저자: Kevin · 외국인
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UiPath 실적 후 16% 급락 후 하락. 재무 탄탄(현금·유가증권 약 16억 달러, 부채 거의 없음)하나 매출 성장률 약 8%로 낮아 PEG 2.4배, 기관 추정치 미달(3~4%), 라이선스 매출 10% 감소, 정부 부문(DOGE) 리스크 우려. 팔란티어 대비 성장성 부족으로 밸류 매력 낮음. 결론적으로 당분간 정부 계약 리스크로 추가 하락 가능성, 가격 회복 위해 상업 계약 가시성 필요.
다듬은 글
uip path was basically automation before we had artificial intelligence now I've been warning course members over the last few years that artificial intelligence is likely to replace a lot of the functions that uith has quite frankly done really well profiting off of but I have to say I wasn't expecting their stock to get hit this hard now I know Cathy wood has exposure to uipath so I thought today you know what let me take a look I know she just sold a little bit of uipath before earnings and now after earnings it's down quite a bit uh but it looks like your funds still have about two you know 1.75 to 2% exposure to it so I thought okay let's take a look at this let's try to understand what what there potentially is at UI path the first thing that I like to just understand is is there any potential technical trend on the chart and there's only one it's not great right now it's basically down which is unfortunate because you know it's wow I mean it basically never went up since the IPO in 2021 which which is quite shocking uh but anyway it's now down another 16% in after hours just under $10 here with uh some quick financial math on it based on current projected earnings we're looking at about 50 cents of uh earnings for January of 2026 so we'll call that our 12-month forward EPS projected growth now this is where the problem is projected growth for this company Wall Street is just not seeing the projected growth it's 12% next year 11% the year after that 1 .
56% the year after that if you add that together that's only 8.1% growth which puts them at about a 2.4 peg in other words fully valued at 10 bucks you know I usually go for about a 2 six Peg on uh on these companies price to earnings growth right then obviously that's just one metric it's not a foolproof metric so you know I'm trying to look and go okay well you know what are some potential upshots that we could look at here because when the stock Falls a lot I often do look at it I'm like H is there opportunity here you know it's sort of like what I do with house hack with real estate right it's I like buying good deals and I like buying stuff when it's distressed you know it's down and moldy and beat up and then I go fix it up yeah it's sort of a old school Warren Buffett strategy except I do it a lot with real estate but I look for the same thing in stocks too so I jump in over here and uh what do we got uh this is the balance sheet I have to say the balance sheet is great uh I mean just at a quick glance you know we have to go so ridiculously deep here because look what we've got I've got cash and cash equivs of $880 million if I add in the marketable Securities they have they have 1.6 billion dollar they've got lots of dollar hollas okay that's pretty good $1.6 billion now what kind of expenses do we have not that many because our current liabilities are about half of that but the vast majority of those $800 million in current liabilities are actually deferred revenues so they only have about $230 million in actual current expenses longer term debt is basically nothing I mean so say they have about 400 million bucks in expenses that means they have 1.2 billion of free cash with their founder returning they might actually end up figuring out how to be a turnaround story now they're competing with a lot of companies service now palent here Microsoft you know you have to know that uipath is exposed to Doge I mean who is it well I mean a lot of companies that spend money uh or or that advertise themselves to the government are exposed to Doge risks but I mean a company like uipath should be able to pull off some level of palerm which is hey look we will actually make you more efficient you know get rid of the inefficiency and use our software uh to help you become more efficient you know uipath used to sell licenses to basically use their software their uh you know sort of robotic process automation which now we just call AI or agent AI whatever uh they were kind of trying to be you know automate your back office work before AI anyway uh you know they could if they strategically set this up use that as a selling pitch at least my opinion uh but what we've got uh is a disclaimer in their 10K worth paying attention to but in their 10K they make it very clear to you if you haven't noticed it yeah we currently sell and anticipate to continue to sell to the US federal state and local and foreign government customers uh obviously these are highly regulated and come with their own uncertainties they don't even mention Doge yet because Doge wasn't a thing yet in the annual report and usually in a quarterly report you're just not going to get those sort of disclosures you kind of have to go back in time uh and in their earnings call today they kind of refuse to break out how much of their revenue comes from the government so it's a little hard you know that creates some uncertainties all right how much revenue is coming from government how much comes from the private sector really no their license Revenue which is where they have phenomenal I I mean absolutely tremendous margin is a place where Unfortunately they let's put it this way they had the largest sales decline so it's something to pay attention to I pull it up again here I want to try to figure out what I did with that page it's all right we'll pull it up in just a moment here uh but anyway so we're going to grab their latest uh press release here and in that last press release what you're going to find is that they have almost pure profit on license sales the problem with their license sales is they're down 10% year-over-year now their SAS sales so basically just paying on a monthly recurring basis or even an annual contract basis is up 22% which is great but that comes at a higher cost a higher margin so or sorry a lower margin higher expense so we could see that uh in their last letter right here so let's jump into uh their docks here here we go we've got uh total Revenue therefore averaged out to about 5% we have an argument that they expect volatility because of macro uncertainty which you don't usually want to hear especially when your estimates are already on