저자: RenéSellmann · 외국인
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빌 애크먼의 넷플릭스 1.1억 달러 지분 매수가 과연 합리적인지 분석한 영상. 결론: 주가 급락 이후 저평가 매수 논리는 성립할 수 있으나, 애크먼의 기존 투자 원칙(잉여현금흐름 창출 기업 투자)과는 상충되어 의문이 남는다. 사건 개요: 2022년 1월 넷플릭스가 Q4 신규 가입자 830만명(가이던스 850만명 하회), Q1 가이던스 250만명(시장 기대의 절반 수준)을 제시하면서 주가가 일주일 새 약 30%, 하루 약 20% 급락해 2012년 이후 최대 일일 하락을 기록했다. 애크먼은 1월 21일부터 매수해 1월 26일 발표했고, 310만주를 취득했다. 실적 수치: 매출은 전년 대비 16% 증가, 영업이익은 8.2% 증가. 영업현금흐름은 -4억 달러. 과거 2014년 이후 분기 기준 잉여현금흐름 흑자는 8분기 중 4분기에 불과했다. 애크먼의 과거 발언: 넷플릭스 비즈니스 모델이 매력적이지 않고 지속가능하지 않다고 공개 언급했으며, 콘텐츠 수명이 음악 대비 짧아 지속적 재투자가 필요하다고 지적했다. 또한 핵심 투자 원칙으로 '단순하고 예측 가능하며 잉여현금흐름을 창출하는 기업'에만 투자한다고 밝혀왔다. 매수 논리: 주주서한에서 애크먼은 (1) 개선되는 잉여현금흐름 프로필, (2) 규모의 경제에 따른 마진 확대 여지, (3) 소비자에게 제공하는 가치에 기반한 가격 결정력을 근거로 제시했다. 영상은 콘텐츠 지출 중 유지비와 성장투자 비중, 이탈률(넷플릭스 약 2.4%, 훌루 4.1%) 등에 따라 넷플릭스가 저평가일 수도 과대평가일 수도 있다고 보며, 2021년 콘텐츠 지출 177억 달러 중 일부를 줄일 경우 현재 밸류에이션이 2021년 잉여현금흐름의 약 15배까지 낮아질 수 있다는 가정을 제시했으나 저자 본인은 그 가능성을 높게 보지 않는다고 밝혔다. 리스크: 팬데믹 특수 종료에 따른 비교 대상(comps)의 어려움, 엔터테인먼트 대안 증가(극장, 공연, 외식), 경쟁 심화, 최근 미국·캐나다 요금 인상(스탠더드 월 13.99→15.49달러)에 따른 가입자 이탈 가능성. 결론적으로 영상은 애크먼의 매수를 '광기'라 단정하지 않으면서도 원칙과의 괴리를 지적하고, 투자자가 콘텐츠 지출의 성장/유지 비율을 스스로 판단해야 한다고 정리한다.
다듬은 글
we got to know some major news the other day black man bought a significant stake in netflix that is worth a cool 1.1 billion us dollars and this makes ekman and his hedge fund one of the 20 largest shareholders of netflix ekman acquired this stake after netflix stock has basically been cut in half which might have changed his mind because ekman previously publicly stated that he thinks netflix business model is not particularly attractive and even unsustainable so as you can see there's a lot to unwrap here is netflix really cheap or did eggman lose his mind so without further ado let's get started so what just happened well netflix stock has basically dropped by around 30 in just one week and 20 during just one trading day so that's the largest one day drop since 2012 and this happened after the streaming giant reported yeah somewhat disappointing subscriber growth numbers and gave in addition to that week subscriber growth guidance so let's just take a look brief look at the results they have reported in their most recent 10k so netflix reported 8.3 million new subscribers in its fourth quarter which came in below management's own guidance of 8.5 million new subscribers bringing the total paid membership membership count to 221 million now to be fair read hastings so the ceo of netflix he was not particularly impressed by this minor miss as he has clearly yeah shown during the investor conference call that followed the release of the q4 earnings what might have truly shocked the market though and led to the rapid sell-off is that management also guided for slower subscriber growth in q1 management announced that it expects to add 2.5 million new subscribers which is basically half of what analysts were expecting and to be fair in the next couple of quarters netflix has to lap against incredibly tough comps because netflix has certainly been one of the biggest beneficiaries of lockdowns and widespread yeah work from home policies of course when you're stuck at home with yeah not much else to do netflix is a terrific service but it seems like we are getting closer to an end to the pandemic thank god and with more entertainment options becoming available so theaters concerts eating out and so on and so forth netflix may have a hard time convincing more and more new people to subscribe to its streaming service and on top of that investors might place even more emphasis on the question of competition right now especially considering that netflix just recently increased prices in the us and canada raising its standard plan for example from 1399 to 1549 per month now just to wrap up the numbers part here netflix was able to increase its revenue by 16 year-over-year in q4 and its operating income by 8.2 percent cash flow from operations however was a negative 400 million us dollars now to get to blackman here's what he wrote in his letter to shareholders in which he announced the netflix transaction the opportunity to acquire netflix at an attractive valuation emerged when investors reacted negatively to the recent quarters subscriber growth and management's short-term guidance netflix substantial stock price decline was further exaggerated by recent market volatility in total bill ekman bought 3.1 million shares of netflix and he and his fund acquired this massive stake actually fairly quickly according to ekman and his letter they started buying on friday the 21st of january and they announced their investment only four trading days later on the 26th now personally i feel like the fact that ackman initiated position in netflix was rather surprising and i think there are two reasons for this firstly because ekman has publicly stated that he doesn't like that netflix business model requires constant and large yeah reinvestments into new content which he thinks doesn't have a very long shelf life so he thinks the length of time newly produced content is attractive for yeah streaming on demand customers is generally rather short let me just really show you a clip of ekman appearing on cnbc in which he discussed this exact problem it's you know top 10 of the top 10 artists you know drake you you know taylor swift make your list are universal artists you have a company that has incredible historic content and a company that is where every great artist wants to you know you know aspiring artist wants to you know uh partner and and have universal you know help them you know break uh as a successful artist and so owning i can't think of a business in a content space i mean netflix is amazing but they have to spend billions and billions of dollars to create content that is not so valuable you know the day after you watch it where music content is really forever so so in that clip ekman basically contrasted the shelf life of music to the shelf life of yeah video streaming