So you're gonna have your ups and downs in the short and medium terms thanks to interest rates, thanks to fiscal policies, thanks to a lot of different factors, macroeconomic factors, recessions and so on. But guess what? As Peter Lynch once said, we've had historically 13 recessions and we've had 13 recoveries out of those recessions.
I'm Mary Long and that's Motley Fool, senior analyst Yasser Elchemy. If a growth stock gets cut in half, is it on sale or just less expensive? Ricky Mulvey caught up with Yasser to discuss the macro landscape for high growth companies, a mission critical software company now treating at half its IPO price and a rocket maker with galactic ambitions.
When others get fearful it's time to do something, I forget the rest of the quote. Anyway, joining us now to talk about some strong, growthy companies in a down cycle is Motley Fool's senior analyst Yasser Elchemy. Thanks for joining us on this journey.
Hi Ricky, good to be here. When I think about investing in super growthy companies, I almost think of it as like a venture capital approach. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, so our Motley Fool co-founder and chief rule breaker David Garner has in fact almost coined that term of a VC approach towards public investing. In that approach you look for young, innovative, relatively small companies with massive runways for future growth, great products, invested leadership, and ideally a purposeful mission.
Ideally, also you want to have your portfolio reflect your best vision for the future, and that's kind of like even when you see in the VC world where a lot of investors tend to back companies that they feel strongly about, you may want to also do that with your own personal investment portfolio. One thing we have to keep in mind, also with the VC style of investing, is that VC investors tend to hold their investments over very long periods of time, and even tend to upsize their stakes in those companies that show themselves to be resilient and successful. So as David Garner would say, you should add to your winners, what are your flowers and trim your weeds?
I'd also say that the VC's tend to have a couple of big winners that make up for, in a lot of cases, the majority of losses. When it comes to my style of investing, I like to have a mix of things. Do you go for this high growth approach for all of your stocks?
No, I don't. You're absolutely right by the way that only a few of the companies that you'd invest in using that VC approach would work out. Most of the companies that you'd invest in may not generate the kind of returns you were hoping for. However, over a very long period of time, those companies, those investments that do work out and those companies that do perform are going to generate hopefully the kind of returns that should more than make up for any losses you've incurred, holding those, let's call them weeds for now.
But back to your bigger question, which is kind of investing strategy here, I would say that the rule-breaker style of investing or the high growth style of investing that I follow does not represent the entirety of my portfolio. I tend to try and invest across many different strategies as someone who thinks of investing in terms of decades as opposed to years. I do lean more towards the rule-breaker style of investing because I know that I have the stomach to hold those companies over very long periods of time and stomach the volatility. But not everybody can do that obviously. It's a really hard thing to do. But even so, even if I can't stomach those kinds of churns, those kinds of gyrations and those stocks, I still like to hold companies that are more stable or established. They own my fair share of what I consider to be balanced growth companies, small mid cap profitable growth, even value sometimes.
So I don't say that I'm an ideologue when it comes to investing philosophy. Being an ideologue and an investor seems to not work out for many of them. Being a growth investor was much, much easier a couple of years ago.
The aphorism don't fight the Fed is carrying out right now. As earlier this week, while the Fed signaled that it's going to pause its interest rate hikes, the risk-free rate of return right now is above 5%. Feel free to disagree. But I think this matters for growth investors because not caring about Fed actions was a lot easier a few years ago. And now it would seem that growth investors have to pay a lot more attention to it.
Yeah, you're definitely right. I mean, if you just take a look at Twitter and in bull markets, everybody's a growth investor. In bear markets, everybody wants to park their cash in the bank, just get that interest or even go after dividend paying stocks. But here at the fool, we are fundamental bottoms up investors. We'll like love to look at companies. And we think that fundamental company performance is the main determinant of returns over time.
So you're going to have your ups and downs in the short and medium terms thanks to interest rates, thanks to fiscal policies, thanks to a lot of different factors, macroeconomic factors, recessions and so on. But guess what? As Peter Lynch once said, we have had historically 13 recessions and we've had 13 recoveries out of those recessions. And if you zoom out and do not get consumed by the headlines of the day, you're likely to do well over time.
