저자: Tom · 외국인
요약 보기
결론: 빌 애크먼의 넷플릭스 지분 매수는 흥미롭지만, 발표자 본인은 현 가격에서 잉여현금흐름(FCF) 문제 때문에 투자하기 어렵다고 판단한다. 애크먼 매수 내용: 퍼싱스퀘어가 넷플릭스 310만 주(상위 20위 주주)를 매수했다고 트위터와 보도자료로 발표. 현재가 기준 약 12억 달러 규모, 자사 포트폴리오 5~6번째 규모. 주가는 전년 고점 대비 약 50% 하락한 상태. 애크먼이 든 6가지 매력 요인: 구독 기반 반복 매출, 최고 수준 경영진과 고성과 문화, 규모의 경제와 콘텐츠 품질, 소비자에게 주는 가격 협상력, 마진 확대 여력, 개선되는 잉여현금흐름 전망. 사업 구조: 구독자 수 증가와 객단가 인상이라는 두 축으로 매출 성장. 라이선스 콘텐츠에서 오리지널 콘텐츠 중심으로 전환하며 디즈니 등 경쟁 OTT 출현에 대응 중. 핵심 우려: 회계상 순이익은 크게 늘었지만 2020년을 제외하고 FCF는 매년 적자 폭이 커짐. 콘텐츠 투자 지출이 현금을 계속 소진하며 장기부채 증가. 주식 희석은 연 0.5~1% 수준으로 미미. 발표자 평가: 유튜브 모델(제작자 수익 55%, 구글 gross margin 45%)이 더 매력적이라고 봄. 넷플릭스는 가격 인상으로 영업 레버리지가 가능하다는 장점. 가치 평가 핵심은 구독자 성장률, ARPU, 콘텐츠 지출 대비 매출 성장 속도 비교이며, 현금흐름 전환 시점을 확인하기 전까지는 'too hard basket'(투자 보류)에 둔다. 넷플릭스가 스트리밍 전쟁에서 이길 가능성은 높게 보지만 현재 가격에서는 매수하지 않겠다는 입장.
다듬은 글
hey it's tom here and welcome back to the channel now uh just yesterday i was scrolling through twitter i am at tom investing on twitter if you don't follow me there already uh and i saw a brand new tweet from bill ekman bill ekman was saying we recently purchased more than 3.1 million shares of netflix which makes us a top 20 holder i've long admired red hastings and the remarkable company he and his team have built we're delighted that the market has presented us with this opportunity and then it gives a link to a press release from bill ekman's basically publicly listed fund pershing square holdings so this is a really big move from bill eckman bill ackman at pershing square runs a really concentrated portfolio if we look at his 13f we actually only see six holdings in the us at least that is and uh this 3.1 million shares of netflix that he's acquired would give him a stake of that at current prices is worth roughly 1.2 billion dollars and that would make it about his fifth or sixth largest investment it would be about the same size as his investment in howard hughes and it would be slightly larger than his fairly recent investment in domino's pizza so in this video i want to share some of the key points in the press release that accompanied this tweet from bill ekman around his five or six kind of reasons why he purchased into netflix in the first place and then i want to basically give you my view on the business and uh whether it is something that i would be interested in potentially investing in at the right price as well so if we jump over to the press release bill ekman uh lays out six what he calls highly favorable characteristics of netflix's business the first one being it's subscription based highly recurring revenue which have enormous future growth potential secondly a truly best in class management team and unique high performance culture consider netflix remarkable pivot from dvd rental by mail to video streaming to becoming one of the greatest producers of beloved content ever thirdly he lists economies of scale and superb quality and its industry-leading content which should continue to drive future growth and widen the company's powerful competitive moat uh next year less pricing power derived from the enormous value it delivers to consumers compared with other alternatives substantial margin expansion with opportunity for continued improvement due to economies of scale and the company's rapidly growing global subscriber base and finally and that's the point that i will definitely get into in this video an improving free cash flow profile which should allow for continued investments and growth as well as the return of cash to shareholders and bill ackman goes on to give some more commentary around when he first started researching netflix and how it's a company that he's kind of followed and admired from a distance for a while and how it kind of was linked up with his recent umg universal music deal as well so i'll leave the full press release link down in the description if you want to check that out but for the rest of this video i really want to focus on some of the key characteristics of netflix's business uh look at their financial performance and kind of give you my thoughts on this whole thing as well all right so in terms of netflix's business i really don't think i'm going to have to spend too much time explaining kind of what netflix does uh they are the largest you know subscription video streaming platform in the world and uh probably most of you watching this video are subscribed to netflix or um maybe someone in your family subscribed to netflix and you've got the login that does yeah that's an ongoing problem with netflix that we probably won't discuss in this video but i'm sure you all know what netflix is and um netflix has actually had one of the best performing stocks in the entire stock market over the last 10 or 20 years it's been an absolute home run uh you would be a very wealthy individual had you put a substantial amount of money into netflix maybe 10 years ago and the stock is actually down approximately 50 percent from the highs that it reached last year and this is kind of the opportunity that um you know eckman describes the market presenting him and it gave pershing square an opportunity to buy into netflix at what he clearly sees is an attractive price and in terms of the business model for netflix uh it's pretty straightforward equation basically you have a subscription product where people are paying you on a monthly basis and in order to grow your revenue you can either increase your number of subscribers or you can increase the average amount that you're charging each of your subscribers and in the case of netflix i'll put up some charts on the screen here where they have basically been been able to push up both of those levers over time it's allowed them to grow a much larger audience over time they have increased the cost that they're charging to their subscribers i'm sure that will continue to grow over time and it has really exploded the kind of revenue and net income for the netflix business and in terms of streaming at least uh netflix