Focusing On Revenue Is A Great Idea! But Do Not Forget About Stabilized Profit
I was feeling a bit sick this morning, so I stayed in bed and turned on CNBC. I NEVER watch CNBC, unless I am at home in bed sick. And it usually makes me feel worse. They were interviewing Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX ), who has clearly done a great job guiding that company. In 2005, Netflix did $682 million in revenue, and this past year, it did $5.5 billion in revenue. Quite an accomplishment. Yes, there are a lot of competitors out there, but he has clearly done a great job. So he was talking about how having negative free cash flow and very low profit is proof that the company is in this for the long run, and he is 100% correct. We are actually starting to operate our business the same way, as I said in a previous post about Dell’s new approach to growth. And this is exactly what you would want to see as an investor. HOWEVER, the problem with this is that most investors are not smart enough to do the trickle-down analysis of what this means. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN ) has the same issue, and it’s something I have lamented about over and over. What a good investor SHOULD do is analyze what the company would have made had it not reinvested. What would there profit be if the company stopped reinvesting and just operated normally for normal growth? That is exactly what you need to do to analyze the value of a business. Because at the end of the day, what is happening now is that with no profit and negative free cash flow, an investor’s eyes are growing wider and wider saying “The profit potential is infinite!” Clearly, it’s not infinite. Clearly, a company with $100 billion in revenue can’t make more than $100 billion in profit, which is also impossible. If Netflix, on a normalized basis, has 15% in profit, its $5.5 billion in revenue would lead to around $825 million in bottom line profit, and at 20 times earnings – which is high based on history, but we will give it that due to just me being overly optimistic – that’s a valuation of $16.5 billion. Now, I am not saying that its profit margin is 15%, because I know it to be. I am purely speculating. But Netflix is currently selling for a valuation of $47 billion. Hmmm. So, based on 20 times earnings, that’s a bottom line profit of $2.35 billion, which is over 42% margin. Not likely. The same goes with Amazon. In the company’s best year ever, it did 3.5% or so in bottom line profit margin. This last quarter, it made $75 million after making $500 million on its cloud-based AWS business, and that was on total revenue of over $25 billion. Not exactly something that I deem to be worth more than Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT ), which has almost $500 billion revenue per year. Either way, the point is that valuing something today for future potential is fine, but you also have to be realistic about it and realize that you have to let things grow into what you hope them to be, without overpaying today for that. Make realistic assumptions about their profit margins based on other businesses in their markets and their gross margins. It’s too easy to get stuck in a market like this assuming the best will happen, since it has for the last 6 years. It is a game of musical chairs, and when the music stops – which it will – don’t be caught looking for a seat.