As long as of course you put all of your energy and focus into selecting companies that you fundamentally believe in that you think can outperform the market and make money over time. So let's dive into some of those growthy companies that have been hit, not just Carvana, one of them that you brought to the table is Confluent ticker CFLT.
This is one that has been cut in half since its IPO, despite a bump on surprising earnings. This is a tricky company to describe even from watching YouTube videos and tutorials about it. So to set the table, what does this company do? Yeah, you wouldn't be the only one to have difficulty to kind of fully understand what they do.
So think of the movie, everything everywhere, all at once. Before Conflent, companies used to collect data, store it either in data center or on premise or in the cloud, and then analyze it and act on it. Conflent founders, they thought that system was inefficient, slow and full blind spots. And so they invented Apache Kafka, which is an open source data streaming platform that lets you move and process data in real time.
Now, as soon as data is received from the source, it is immediately transmitted across the entire tech stack of the business, analyzed by all applications and software programs and acted upon again in real time. Now Conflent as a company was built to fully maintain, manage and improve on Apache with what they called Conflent Kafka. So let me give this analogy and maybe this is one that only train enthusiasts can fully appreciate, but I'll make it anyway.
If Apache was a train cart that moved products from point A to point B, Conflent is a whole rail network with autonomously driven trains that takes stuff everywhere all the time. Now, companies of course have the option to use the open source Apache Kafka version, but they will unfortunately need to maintain or dedicate many members of their IT team to operate and sustain that program. And that takes them away from doing the kind of work that they can actually be valuable to the company's core product or value added. So the ROI for many companies using Conflent Kafka is significant as it cuts down on these operating expenses by a large margin.
So I know the train analogy, the train network, the train cars, data and motion, I'll pretend that I got it, but what's a real life example where one might see Conflent's technology and action? So actually chances are you have used the technology even though you may not have actually realized you are using the Kafka technology, but one good example of that is Instacart.
The service like Instacart needs to have real-time visibility and instantaneous analysis of everything that's happening all the time. Where the shoppers are at all times, what products are they collecting, what products are missing and therefore they need to suggest replacements for and give customers a time estimate for the order arrival and so on. That's just one example. Another example is if someone uses your debit card in an unusual location for an unusual purchase or withdrawal, the transaction can immediately be flagged as fraudulent. The bank puts a hold on the card. It notifies you. All of this happening instantaneously and across the board.
Another example could be a stock exchange where millions of buy-in cell orders are constantly flowing through and you need to execute in those in the most efficient and transparent manner possible. And so we'll find like a stock exchange like you're next, for example, in Europe deploys the confluent Kafka technology. So I could go on, but Kafka is essentially what enables a lot of this real-time action and it quickly becomes mission-critical, not just a nice to have software. It's when you don't have time to go back and forth from database to action with whatever that action might be in a stock exchange, inventory at a grocery store for Instacart or debit cards when someone's using it in an unfamiliar place.
I want to talk about the financials a little bit with Confluent because I like it has high-inside ownership. That's good. It's a sticky product. That's mission-critical. That's good. But it also loses gobs and gobs of cash. And it's latest quarter. It's operating loss about equal its total revenue. And this seems to be a habit of having a massive operating loss. Maybe it's because Confluent gives out a lot of free software. What's it need to do to be profitable?
Well, you're absolutely right. They have been burning through a lot of cash. But it's important to put things in context.
嗯,你说得完全正确。他们一直在烧掉大量的现金。但是把事情放在正确的背景下是非常重要的。
First, I would say that Confluent is still a relatively young company less than 10 years old. And even within those nine years of existence that they've been at, not even fully nine yet. But even during those years, they've started out with a Confluent program, which is an on-premise offering.
And they've moved from that to Confluent Cloud, which is a hybrid or cloud first offering that any company can use. And so they're still kind of introduced, still in the part of introducing the market to what this product is and the full capability of how this product can be used to transform the business and give good returns on investment.
So understandably, they have prioritized growth over profitability in this young age. Now, secondly, the company has shown it understands that the 0% interest rates are not coming back anytime soon. And the time has come to prioritize self-funding.
