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Butler School of Music.That cost is now being split up over months, years, and decades, each time somebody streams a song. Giant record labels like Sony, which are conglomerations of many other record labels, have such a huge portfolio of artists and songs that the micropayments add up to a lot of money. Private equity firms that have purchased music catalogs have also found the structure appealing.”
“On Saturday, as Rubio was drafting his bill and brave Ukrainians held off Putin’s armoured columns on the outskirts of Kyiv, the BBC were televising the highlights of that day’s football (soccer) matches. First up was Burnley and Chelsea. Although you may not have heard of Burnley (a small town in the old industrial north of England) you will know that Chelsea is owned by the Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich. Banks of largely home supporters held blue and yellow banners aloft to mark their “solidarity” with Ukraine. This collective “virtue” was then rather undermined by fond chants of “Roman Abramovich” from the Chelsea faithful, grateful for the hundreds of millions he has lavished on the club and the success it has brought the club on the field.”
“Asset owners and investors also assign different relevance to specific ESG factors, with the greatest attention paid to environmental factors and governance; social factors tend to be less relevant (see Figure 3). While governance in general is highly relevant, it’s difficult to pin down at the specific factor level. In practice, ESG factor measurability also varies widely, with some factors more easily measured—a key consideration for asset and wealth managers when prioritizing which factors to emphasize.”
“‘I don’t know how it survives such an obvious example of its inconsistencies. There’s already a growing backlash. And yet another thing happens and everyone looks closely and they’re like, ‘None of this makes sense’…’What was sold as a panacea already seems to be nonsensical,’ said Fancy. ‘ESG was ready, this is your moment ESG. But where is ESG?'”
“The mechanism used by differential privacy to protect privacy is to add noise to data purposefully (deliberate errors, in other words) so that even if it were possible to recover data about an individual, there would be no way to know whether that information was meaningful or nonsensical. One useful feature of this approach is that even though errors are deliberately introduced into the data, the errors roughly cancel each other out when the data is aggregated…This is best explained with an example. Suppose we are interested in the relative performance of two big-box rival retailers: Home Depot (abbreviated below to “HD”) and Lowe’s. Given data on many individuals’ locations, one can then count how many of those people visit stores owned by the two companies…”
“For the vast majority of companies, the bulk of their emissions fall into Scope 3…It’s intuitive that this should be the case for data and technology companies with no manufacturing footprint (Experian, for example, calculates that just under 95% of its emissions are Scope 3) but in fact the same is true even for producers of physical goods. Remy Cointreau thinks that Scope 3 accounts for 73% of its total emissions; Diageo 86%, Heineken and Burberry each say 90%, Pepsico 93% and Unilever puts the figure at a whopping 98%.”
© Quality Growth 2021