the Lower Side quote over the last several weeks we have seen an increasingly Global macroeconomic uncertainty or level of uncertainty particularly in the US public sector and this uncertainty is reflected in both our fiscal first quarter and full year outlook okay now this is important because when they say spec you know particularly the US public sector I honestly think there's a chance they're kind of getting gutted by Doge and they're trying to innovate right they're really trying to step up and get into the AI agent space it's one of the reasons they acquired Peak AI limited which is basically a company that just creates AI you know agent service for the manufacturing and product optimizing business okay fine fantastic but let's actually look at some of the numbers here on the quarterly figures so on a quarterly basis again you see that the license sector is where they have like 99% margin it's great it's sort of like cool here's a copy of the code enjoy there's really nothing to it on the sasp is you know you're maintaining servers and maintenance and updates and all that so you have significantly worse margins here they're still good but if you look at this portion that's growing licenses aren't what's growing it's actually a potentially a risk factor now the expenses are only somewhere around 20% so it's not that big of a deal but I mean that's kind of normal for SAS but what's important in my opinion to remember about the SAS business is when you buy the license you own it the you own the product the company gets the big margin boost done when you go SAS there's a greater chance or risk that somebody just takes their data and says hey I'm going to go try paler and they end up switching products so it seems like you know uipath is really sort of like a company that's left behind until they can really prove some Innovation here now one of the issues with this is I listened to the a part of their earnings called I didn't listen to all of the earning call because it was still in progress So I listened to the portion and the portion I listened to is they said that they're building momentum on generative AI but that they don't expect that to contribute much to their 2026 revenues and then I'm thinking man I think yall are just unfortunately falling behind like you got to step it up here to get get moving here uh their estimates for 2026 missed by 3.8% could be a doge issue their annual occurring revenue forecast for 2026 missed by 3% uh and uh it seems like their net revenue retention rates are not exactly where wall Street's hoping them to be and there appears to be some cautiousness on artificial intelligence and and this is what you know the stock market right now how uncertain it is it wants confidence in AI you know and in order to really instill confidence you have to have a good product and see the way the Market's trading right now is if you have a great product and your revenues are growing you can prove growth stock starts moving up then retail notices you and then your stock goes up even more you know paler I mean let's look at the valuation for paler right now because paler has a cash War chest as well uipath and paler both have a cash War chest the difference is really coming down to growth rates and valuations remember I said this company's growing at you know somewhere around 8% which is on the low side for growth paler on the other hand uh has forecasts at least these are wall stre expectations of much more growth in fact it's kind of interesting when you compare paler to uipath paler has 53 cents of earnings expected this company's 51 cents it's like they expect the same amount of earnings except uipath is trading for $10 and paler is trading for you know $80 is right now might be $85 I mean this this is so volatile but the growth trajectory for paler right now is 25% then 28% then 41% then 29% % you know those are four years right there divide that by four that's 31% growth divided by 8 you know we're talking about four times the growth at paler uh so paler that's the growth story and that's what I'm saying like once you prove a little bit of growth then retail sees you and goes I got have it and it's fine you know this is I'm not trying to bag on on paler I'm just saying like that's what moves stocks is growth uh evaluation doesn't so much matter you have to show growth missing growth is bad you you really got to beat here so maybe they can pull it off and and maybe hopefully they don't have too many government Cuts but they've really got to somehow get the commercial contracts going because I don't think they can keep relying on the federal government so a little bit of a risk that they're getting doed maybe they can figure out how to really advertise one of their new products but their advertising s like their their sales and marketing numbers are actually down if I look at paler trading with what do we got here uh 31 times growth 85 bucks divided by 51 they're trading for 166 times * 31 you know they're trading for a 5.3 Peg they're trading for twice the valuation that UI path is already adjusted for growth right already adjusted for growth they're trading for five times uip path not adjusted for growth they're trading for you know two times right or sorry um am I getting this right hold on adjusted for growth let's let's let me clarify this okay adjusted for growth okay already on a PEG ratio basis paler is trading for two times the valuation of uipath on a not adjusted for growth basis uh uip path is trading with the same sort of Revenue I mean you could honestly just look at the share price here it's trading for about eight times uh as much as uipath so uh that's why I like looking look same EPS right uh different share prices $10 85 bucks one's trading for 8 and a half times as much but it's got so much more growth at paler and that's why we say paler is trading for Just Two Times the valuation of uith on that growth adjusted basis so there bottom line paler is twice as expensive now it's probably twice as expensive because it has the growth so it's sort of like a chicken or egg problem there uh and that's where I think if paler gets back to like 40 bucks you're actually buying the growth of paler at a UI path valuation somewhat interesting to look at but another thing to watch for is what's going on with sales and marketing so first if we look at them and then we'll compare to palent here if we look at their sales and marketing you