And so they've guided towards reaching adjusted EBITDA profitability this year and positive free cash flow next year. All while growing sales by nearly 30% year over year, they have been also rationalizing their workforce, optimizing their sales, focusing on high return projects.
And some of their expenses have been going towards going to prospective clients, demonstrating what Confluent can do for their business and signing them up. That is still important, but not maybe top of the list anymore. And maybe some of the existing big clients can provide higher profitability for Confluent. And that's what they're going to prioritize.
I got two pushbacks for you. From the latest call CEO, Jay Krepp said quote, the Confluent has less than five Kafka engineers on call for tens of thousands of production in Kafka clusters. That gives us a cost structure for operation that we believe is a 1000 times better than our customers end quote. So it seems like they're being efficient on labor costs from the call.
But I haven't seen that reflected in the company's operating margins. And also, while the company is young, it's already had a huge adoption cycle more than more than half of Fortune 500 companies use Confluent software as of 2021. So that's one reason I'm a or two reasons I should say I remain a little skeptical and hesitant.
So let me start with the last part of your question first about the use the wide adoption of Kafka. Now it's important to actually kind of make clear that when we say that 75% of Fortune 500 companies use Kafka, they're in fact using Apache Kafka, which is the free version, the free open source version of the software. So this in fact gives Confluent an opportunity to sell them on its flagship product and move them into that self-managed or fully automated, I would say, data streaming platform that Confluent offers.
Now, you know, they actually estimate their total addressable market at $60 billion, whereas in fact, their trailing 12-month sales came at just over $600 million. So, so, you know, a lot of green growth left. Now, going to your first question about their operating expenses, I would say that that's not managing the data streaming platform has not been where Confluent expenses have gone.
They've gone mostly towards building servers, for example, which is part of the value proposition that they're offering to their prospective customers. When you go to a modern enterprise that has potentially hundreds of different servers with dozens of tech staff, IT staff, who is literally manning the data streaming platform, the Apache Kafka, the open source version, and you're telling them, you don't need to worry about any of this.
You don't need the servers. You don't need, you know, most of the IT people to dedicate all of their time and energy towards, you know, managing this platform. We will do all of this for you from the back end. So, the value proposition here is very clear to prospective customers that the total cost of ownership here, the return on investment from migrating towards the Confluent product, the fully automated managed product is going to actually save them a lot of time and a lot of money.
你们不需要服务器,也不需要大部分 IT 人员将全部时间和精力用于管理这个平台。我们将从后端为您完成所有这些工作。因此,对潜在客户来说,这里的价值主张非常明确,即采用 Confluent 产品进行迁移的总拥有成本、投资回报将通过完全自动化的托管产品节约大量时间和金钱。
So, that to me is definitely one of the strong points that Confluent has. Let's move to a bleeding edge tech company or more bleeding edge, which is Rocket Lab USA. This launches satellites and is working on a neutron rocket. It is a space startup that went public via SPAC.
Unfortunately, that gives me vibes and memories of Virgin Galactic. What does this company do? What's the case for Rocket Lab? Oh boy, you don't want to be in the same sentence as Virgin Galactic, if you're a space company. I personally have never understood the case for space tourism.
I mean, who would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to fly just to the edge of the earth and come back down in a few minutes, but I'm probably not the targeted audience here.
我的意思是,谁会花费数十万美元飞行到地球的边缘,只为在几分钟内回来呢?但我可能不是这里的目标受众。
Yeah, so Rocket Lab is not one of those companies. Yes, it came public via SPAC and that will forever tarnish any company that that ever did so after the painful experience of 2021-2022. But, you know, I think there is something here.
This is a company that is focused squarely in the commercial government and research space use cases. It has a long and flawless record of successful rocket launches. It has plenty of serious customers including NASA, the US Space Force, and many universities and communication companies across the world.
So, you know, why do I think it's a good investment? Well, you know, the company is fast becoming another top dog with SpaceX and the commercial space industry. Launching rockets carrying satellites and returning them successfully is not easy as it sounds. It is literally rocket science.
We have had and we have seen so many field launches by so many new entrants and new comers into this space, including the likes of relativity space, firefly, astrospace, and I could go on even SpaceX. They just had a field launch with their starship a couple of weeks ago. So, rocket lab can in fact be proud of its pristine launch record here.
