Bill Ackman: an industry as certain as food and oxygen

요약 보기

Pershing Square가 유니버설뮤직그룹(UMG) 지분을 약 7.5%(공동투자 포함 10%) 매입한 배경과 투자 논리를 설명한 인터뷰. 핵심 결론: 음악 산업은 스트리밍 전환으로 성장 사업이 되었고, UMG는 고품질·고수익 독점적 지위 기업이라 가격 대비 손실 확률은 낮고 상승 여지는 크다는 판단. 투자 논리: 음원 저작권 소유자로서 스트리밍 구독료와 SNS(틱톡 등) 사용료 등 로열티 수익이 확대되는 구조. 장기적으로 음악 소비는 식량·산소처럼 확실하다는 주장. 재무 특성: 순 레버리지 거의 0(스포티파이 지분 감안 시), 높은 자본수익률, 예측 가능한 성장. 포트폴리오 변화: 자금 확보를 위해 애질런트(Agilent) 매도(2배 이상 수익), 다른 신규 매수는 없었음. 새로운 아이디어 검토 중이라고 언급. 부채 전략: 5억 유로 및 7억 달러 채권 발행(금리 낮음), 과거 발행 대비 스프레드 대폭 축소. 조달 자금으로 20% 이상 수익 기대 투자 가능. 마진 부채는 사용하지 않는다고 강조. 수수료 관점: 레버리지 활용으로 운용보수 부담을 상쇄하여 기초 포트폴리오 수익률을 사실상 수수료 없이 얻는 효과 주장. 리스크: 시장 급락 시 마진콜 위험을 회피하기 위해 장기 고정 부채 사용.