has had uh quite the transition over maybe the past four or five years they really started out with their streaming service as basically licensing content from other companies whether that's uh warner or disney or um whatever kind of other media company they're basically licensing that content to put onto netflix to show to their subscribers and they clearly still do a very large amount of that but over time they've started to transition more and more towards netflix original content uh whether that's creating their own movies or their own uh you know shows or whether that's you know stand-up comedy or whatever it is they've really started to build out their own uh basket of of netflix original content and i think that again is a trend we'll continue to see with netflix they're probably doing this for a couple of different reasons firstly uh it makes them kind of the master of their own destiny they're not at the mercy of a media company in terms of controlling the prices that they have to pay to actually get that content onto their platform and we've also seen uh many rival subscription services kind of pop up whether that's disney plus or an hbo service or discovery or any of these other kind of streaming services that now exist disney for example used to have a lot of content on netflix but that's now been pulled over the last couple of years um and any content that is kind of still on the netflix platform which i think there is still a small amount will eventually get pulled and will end up on you know obviously a disney plus server so in order for netflix to continue releasing new content and high quality content to their subscribers they've started to basically spend money on making it themselves now netflix clearly has a great product and a very sticky custom base and a growing customer base which i really can't see that that will stop growing anytime soon but uh the underlying business model has some really interesting kind of financial characteristics and there's a couple of reasons why i've always personally at least really struggled to get over the line with really being interested in making an investment in netflix and it's basically to do with the balance between sort of accounting profits and actual cash flows that are turning up in the bank and able to be you know return to shareholders and so on um if you look at the profit and loss and i guess the bottom line on on that profit and loss or income statement being the net income um netflix shows a lot of accounting profits and those accounting profits have really grown very very substantially over time i'll put a chart up on the screen here so you can see that but whenever you start to get into the value investing world and particularly if you go on to study warren buffett and some of his thoughts on accounting profits versus cash flow and so on uh what someone like buffett really cares about is something that he would describe as owner earnings so how much cash can i as an owner put in my pocket at the end of each year and you know redistribute elsewhere or spend or reinvest in the business or whatever it is he doesn't really particularly care what shows up on an income statement although that does obviously show him a lot of the key characteristics of how the business works fundamentally but what he really cares about is cash flow and if we look at the free cash flow for netflix that has really been negative for a number of years and it's actually been increasingly negative basically each and every year up until 2020 and the reason for that like i say is they're spending more and more money on content and creating their own big library of netflix original content and we actually really interestingly saw in 2020 when obviously the world was kind of shut down and there was a lot of restrictions around netflix even being able to make new content uh they really turned a lot of that spending off and we got a small glimpse at just how cash flow generative netflix can be if they really turn off that content production machine but the key question that uh we'll get into in this video is can they really turn that off can they really just stop making content or will subscribers slowly start to kind of turn off and cancel subscription if they're not getting a constant flow of new content from netflix and of course anytime you have accounting profits but you have poor free cash flow and you continue to have increasingly negative negative free cash flow you have to get that money from somewhere in order to continue creating this new content and keep spending so we've basically seen the long-term debt for netflix grow at a pretty substantial rate over time as well we haven't seen them issue a lot of shares they're not really diluting shareholders there's been maybe half a percent to one percent per year dilution nothing super substantial in that department but um you know you can only burn cash and borrow money for so long right so at some point you would hope that this will turn around for netflix and they're getting to kind of the scale at which they can start to have those cash flows move the other direction so yes we have great accounting profits we have a great growing user base but we really have a very poor cash flow profile and it was really interesting to see blackman actually mention uh you know an increasingly positive cash flow profile on netflix i i really am not quite across the line with them on that one just yet but um you know bill's a lot smarter human being than me and and maybe i'm missing something here so for netflix that kind of remains the big question for me is if they keep investing in new content really how durable are these assets and can they ever stop producing new content or is it going to be just an a constant you know outflow of cash in order to create new shows um you know there's certainly businesses that have kind of won at this game before and have spent a load of money on new content and