Second, I would say that we have we actually have a global shortage anticipated global shortage of launch capacity in the coming years. We may currently have over 100,000 licenses obtained to launch satellites in into space, but nowhere near enough capacity to get them there. And that is even if we assume the likes of blue origin and united launch alliance will be successful to get their rockets off the ground and back safely.
So, you know, finally, you know, just looking even at the numbers, I could tell you that the consensus analyst estimates on S&P cap IQ are for sales to quadruple over the next five years and for rocket, rocket lab to become profitable in two years.
那么,你知道,最终,即使只看数字,我也能告诉你,S&P cap IQ上的分析师共识估计是,Rocket Lab在未来五年内的销售额将增长了四倍,并且在两年内将实现盈利。
I can also tell you that when I build my model, lower assumptions and those but the analysts have, I find the shares to offer plenty of upside opportunity. And just one thing I keenly look for in rule breaker type high growth investments is that I want to find them at evaluation that is reasonable against expected future earnings and less than 10 times 2026 EV EBIT multiples for such a high growth and young company with clear competitive advantages. Sounds good to me as a patient long term investor. So much has to go right, of course, for these earnings to flow through and for this investment to be successful. And that's why, you know, trust in management, product and business strategy becomes key. But of course, things could go wrong like with many of these kinds of companies. Yeah, I'm really knocking on wood after you said flawless launch record and clear something up EV to EBIT basically means the enterprise value of the company, how much it's worth compared to the company's earnings before interest in taxes.
我还可以告诉你,在建模时,我发现股票提供了大量的上涨机会,只要我的假设比分析师更低。在寻找规则突破类型的高增长投资时,我特别关注合理估值相对于预期未来收益和不到2026年10倍EV EBIT多重的股票。对于一个高增长且年轻的公司来说,具有明显竞争优势,这听起来对我这个有耐心的长期投资者很有吸引力。当然,这需要很多事情顺利才能实现这种收益,投资才会成功。因此,信任管理、产品和业务战略变得至关重要。但当然,像许多这样的公司一样,事情也可能出错。是啊,在你说毫不出错的发射记录和清晰的EV to EBIT之后,我真的在敲木头。EV to EBIT基本上意味着企业价值与公司利润前利息和税收相比。
Startups are great, but it seems like size matters in this case can rocket lab reasonably compete against the aforementioned SpaceX against Boeing, which builds jet engines as well. Yeah, well, size does matter, but not in the way you think. This field has been dominated by very large rockets carrying very large payloads. SpaceX is a top dog here. No question about it.
Rocket lab, however, has carved a niche of launching reusable small rockets because they cost less to launch and are faster to schedule for takeoff. The electron has a sticker, which is made by Rocket Lab, has a sticker price of $7.5 million compared to SpaceX's Falcon 9, which will cost you $60 million. That's a big difference.
Also, Rocket Lab, unlike SpaceX is a one-stop shop for most space needs, including satellite building, components, software, operations command center, radios and solar panel systems, etc, etc. And this is why we have seen defense companies like Lockheed Martin, placing orders with Rocket Lab for these kinds of systems.
You know, in defense, the ability to launch quickly is critical, and Rocket Lab can offer that thanks to its three launch pads, including in New Zealand, where there are fewer airspace restrictions on launches than here in the US, and because they can, or they're working towards refurbishing the rockets and launching them pretty quickly soon after.
Finally, Rocket Lab is working on neutron, which is a larger rocket capable of carrying up to 13,000 kg payload into the lower Earth orbit, 2000 kg to the Moon, or 1500 kg to Mars and Venus. It should also be capable of human space flight, but the primary goal of this one is to compete with SpaceX on launching very heavy satellites and mega constellations of satellites.
Paragraph 1: One potential yellow flag about Rocket Lab that our colleague Alex Friedman brought up is that it has some, like, pretty poor reviews on Glassdoor, I think just 50% of the employee base would recommend working there to a friend. Is that a yellow flag for you? So, yes and no. I mean, it definitely gives me pause.