could see right here sales and marketing declining uh and this is in the year-over-year for the quarter but not for the year basis right so on the 12-month basis their marketing is up 713 12- month basis they're up 3.5% on a year-over-year on the quarter basis they're down 8% so why all of a sudden are we looking at an 8% haircut in marketing is there sort of a lack of potential confidence I don't know if you go over to paler for example paler is still you know at least for Q4 showing commercial and government revenue growth of course the government revenue growth could get hit especially with the 8% Department of Defense Cuts year over year over year it's one of the reasons actually paler started sliding a little bit from their $120 value ation when they were trading for like a npeg uh but if we go to some of the financials here look at paler sales and marketing see they get it that in order for your stock to Skyrocket you need to plow money into marketing because you want to show growth it like these companies basically it's growth at all costs like people don't care if you make money look paler at you know three cents in the quarter what they want is growth they want this number up and look at that this is what's sexy to Wall Street okay you get in here and it's like oh yeah give me 652 versus 4997 oh my gosh my calculator says 31% growth and we're going to project that out for the next four years oh it's so nice that's what kind of gets the stock going and they know that so usually when sales and marketing goes down it's a sign that maybe they don't have cohesion on their product on their messaging yet Palante here when your marketing goes like let me let me rephrase that if you have a good product today okay let's say you have these two coffee mugs all right this one says Tesla we know how to Brand it this one we don't know how to Brand it yet see it's a clean slate CU we don't really know what our product is yet yeah we help you automate your back office okay what does that mean uh well we have all this old stuff figure it figure out what your product is and and then start spending money on marketing paler is like yo we got to save you lots of money we got a brand all right sign me up so like obviously both of them are designed designed to try to save your money but I don't think path has their marketing figured out yet and I think that's why or their message and I think that's why their advertising s like their their sales and marketing spend is going down on a SAS business sales and marketing spend going down is usually not good you know that's obviously different very very very different from like an asset-based business like for example you know a real estate company you shouldn't have to spend a lot of money on sales and marketing like your sales and marketing spend should be zero basically because you take money and you deploy it into real estate like what are you marketing for uh so it should be very very low it's pot You could argue you know brand like lenar a home builder maybe you're advertising homes for for for lease or build or whatever fine there's always going to be a little bit but compared to a SAS business should be should be nominal SAS businesses on the other hand I mean look at paler you know what what do we got here paler their year-over-year growth uh for the full 12 months on marketing is 19% and their sales and marketing when I just compare the quarter year-over-year is 46% so they're actually accelerating their marketing spend going into the end of the year now maybe that was strategic and they're like hey man if the Market's going to tank in 2025 let's get the real pump in in in the December quarter which they got a fantastic pump you know great job I mean they make both of these companies make a lot of cash flow they're SAS businesses the question just comes down to what's a fair valuation for these companies paler selling rich but it has the growth and it has the retail momentum uip paath has no momentum I mean how much how much how many UI path shares sell in a day 50 million shares at $10 okay who cares that's like 300 to $500 million paler how many shares traded uh oh this is in a week yeah yeah this is in a week okay that's fine that'll give us something more consistent palente here I got 570 million shares at $80 that's a 47 billion dollars okay that means that's such a big number I'm like joking that's like 90x the trading volume right for every $1 that gets traded in uipath $90 trade at paler cuz like retail's nuts for paler everybody wants paler uh and and paler knows this and that's why they're spending more on advertising and so it's sort of this perpetuating cycle now if paler starts cutting sales and advertising or the stock Falls and and they you know they miss some of their growth they'll fall even more and more rapidly I personally think a fair valuation at these growth levels for paler probably closer to this 43 support line over here uh so like this growth here totally reasonable this right here was momentum driven and you can almost see it on like just by looking at the lines usually when we have a slope that's this steep it's momentum this could be fundamental right this is your more sustained solid growth uh it's sort of like with Tesla right so that's it's a momentum chart and it does tend to reverse over time whereas like you zoom out on on the NASDAQ for example you know you zoom out on the NASDAQ on the month it looks like a giant meme stock since the financial crisis uh but this looks a a little bit more normal I suppose you know because if we actually draw out oh look we have my long-term that's part of my Nike swo right here this uh this yellow line right here oh wow look at this let's drag that Nike Swoosh out just noticing that oh that put you about the mid fours to go revisit the the Nike Swoosh you know because there has been a little bit of extra Trump Euphoria built in on over here uh but that's okay so anyway my thoughts on uh some notes for for UI path I just saw they were down 16% I'm like hm you know is it a buying opportunity uh bottom line I I a they're probably going to get beat up because of government contracts for a while longer but I really need to see some like stickiness on a cohesive marketing message around a product that is great easy to understand easy to implement and then some traction I don't know that we have that right now
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