Lakehouse Capital, a Sydney-based investment manager, released its “Lakehouse Global Growth Fund” April 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. It was a quiet month for global equity markets and the fund returned 2.8% net of fees and expenses compared to a 2.8% return for the MSCI All Country World Index benchmark. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Lakehouse Global Growth Fund highlighted stocks Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in April 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) provides consumer products and subscriptions. On June 8, 2023, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) stock closed at $124.25 per share. One-month return of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) was 12.69%, and its shares gained 13.32% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has a market capitalization of $1.275 trillion.
Lakehouse Global Growth Fund made the following comment about Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its April 2023 investor letter:
“Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) delivered a positive quarterly result with overall growth and profitability coming in ahead of expectations. Net sales increased 9% year-on-year (11% constant currency) to $127 billion and operating profits increased 30% year-on-year to $4.5 billion. In retail, growth proved resilient and it was encouraging to see operating margins for the North American unit turn positive for the first time since mid 2021 – coming in at 1.2% (or roughly 1.5% ex-restructuring). Even more encouraging, though, was Andy Jassy’s comments that they are confident they can achieve pre-pandemic operating margin levels of 4%-6% for North America with time. Looking forward, we continue to believe there is significant margin expansion ahead as cost pressures related to external macro factors, such as elevated shipping and fuel costs, and also lower productivity and efficiency continue to ease over 2023.
On the other hand, the outlook for the company’s second largest segment, Amazon Web Services (AWS), wasn’t so rosy. AWS grew 16% year-on-year to $21.4 billion, which isn’t terrible, but was a material deceleration from last quarters growth of 20%. Concerns were only heightened by management’s comments that growth slowed even further to 11% in April. As has been the case over the last few quarters, the headwinds were driven by enterprise customers seeking to optimise cloud spending and management reiterated that the slowdown is macro-driven. These comments are consistent with what we have heard from other cloud providers, and in our view, the current headwinds are more a factor of strong comparison periods and cyclical weakness, as opposed to any fundamental issues. Taking a step back, AWS remains the leading cloud provider (in what is an increasingly two-horse race with Microsoft’s Azure) and with 90% of global IT spend still on-premise there is still plenty of runway for future growth. At current levels, Amazon’s valuation at 5x gross profit is the most attractive it’s been since the GFC and we remain confident that patient shareholders will be treated well as the company is set to deliver many years of solid revenue growth and margin expansion.”
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is 2nd position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 243 hedge fund portfolios held Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) at the end of first quarter 2023 which was 240 in the previous quarter.
We discussed Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in another article and shared the list of tech stocks to buy according to billionaire Philippe Laffont. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q1 2023 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
