2. General Motors Company (NYSE:GM)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 77
Percentage Increase in Stake During Q4: 54%
General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) is a Michigan-based automobile manufacturer. Cooperman has owned the stock intermittently since the fourth quarter of 2010. At the end of December, his fund owned 750,000 shares of General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) worth $43 million, representing 2.2% of the portfolio.
Elite hedge funds are exceedingly bullish on General Motors Company (NYSE:GM). Among the hedge funds being tracked by Insider Monkey, Chicago-based investment firm Harris Associates is a leading shareholder in General Motors Company (NYSE:GM), with 33 million shares worth more than $1.9 billion.
Miller Value Partners, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned General Motors Company (NYSE:GM). Here is what the fund has to say about General Motors Company in its letter:
“Another name we’ve recently purchased and have grown incredibly excited about: General Motors (GM). GM is interesting on many levels. We see it as an attractive investment opportunity and it might be a microcosm of current markets, both past and prospective.
Tesla trounced GM over the last decade. Tesla rose 15,797% crushing GM’s 238% increase, which lagged the S&P 500’s 365%. Tesla came out of nowhere creating what many said was the best car ever made. A decade ago, no one saw that coming, including GM. GM’s historical strength led to arrogance. It completely dismissed the threat of any newcomer.
Where are we now? Expectations are entirely different. Tesla’s current price embeds 18 years of growth while GM embeds under one year (see a pattern in what we like?!). Tesla’s expectations look even loftier when you consider that in that 18th year, Tesla would be projected to earn $1.35 trillion revenues at very high, Ferrari-type margins. The largest automakers today generate roughly $250 billion revenues at less than half those margins.
Tesla’s priced to go where no man (or woman!) has gone before. It’s impossible for Tesla to meet these expectations with auto manufacturing alone. It requires something more. Bulls believe Tesla can dominate an autonomous driving future and make significant money on software subscriptions. We don’t have a view on this other than that Tesla needs to do so to be attractive at the current price.
Market expectations for GM, on the other hand, are muted. There appears to be no innovation or growth priced into the stock. Yet GM plans to launch 30 EV (electric vehicles) models globally by 2025 (Tesla has launched a total of 4). GM’s new electric vehicles, like the Hummer and Cadillac Lyric, are extremely impressive. It’s revamping its manufacturing production to be modular, allowing greater speed and adaptability. The entire culture has transformed from a stodgy, bureaucratic old manufacturer to a speedier, more innovative software-enabled automaker. GM currently employs 25,000 software engineers.
GM believes it can double revenues by 2030, and improve margins through software and services. GM currently earns $2 billion of high margin software and services revenue, which is more than Tesla. Cruise, GM’s majority owned autonomous company, recently detailed why it sees the potential for $50B in revenues within 6-8 years of its 2023 launch of the Origin vehicle. BrightDrop, its autonomous commercial vehicle unit, looks promising as well with the potential for $10 billion in revenues. We don’t think this optionality is reflected in the current price. Investors started to see the potential after GM’s recently analyst day. We can easily get values for GM more than double its current price of $58.
The contrast between GM and Tesla illustrates what we see more broadly in the market, which is why we see more opportunity in classic value names than in the secular growth names. After a decade of dominance, expectations for innovative and disruptive companies are quite high. Many classic value companies were caught flat-footed, but have invested heavily to catch up. Muted expectations don’t reflect their improved prospects.”