got to sufficient scale for that to be a cash flow positive exercise disney obviously is a shining example of that but whether netflix can achieve that same kind of feat is just something that i really don't know the answer to um you know the the capital expenditure and spending on new shows to me it's kind of like the streaming equivalent of you know owning a rental property and putting really expensive paint on the walls and the question you have to ask when you spend money on that paint and make the house look a little fancier is is that something that's going to bring in you know more higher paying tenants over time or more subscribers to netflix over time or is it really just something to keep you know existing tenants and existing subscribers happy i don't i don't really know the answer to that and that's kind of how i think through it personally now there is another business in the kind of content and video game which has quite a different business model that i actually find a lot more attractive and that uh that business is what you're watching this video on right now which is youtube if we contrast the netflix business model with the youtube business model uh we find some really interesting things you know youtube basically doesn't pay for their content i make these videos for youtube and i i put them on youtube right and um that guarantees kind of a couple of things you have this endless stream of creators uh you know hoping to share their ideas or maybe make money off youtube and it ensures that the content's always relevant and there's always new videos coming out and um you know youtube basically doesn't have to do a lot in order to keep their content relevant and and have something kind of for everybody that that comes on the platform now youtube obviously pay their creators so um as a youtuber myself i get to keep 55 of all of the ad revenue that i make off of youtube uh which means that google or youtube keeps 45 so they have a gross profit margin of 45 now if you look at the gross profit margin for netflix they're actually um they've actually expanded that gross profit margin over time and they're actually getting pretty close to about that 45 number as well now with those underlying characteristics would i rather own youtube via google we can't own youtube directly unfortunately would i rather own netflix i would probably tend towards youtube although uh netflix does have you know the opportunity to have a little sort of operational leverage kick in you know if they can increase their subscription rates by five dollars a month for example um that's basically five dollars per subscriber that effectively goes directly to the bottom line maybe some of that gets spent on making again new content and it's sort of a never-ending cycle of no cash ever actually being produced in netflix i don't quite know um but that is a real key driver that uh netflix has over youtube i don't think youtube could really um shift that 55 giving given to creators down to 50 in order to increase their own margins maybe that is something they they will do at some point but i think netflix has sort of an easier time at least increasing prices and uh getting some operational leverage kick in so that is definitely something on the side of the netflix business model so for netflix it really is quite a simple equation they're going to need more subscribers they're going to need to probably charge more per subscriber over time and they're also going to have to be disciplined in terms of spending on content uh they are already at immense scale again i'll put their subscriber numbers up on the screen here um but there has to be kind of a certain scale at which the cash flow profile as blackman is kind of describing it here must move positive and uh for me if i were to try and value something like netflix uh those are some of the factors that i would consider i'd be looking for um you know what's the expected subscriber growth what's the expected uh average revenue that they'll generate from each subscriber and you know how sustainable are those growth trends and if i'm looking out maybe five years or ten years where do i really think that netflix can get to with that top line revenue and also you know how is the cash outflows grown over time in terms of what they're spending on new content will the revenue grow much faster than their content spending can they keep that kind of flat or growing a little bit and grow the revenue a lot faster and actually get to generating some real free cash flow or is the content spin just going to continue to follow the revenue growth forever and we never actually generate any cash those are the questions that i would be looking at answering if i was investigating netflix and uh you know you would hope that there's an inflection point somewhere if you go through that through that mental exercise and you figure out that netflix are going to need a billion subscribers and they're going to need to charge them 50 per month or something then you need to figure out whether you think those assumptions are reasonable and um unfortunately that's just not something that i've been able to get across the line with so this has been a super interesting move from blackman i genuinely think that netflix have a fantastic shot at kind of winning the streaming wars i think they probably already have to a large extent um and i think that if they can get to a state where they are generating real free cash flow they're going to be an extremely valuable company and blackman will probably do very well on this investment but um unfortunately it's in the too hard basket for me at least at current prices but um nonetheless super interesting one to follow and i do hope you enjoyed some of these thoughts in this video on netflix if you did please hit like and also subscribe to the channel if you're new here but that's it for me for this one and i'll see you in the next video cheers
Comments 0