Lone Pine has $18.6 billion worth of assets under management. Currently, Priceline.com Inc (NASDAQ:PCLN) holds 6.74%, Dollar General Corp. (NYSE:DG) holds 3.87%, and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) holds 5.96% in Lone Pine’s portfolio.
Lone Pine adopts the investment strategy of “bottom-up stock picking.” Under this strategy, companies are analyzed on the basis of their performance rather than their industry or the macro-economic factors of the country to which they belong.
In this article, I have analyzed three top holdings of Lone Pine’s portfolio to identify the investing opportunity in each of these companies.
New product offering will boost revenue
With the rising demand in reasonably-priced products, Dollar General Corp. (NYSE:DG) is expanding with 365 new stores and relocating 550 stores in the U.S. by the end of 2013. This will include 20 DG mini-supermarkets, 40 DG plus-stores, and all others will be in the core DG format. Its total retail space is expected to increase by 7% from this expansion.
Under the expansion plan, the company has allocated $300 million as capital expenditure and $155 million as working capital investment. Expansion will result in the rise of the free cash flow of the company to $666 million by the end of this year from $536 million last year. The sales growth of the company is also expected to increase to 12.4% in the fourth quarter of 2013 from 8.5% in the first quarter of 2013.
Looking at the increasing demand of tobacco in competitors’ stores, Dollar General tested tobacco sales in its 50 stores of Florida. The stores reported sales of approximately 33% more tobacco than planned by the company. The average purchase of a customer was $14 in stores where tobacco was available, in comparison to $11 in stores where tobacco was not available. With the positive results, the company will be adding tobacco in more than 10,500 locations by June 2013 across the U.S. The company’s tobacco business is expected to generate $36 million in additional revenue by the end of 2013.
Higher revenue forecast
Credit: Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Marketers are now planning to target more on the mobile platform for their advertisements to reach larger masses. This will cause an upsurge in mobile advertisement rates, which will be positive for the company. Mobile advertisement revenue is expected to reach $14 billion by the end of 2014 from $7.5 billion in 2012. This will contribute around 27% of the total company’s revenue by the end of 2016.
More than 6 billion hours of video per month are watched on Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s video site, Youtube, globally. The company plans to monetize this opportunity by launching a pilot program for video content makers, which will offer paid channels on Youtube. This initiative aims at increasing revenue for Youtube and its content makers. Initially there will be 53 paid channels with average monthly subscription fees of $4 per channel. This program is expected to generate $1 billion of additional revenue through fees charged by Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) to content makers over three to five years’ time.
