Pershing Square Holdings Ltd, an investment management firm, published its fourth-quarter 2020 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A net return of 70.2% was recorded by the fund for the year-end of 2020, outperforming its S&P 500 benchmark that delivered an 18.4% return in the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Pershing Square Holdings, in their Q4 2020 investor letter, mentioned Agilent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: A) and shared their insights on the company. Agilent Technologies, Inc. is a Santa Clara, California-based analytical laboratory instrument manufacturing company that currently has a $38.9 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, Agilent delivered a 7.76% return, impressively extending its 12-month gains to 76.64%. As of April 01, 2021, the stock closed at $127.69 per share.
Here is what Pershing Square Holdings has to say about Agilent Technologies, Inc. in their Q4 2020 investor letter:
“Amid a challenging backdrop, Agilent’s highly resilient performance throughout 2020 demonstrated the durable and high-quality nature of its business model. Despite the impact of the COVID crisis, the company generated positive revenue growth and improved profitability, with 1% organic growth and 20 basis points of operating profit margin expansion in fiscal year 2020.
The company was able to achieve these results without furloughing a single employee. The resulting organizational stability allowed the Agilent team to remain focused on customer-centric initiatives and new product innovation to drive market share gains. For example, the company launched several new instrument lines designed to improve throughput for high volume testing in the pharmaceutical end market. Likewise, in its CrossLab services segment, the company is capitalizing on the trend of labs increasingly outsourcing multiple services to a single vendor, and has recently won several large, lab-wide, enterprise service contracts.
The pandemic provided the company with a timely opportunity to accelerate its digital transformation. Agilent quickly adopted online engagement channels and digital tools to remotely respond to customer service requests and sales inquiries in a timely and reliable manner. This online service approach yielded record high customer satisfaction scores. As the business emerges from the pandemic, we expect Agilent to remain committed to its digital transformation as it not only supports a higher standard of customer engagement, but also allows for more efficient internal operations and cost savings.
In December, Agilent held an Analyst Day to highlight the acceleration in the company’s long-term revenue growth outlook and margin expansion opportunity. Management significantly raised its guidance from its Analyst Day, and the company is now targeting long-term organic growth of 5% to 7%, and margin expansion of up to 100 basis points per annum. Agilent’s strong business momentum was clearly reflected in its most recent quarter, where the company delivered 11% organic growth and an impressive 260 basis points of margin expansion.
We believe that Agilent will be a more profitable and competitive company post COVID-19.”
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Our calculations show that Agilent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: A) does not belong in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, Agilent Technologies, Inc. was in 45 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 39 funds in the third quarter. Agilent delivered a 7.76% return in the past 3 months.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 231.2% between 2015 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 126 percentage points. We know it sounds unbelievable. You have been dismissing our articles about top hedge fund stocks mostly because you were fed biased information by other media outlets about hedge funds’ poor performance. You could have doubled the size of your nest egg by investing in the top hedge fund stocks instead of dumb S&P 500 ETFs. Here you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