다듬은 글

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01. hello with me today i have star investor bill ackman ceo of ftse 100 company pershing square holdings hi bill thanks for joining me today sam good to uh good to see you now pershing square holdings has just taken a 10 stake in universal music group umg the music rights owner that's part of it spin out from vivendi um you're betting big on a single company what makes you so confident you'll make a profit on this investment sure just for clarification we actually purchased where holdings owns about perhaps seven and a half percent of umg the other funds that we manage on on the balance we raise the co-investment vehicle um but yes it's a large investment and we size investments based on our perception of both risk what's the probability that we lose money uh and what's the opportunity for gain and in this case we think at the price paid the probability of a loss for us we was about as low as we could calculate um and then on the upside case you know we thought there was a huge opportunity versus even everything else we owned so it had the most upside and the least downside again at the price paid and that made for a really attractive investment and the and what drove the the nature of this investment what makes it so appealing it's really the changes that have taken place in the music industry really over the last couple of a couple of decades but what you had is a business that was a pretty good business in the 90s that became a terrible business as music piracy theft basically killed the business uh apple began a recovery uh with the you know the you know i guess the ipod and then the iphone and the beginning of uh music uh you know digitization music that people would pay for but that was not a great recurring business really spotify to save the industry working with universal initially uh to build out a consumer offering that was appealing and uh it was so appealing that rather than steel music people signed up and paid the relatively modest uh you know a few dollars a month five six dollars a month for a family plan today you know globally that number's in the low single digits and some of the more emerging markets uh to sign up for a streaming account and it's really music streaming uh over the last decade and the lines crossed in early 2015 when the declines from the physical sales and downloads were replaced by revenue from streaming and when those lines crossed all of a sudden became a growth business as the streaming business became a you know substantial percentage of the revenues and it grew much more quickly and what you had was a kind of hits driven business where people would go buy a physical think cd um you know think of the logistics involved in delivering you know manufacturing the capital intensity that the physical delivery dealing with the inventories dealing with the returns trying to get it right versus the business of you know uh just getting your participation in the monthly subscription revenues of the of the distributors like like spotify and uh going from spotify you know when you had only really one dsp to now apple music youtube music amazon music a couple hundred other streaming services so the you know if you look at this business as we often do using kind of a kind of strategy analysis i'll steal from michael porter you know i think companies really uniquely positioned and in music universal owns the rights and effect on a third of global music and that's a very very strong and dominant position for the company and they've earned that by virtue of really being the best place to go if you're an artist and you want to become a superstar you want to partner with universal and they've got the best management team they've got the most market share and they're taking share so it's best business and an amazing industry and the way to think about the business today is it's really just owning a royalty and people listening to music and i think of all the assets in the world um you know music is one where you know as i've said uh before other than food and you know let's say oxygen you know you know it's a it's a certainty people are going to consume music over the next thousand years you know they consumed a lot of it a little previous thousand years they're going to consume even more because it's cheaper it's easier to get access to it it's become more important i can go on and on but you know look at what what's going on in social media i mean tick tock built a business worth you know reportedly 100 plus billion dollars uh selling these little music videos and up till very recently you know earlier this year they're paying nothing for those music rights and now universal is beginning to receive revenues from the tick tocks of the world and all the other social media applications where they realize if you add music people spend more time at the end time is what advertisers pay for you know it's a lot of controversy with facebook you know where anger drives people's attention on on social media but the other thing that drives people's attention if you add music to a to an application an exercise app to even to facebook and so it's uh it's a very high quality great business and we bought it at a very attractive price yeah well you you my next question was going to be what is it about universal that fits into your portfolio now you've you've given us a lot on universal there but what jumps out is its dominant market position are there characteristics that you adopt on stock acquisition across your portfolio that universal you ticks all those boxes it literally ticks all the boxes you know when we uh describe what we're trying to do we try to find simple predictable free cash flow generative business this is precisely that um we like businesses earn very high returns on capital this is precisely that we like businesses with strong dominant market positions with strong balance sheets you know the company has about a billion of uh euros of net leverage and that's it's really zero leverage when you net out the market value their spotify stake so it's a conservatively financed super high quality high return on capital predictable fast growing durable growth company um and we were able to buy the tractor price and so that's the reason we kind of put the chips big chunk of the chips on the table on this one and we think it's something we can own for a decade or more you know so that uh they don't come around that often when you find them you got a bad bit and other than universal has the pershing square portfolio changed much in the past six months uh what stocks have you been buying and selling and why sure we so we sold agilent which is an amazing business we we you know more than double our money in a couple year period of time and we did even better of course he bought a lot more of that position during the pandemic last year it's a really well-run company you know fits a lot of the attributes we've talked about the only negative is the market kind of revalued it to a price where we still think it's going to be an attractive you know kind of low double digit return for a stock market investor but we needed capital uh to make our commitment to to universal so we sort of regretfully sold achievement but it's uh it's an amazing company and we wish the management team uh well but it was a only because of scarce resources you know at the price paid universal is a better business at half of agilent's price you know obviously wouldn't sell it there but we're you know we're always open to selling even a long-standing holding if it reaches a price where it's hard for us to earn the kind of returns we'd like to earn for our shareholders and where we found a better use of the money and that's what happened here but other than agilent we really haven't done anything new in the kind of positions well because of the um the universal deal do you now sort of think well you know well done everyone we'll we'll sit back for a bit we've made a that's a it's a great trade a great investment uh we won't be doing anything for for a while now or are you always on the lookout and if another universe or another big opportunity came along would you then think well yeah let's look at how we can finance this if we have to sell something you you're always on the lookout for sure you know i stepped out of an investment team meeting we're looking seriously at a new idea uh to take this uh to do this video with you so absolutely you know um we're we don't rest on our laurels so to speak the other thing i'll point out uh actually which is significant is we just did a bond financing uh and you know we raised uh 500 million euros of of debt at a 1.4 interest rate for fixed for six years unsecured you know no marked marked covenants and 700 million of us dollar bonds and you know just or we call it three and a quarter percent uh yield a ten-year instrument let's call it uh a billion three of incremental cash we raised and then we tendered for our public debt and we're only able to buy back about a third of it uh so we've actually have a decent amount of free capital to put to work which we would love to put to work on a new idea and one of the things i think is not appreciated about persian square holdings if i could diverge for a second is you know one of the questions is why do we issue this long-term debt why don't we use margin debt well so number one we will never use margin debt because it's you know if the market crashes you can be wiped out and be forced to sell it precisely the wrong time and the fact that we our closed end fund we own the highest quality businesses in the world allows us to borrow money extremely at extremely attractive rates certainly in our view uh you know blended cost of the capital was something in the twos um and we can deploy that capital and earn we're we're looking to earn well north of a 20 return about 20 of our capital today is represented by that debt right 20 percent of our total assets um balance 80 is represented by the shares that we our shareholders own when you look at the fact that we charge a management fee and incentive fee people obviously view that as a negative because that's a drag on returns versus owning the underlying portfolio directly but the fact that we've replaced 20 of our equity with very very low cost debt basically makes up for the fees that we charge and so interestingly if you look at the gross returns of our private funds and you compare them with the net returns of psh they're basically about the same and so you can effectively invest in purchase for holdings and earn the underlying return on the assets without paying the fees economically because of our ability to issue very very low cost debt and so that transaction which we just did at the tightest spreads at which we've ever issued debt we issued our original bonds call it uh seven years ago they were issued or six years ago they were issued at a you know something in the 350 basis point spread we just issued debt at 160 107 basis point spread and so that is a very significant event i think was ignored by the market um we can now take that capital and go invest in something or a much much higher return and that of course will help create uh intrinsic value or growth in our entity and so fast forward over time we make a great new investment it increases nab by a nice amount that frees up that reduces our leverage uh allows us to issues you know long data debt and attract price and and it continues um and we'll always keep that leverage quite low uh so it we don't think it meaningfully affects the risk of purging square holdings um and so it's a really attractive development that i don't think anyone's focused on or thought about great bill ackman um ceo of pershing square holdings thank you very much for joining me today sure thank you lee appreciate it you