4. Visa Inc (NYSE: V)
The payment technology company Visa is among Ken Fisher’s favorite stocks. His hedge fund held a position in Visa since 2012 and the firm added to its existing position during the first quarter. Shares of Visa rallied only 3% year to date amid investors concerns over global traveling and tourism outlook.
Wedgewood Partners, an investment management firm, highlighted a few stocks including Visa in the first quarter investor letter. Here is what Wedgewood Partners said:
“Visa payment volume recovered along with consumer spending habits, finishing up +5% during the December quarter; but it skewed heavily toward online purchases, particularly with debit. Historically, Visa has had a meaningful portion of its volume derived from higher-yielding credit card spending related to cross-border travel and entertainment (T&E). As many countries maintain closed borders, Visa’s cross-border T&E segment has stayed depressed. However, we expect this business will rebound as borders inevitably reopen to COVID-19 vaccinated populations. In the meantime, we trimmed Visa to help fund a re-established position in Booking Holdings, which should disproportionately benefit from the aforementioned reopening as well.”
3. Amazon.com, Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN)
The world’s largest e-commerce platform Amazon.com, Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) is weighted around 3.96% of the overall portfolio at the end of the first quarter. The firm has been holding a position in Amazon since 2011. Shares of Amazon underperformed since the beginning of this year.
Polen Capital expressed its views about Amazon in the first quarter investor letter. Here is what Polen Capital stated:
“We purchased Amazon in February 2021, which accounts for 5% of the Portfolio’s weighting. For most of the last decade, Amazon did not meet our guardrails. We also did not have enough visibility into future free cash flow margins to indicate that the company would sustainably meet our guardrails and, relatedly, if valuation supported the double-digit annualized returns we seek. We now believe we have that visibility.
In 2008, almost all of Amazon’s revenue and operating profits came from its e-commerce business. Amazon Prime and Amazon Web Services (AWS) were new and relatively small back then. The company had roughly 5% operating profit margins overall, entirely from the e-commerce business. In 2009, the company began harvesting its retail business profits to accelerate investment in its distribution and logistics infrastructure globally and very heavily build out and scale AWS data centers.
The company’s return on equity began to decline at that time and turned negative for three full years from mid-2012 to mid-2015 (margins and free cash flow declined similarly). So, beginning in 2010 and continuing to mid-2018, Amazon’s business was outside our guardrails. We chose to stick to our guardrails and not own Amazon.
Amazon’s profit drivers have changed quite dramatically over the years. Starting in the back half of 2018, Amazon came back above our hurdles. Revenue generation overcame ongoing heavy investments in areas such as delivery infrastructure, data center infrastructure, and shipping.
Our research suggests that today, after considering cost allocation, Amazon’s underlying profit drivers from higher-margin AWS and Advertising could grow much faster than its low-margin e-commerce business (excluding Prime), its historical driver of revenues and operating profits.
Amazon Prime, AWS, and Advertising together account for only about 20% of revenue today, but we believe over 150% of operating profits. Looking forward, growth of higher-margin businesses means Amazon’s total margins and profit dollars could rise quite dramatically.
It is important to note that Amazon proved to be an exception to our guardrails. Based on our experience, very few companies that remain outside our guardrails for an extended period operate from a position of competitive strength but rather, from a position of competitive pressure. Today, we feel we have better visibility into the future earnings growth and margins from AWS and Advertising and believe these could drive 30%+ annual earnings growth for the next five years. Even with significant P/E multiple compression, we would still expect double-digit investment returns.”
