저자: BillAckman · 외국인
요약 보기
결론: 빌 애크먼은 JC페니 투자 실패를 회고하며 경영진 교체·이사회 정렬·리테일 테스트의 중요성을 강조했을 뿐, 특정 자산의 향후 가격 방향은 예측하지 않았다. [투자 배경] JC페니는 112년 된 미국 리테일 기업으로 전성기가 25~30년 전이었고, 투자 당시 주가는 80달러에서 약 20달러로 하락해 영업이익의 약 4배에 거래되었다. 애크먼은 16% 지분을 보유하고 동료와 합쳐 26%를 확보해 이사회에 참여했으며, 보유 부동산 약 1억1,200만 평방피트가 핵심 자산이었다. [경영진 영입과 전략] 이사회는 CEO 후계자로 애플 스토어를 설계한 론 존슨을 영입했다. 존슨은 약 1억 달러의 제한주식을 포기하고 회사 측 보상과 자기 자금 투자 조건으로 합류했다. 존슨은 약 10억 달러의 비용 절감과 약 6억 달러 규모 비핵심 자산 매각을 추진했다. [실패 원인] 존슨은 할인 쿠폰 중심의 가격 정책을 폐지하고 정가를 낮추는 방식을 전국적으로 한 번에 도입했으나, 쿠폰에 익숙한 고객이 이탈해 약 12개월 만에 고객의 약 1/3을 잃었다. 영업 레버리지가 역방향으로 작용해 대규모 손실이 발생했고, 취임 15개월 만에 교체되었다. [교훈과 리스크] 이사회 내 의견 불일치, 실패 데이터에 대한 과도한 확신, 지역 단위 테스트 없이 전국 확장한 점을 교훈으로 꼽았다. 출연자는 향후 이사직은 11인 중 하나보다 명확한 권한을 가진 위치가 낫다고 말했다. [출연자 전망] 애크먼은 리테일 비전 자체는 여전히 유효하다고 보지만 실행이 어려웠다고 평가했고, 존슨은 다음에는 더 나은 CEO가 될 것이라고 언급했다. 특정 종목의 1~3개월 방향 예측은 없다.
다듬은 글
So, what have you learned from the successes and then maybe what have you learned from the ones that haven't been successes? You know, again as I said at the beginning, experience is making mistakes and learning from mistakes. And unfortunately as students you haven't made many mistakes yet. If you know, you've gotten to Oxford at this point in your career, the biggest risk is you probably haven't screwed up a lot.
And so, you know, the risk of that is when data comes across your desk that's inconsistent with you being successful, you're less likely to pay attention to it than if you've made a few mistakes. So, I encourage you to make some mistakes. Um and uh actually I I've made plenty of over the course of my career and I think I've been very successful uh over time, but it's not been a straight line up.
In fact, I had if if I were a stock, it would look something like this after business school, you know, and then and so the concern is whether this is coming, you know, but but so far, you know, we we you know, the overall trend has generally been positive, but you know, there there are certainly bumps along the way.
And uh J.C. Penney is a company uh that we invested in that we knew on the way in was a much higher risk situation than a Canadian Pacific. J.C. Penney for those of you not familiar is a 112-year-old American sort of iconic retailer that's certainly way past its prime. It probably peaked 25 or 30 years ago.
Again, another example, you had James Cash Penney who founded the company. He died I think in the early '70s and there's a pretty good correlation between when the founder goes and when the company goes. Um and part of that has to do with governance, which is a a topic I'm sure we'll get to. Um by the time we invested, J.C.
Penney stock was down from 80 to about $20 a share. Uh it was trading at about four times operating income. It had lots of assets lying around in the company that were non-core assets. It had a very bloated expense uh base and it was generating very little sales per square foot. It was a very underachieving retailer.
And part of that is the brand had become somewhat tired and they had gone to a very highly discount oriented model where they'd mark a a dress at $40 and they wouldn't sell any at that price. And a week later they'd mark it to 20 and they probably wouldn't sell many at that price. And then they would send you a coupon where you got $10 off and then it start to sell a few.
And then if you used your credit card you got $4 off and if you bought this moment you got another $5 off and eventually it was, you know, eight bucks or whatever and they sold a lot of them at that price. And um but this was undifferentiated merchandise. And the thesis was um this company has actually still a brand while faded uh restorable.
And uh because they were created over the last 112 years, they actually own about 112 million square feet of some of the best real estate in the shopping mall in the shopping malls uh in the shopping uh real estate industry. They own or have very long-term leaseholds at very low rents. We said, "Look, this is a great platform to rebuild the company." And we bought a 16% stake in the company.
Uh we I was invited to join the board. I I joined the board with uh a friend who bought uh 10% along with us. So, we owned together 26% of the company. We both joined the board. We were two of 11 directors. Um and the CEO was 64 uh and uh the board was very much focused on succession as any board should be generally, but particularly when their CEO's in his mid-60s.
And uh we helped the board with succession and there was a candidate uh that kept surfacing as the best guy in retail. And this guy's name is Ron Johnson and he had an ideal background. He didn't go to the Oxford Business School, but he Said, he went to Harvard Business School. Uh and he graduated and went to work for Mervyn's.
