Although these companies are expensive for a reason — they offer some sort of brilliant technology or have cornered an emerging market — their financial metrics are, in some cases, quite literally off the charts.
There are many financial metrics that can be used to rate a stock as cheap or expensive. Some of the more popular ones include dividend yield, price-to-earnings ratios and price-to-book ratios. By virtually all of these measures, Netflix, Amazon and salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) are expensive.
Dividends are important
Dividends are the income shareholders get for being shareholders. Value investors like Buffett typically place tremendous significance on a solid dividend yield. About.com notes that, of the S&P 500’s compounded return from its inception in 1926 until September of 2007, 95% of that return would have been earned by reinvesting dividend income.
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) owns several dozen stocks, but nearly all of them pay a dividend. In fact, of Berkshire’s top 10 largest holdings, only one (DirecTV) doesn’t pay a dividend. However, neither Netflix nor Amazon nor Salesforce pay a dividend.
Netflix’s P/E ratio is 35 times the S&P 500’s
Based on Friday’s closing price, Netflix has a P/E ratio of 615.54. The broader S&P 500’s current P/E is 17.26. That means that Netflix’s P/E ratio is over 35 times greater than the broader market, suggesting that users have sky-high expectations for the company’s future earnings.
Of course, P/E ratios fail to tell the whole story. Since they’re based on the previous year’s earnings, they only give a snapshot of the past. The price-to-book ratio compares the current share price to the value of the company’s assets. Netflix has a price-to-book ratio of 13.51, compared to the industry average of 2.08 and a sector average of 1.70. Here again, Netflix’s investors are placing a large premium on the company.
Of course, Netflix’s absurd valuation statistics have grown as the company’s share price has increased. Over the last month alone, Netflix shares have rallied more than 92%. Much of this rally may have owed to short-sellers scrambling to cover their bets against the company; nearly 19% of Netflix’s outstanding shares were sold short as of mid-January.
At the same time, however, investors may be willing to pay absurd prices for Netflix shares as the company has an interesting story. As Internet video grows, more and more investors are coming to believe that, at some distant future date, cable companies will lose their stranglehold over content, and consumers will make a shift from cable to Internet services like Netflix.
Netflix remains the king of this emerging Internet streaming paradigm. Despite growing competition, Netflix has been able to continue adding subscribers.
Amazon doesn’t even have a PE ratio
Currently, Amazon doesn’t have a P/E ratio at all, since it doesn’t really have earnings; it technically reported a loss over the last 12 months. If one calculates the figure based on its last adjusted earnings report — $0.21 per share (multiplying that quarterly figure by four to project it out for an entire year) — its P/E ratio would stand at a whopping 311.