Paragraph 2: When I look at Glassdoor for ratings, I do obviously want to see the higher ratings, more positive ratings for the CEO, for the company culture, and so on. But it's not the complete picture. Again, if we take a step back, here we have a management team that hails from a fairly impressive group of companies and organizations, including General Dynamics, NASA, SpaceX, Broadcom, Airjet, Rocket Island, among others.
Paragraph 3: We also have very strong ownership by Cion Founder, Peter Beckwell, around 11.5% of the company. And even more confusingly, when you look at other company review websites, in this case, comparably, for example, they have much higher scores. So they give a CEO rating of 90 out of 100 and, you know, executive rating of 75 out of 100.
Paragraph 4: So it's kind of a mixed picture. I would say where it comes to these websites can never really tell how accurate they are, what methodology they're using. And therefore, I just want to kind of like follow closely and see what's going on there. And if there's anything to that.
Paragraph 5: But ultimately, you know, if you are working in the space industry, if you're in the business of making rockets, you're probably overworked, you're probably working log hours, very high chances of failure, very cutting-edge research projects you're working on. So I can imagine it be a stressful environment. Yeah, a lot of the complaints are about overwork, work life balance, that kind of thing. And I'm not trying to sound cold or dismissive, but like I don't see how you I don't see how a space company has run without just an absolute maniac in charge. And I'm not accusing Peter Beck of being a maniac, but I think you will wear that badge with honor.
Paragraph 6: Fair enough. Let's do a quick, quick check on the numbers before we wrap up. Rocket Lab is unprofitable on an operating business and launching rockets, sure sounds expensive. You mentioned that they can reuse some engines, but is that enough of the story for this company to scale into profitability?
Paragraph 7: Yeah, so just to be clear, they have not started reusing their engines. Just yeah, they have run tests to check whether they can. And so far, they report that they have been able to to get their engines to work after they have landed back on earth. But yeah, see, I think he raised a very important point here, which is kind of the profitability or like they're off for this business and operating basis.
Paragraph 8: Again, like Confluent, like I was saying was Confluent earlier, this is a relatively young company, still long path of growth ahead. And for this business to generate a lot of operating profits, it's going to have to first launch more rockets more frequently reuse the missiles, including the engines, become a vendor of choice for most space needs. And more importantly, it's going to need for the new neutron rocket to actually work.
Paragraph 9: One of the worst things that could possibly happen, and for this company and for this as an investment idea is for the neutron to fail. If that was to happen, that's that's going to be a serious blow to this company's balance sheet and future prospects. Now, zooming out beyond operating expenses, we should see CapEx peaking this year as a lot of the spending on new manufacturing facilities, new launch pads, and the neutron program kind of is undertaken and we get to towards the end of that.
Paragraph 1: Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day. It's Monday, October 25th, and we're discussing the space industry. I'm your host, Mary Long, and I'm joined remotely by Motley Fool contributor Yasser El-Shimy.
Paragraph 2: Yasser, thank you for joining us today to talk about the space industry. Can you give us an overview of what's been happening in this sector?
雅瑟,感谢您今天加入我们谈论太空行业。您能概述一下这个行业最近发生了什么吗?
Paragraph 3: Sure, Mary. It's been an exciting couple of years for the space industry. A lot of private companies are getting involved, and we're seeing more innovation in this field than we've seen in the past fifty years.
Paragraph 4: One area that's really taking off is satellite launches. Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab are all offering cheaper and more frequent launches than traditional government contractors like United Launch Alliance.
Paragraph 5: Another area of interest is space tourism. Virgin Galactic is a notable company in this space, but we're also seeing companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX express interest in this area of business.
Paragraph 6: Another thing to keep an eye on is SpaceX's Starlink project, which aims to provide high-speed internet to rural and remote areas around the globe. This project has already launched over 1,500 satellites and plans to launch as many as 42,000.
Paragraph 7: In addition to these companies, we're also seeing more traditional defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman get involved in the space industry.
Paragraph 8: Overall, there's a lot of excitement and innovation happening in this sector, and it's definitely an area that investors should be paying attention to.
总的来说,这个领域正在发生很多令人兴奋和创新的事情,这绝对是投资者应该关注的一个领域。
Paragraph 9: Thanks for joining us today, Yasser. It's been great having you on the show to talk about the space industry.