His dream in life was to reinvent the department store. And Mervyn's was kind of a dying department store. It was acquired by Target. So, he spent a few years at Mervyn's. He spent 10 or 11 years at Target, which is probably the best run US discount department store. And then he was hired by Steve Jobs uh to build the Apple Store from a blank sheet of paper and he did an absolutely incredible job.
And we said, "Look, you couldn't ask for a better background to do what we're trying to do here, reinvent the department store, um combine the Apple customer store experience with uh you know, kind of some of the Target uh brand excellence and cost management." And the problem was recruiting him. He's very happy living in, you know, Atherton, California.
He had uh three 400 million dollars restricted stock in Apple, 100 million of which he was going to lose if he left. And he had kids who were in, you know, 13, 15 years old in the middle of their, you know, the time when parents don't like to move. But I managed to convince him to take the job and uh he walked away from 100 million restricted stock.
Uh we gave him 50 million to make up for it, but he still took a loss when he took the job. Then he invested 50 million dollars in seven-year options that he bought with his own money that he couldn't sell for six years. I thought this is the absolute perfect thing. We have the best guy. We got a great platform at a really cheap price.
We have the perfect alignment of incentives and I thought it's done. But it didn't work. But it didn't work. And uh and so Ron got started in November of uh 2011 and he proceeded to make a series of changes. Um many of them very favorable. Among them, he took a very hard look at the cost structure and found about a billion dollars that he could take out of the cost structure of the business.
We took a hard look at all the non-core assets and we monetized about 600 million dollars of the non-core assets. So far, so good. And then he launched a business plan to convert the J.C. Penney store into basically a mini shopping mall, uh a Selfridges type model where there were a series of uh brands, each of which would have their own kind of presence in the store and then you'd have a consolidated checkout, you know, with a wireless experience and sort of this Apple-like uh customer service experience.
And he sold this idea to brands that heretofore wouldn't be willing to go into J.C. Penney. And the guy's very charismatic. It was a great idea. He had a whole bunch of brands that he got from around the world who were excited about opening up inside J.C. Penney. And he went to work. But he made one very significant strategic strategic mistake.
This whole notion of what he almost called fraudulent pricing, this overpricing an item and then marking it down and marking it down and coupons. He said, "Look, this is a waste of time. Let's just mark it at the price. The consumer knows the fair price. Because when you looked at those $40 dresses and $40 shirts, they all sold it for something like $12.30 but you got on average and very little sold at any other price.
He said, "Let's just mark it at 12 bucks. The consumer understands value. We can save a huge amount of, you know, the company had spent an enormous amount of man-hours actually changing signs. If you think about how often they're constantly repricing and reticketing and changing signs. I mean, the stores look really cluttered.
And you know, it sounded like a brilliant idea. And Apple, the Apple experience was not about testing. So, instead of trying this out in one or two stores or in a region, he rolled it out across the country. And it failed. And the customer who had become accustomed to getting coupons in their Sunday circular, all of a sudden coupons weren't there.
And so they decided not to come and we lost about a third of our customers after about 12 months. And the great thing about a retail business if you get it right is this business has enormous operating leverage, right? Because you've got a substantial fixed cost base, but once you start generating additional sales, it almost all drops to the bottom a lot of it drops to the bottom line.
Well, you know, only problem with leverage as you learn in business school is it works in reverse. And so all of a sudden the company was losing huge amounts of money after having spent a ton of money on capital rebuilding and redesigning these stores. And we found ourselves in a turnaround 15 months after he was hired.
And we had to replace him. And the lesson? There are many. Um so, number one, this was what I call an extreme makeover of a company. And when you do an extreme makeover, it requires perfect board alignment uh and backing for the CEO. And uh we didn't have that. Number one, we were one of 11 directors on the board and there was still a uh while it had it worked perfectly from the beginning, it wouldn't have been a problem.
As things got dicier, there was a divergence of opinion on the board of what to do and when to do it and who to hire. So, I think that's one interesting lesson. I don't think I'll ever go on a board and be one of 11 anymore. I like going on with a mandate like in Canadian Pacific. Um two, you know, I think Ron is an incredible talent, but I don't think like the students in the room, uh he'd never made a mistake before.
And I think it was as the data kept coming back, you know, Ron still had a lot of confidence it was going to work and you've got to back your CEO and give him and give him and give him rope. And I think uh Ron will be and I think he'd say this today, he'll be a much better CEO the next time because having had a big negative experience like this.
I think third, retail is one of the businesses where you can really test, right? You can take a region, you can take a store uh and you can try things out and rejigger them and test them. And I think uh you know, the Apple experience, Steve Jobs was all about the customer doesn't know what he or she wants.
I know what the customer wants. And and Steve Jobs, you know, got it right. I think in retail, you know, there's a kind of a saying, "The customer knows what he or she wants." And I think you really have to listen to that. Um so, while I actually I I still love the vision for J.C. Penney. I think it was right.
I think the execution was difficult. Um and uh you know, to do something like that and also in the public domain, right? This is a major change and the company was constantly being harassed by the press and Ron was attacked. I think it makes it difficult to make decisions in that kind of a public
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