content which is mostly very short put differently in music there are probably more evergreen titles than in video content streaming you seriously just have to ask yourself how many songs there are that you are happy to listen to over and over again and then ask yourself how many netflix series you have actually watched more than once personally i don't remember watching any netflix series for a second time quite frankly now the second reason why i was surprised by this transaction is because one of bill eckman's core investing principles is to only invest in highly free cash flow generative businesses this is also something that he has articulated publicly when he was interviewed by rubenstein so let me just show you a clip of that interview uh two thousand we went through a very difficult period circa 2015 2016 the two investments you mentioned were big drivers of that it was uh you know if you will experiences making mistakes and learning from them and it was a moment of reflection for the firm and i went back to the core principles that have driven our success for the first 12 years and i had a member of the investment team literally engraved them in a stone tablet not dissimilar from moses's ten commandments and i had that stone tablet put in what you might call a deal toy sits onto everyone's desk in the office and uh we've adhered to those principles you know ever since and you know we've been fortunate uh to return to the success we had for the first uh dozen years so i think it's about keeping to your our principles are basically one invest in simple predictable free cash regenerative dominant companies with large barriers to entry that are in high returns on capital that have limited exposure to extrinsic risk we can't control strong balance sheets don't need access to capital to survive have excellent management good governance sounds logical um but you know occasionally we've diverged and there's uh those times you know there's a certain discipline that comes with investments and there always seems to be a countervailing quality that caused us to diverge but in really each case we've compromised on business quality or complexity we've been harmed so one of pershing square's core investing principles is only to invest in free cash flow generative businesses if we now take a look at netflix past financial results we can see that netflix hasn't really been a company that's gushing free cash flow in fact if we look at the financial results going back to 2014 then we can see that there have only been four four quarters during which the streaming joint has been free cash flow positive although to be fair four of the last eight quarters were actually pre-cash flow positive but again relative to netflix valuation the free cash flow produced by the company is really insignificant so why did eggman invest anyway did he abandon one of his core investing principles well obviously we can only take guesses here but what eggman certainly understands very well is that the value of any asset usually or should reflect the value of all future cash flows discounted back to present value at some kind of appropriate discount rate so the question is how much of the money netflix spends on the production of new content is actually maintenance spent and how much is spent to grow the business and the subscriber base in other words how much content spent is necessary just to maintain the already existing subscriber base and how much is spent to attract new subscribers netflix has certainly significantly increased content spent over the years just for comparison in 2015 content spend was only around 3.4 billion us dollars and this increased spending on content production is reflected in this chart by twitter user sleep world capital that shows produced content assets are now 55 compared to less than 10 percent in 2015 and this content spending seems to be paying off at least when we look at netflix churn rate according to recent research from antenna netflix churn rate is only around 2.4 which is yeah again incredibly low in comparison to competitors like hulu with a churn rate of 4.1 and this was nicely visualized by medium in the chart that you can see on screen right now and just in case you don't know churn rate reflects the annual percentage rate at which customers stop subscribing to a service so depending on the answer to that question so how much could netflix cut its content spent without significantly increasing users churn rate netflix may be significantly undervalued or massively overvalued if we head over to netflix's most recent cash flow statement then we can see that in 2021 netflix management spent 17.7 us dollars on new content let's just say netflix could maintain a low churn rate and high customer retention rate if they drastically reduced content spent well for example just you one billion a year then netflix current valuation may be as low as 15 times 2021 free cash flow personally i don't think this seems very likely but it shows you that yeah this is the basically mother of all questions that netflix investors need to ask themselves when they attempt to value netflix let me just give a shout out to jamie shorter here who did a fantastic video on this exact question and discussed it in depth in yeah one of his videos so if netflix could theoretically reduce content spent and increase prices this could significantly increase the free cash flow margins of netflix and thus lead to more cash flows in the future making the business more valuable today and bill ekman certainly believes in the narrative that a large part of content spent does indeed reflect growth investments and that the business will be able to yeah enjoy operating leverage operating leverage occurs when a company has a low amount of monthly fixed costs let's say netflix only needs to spend 7 billion us dollars annually on new content so there is a fixed cost to producing content but if they now can continue hiking prices and grow the subscriber base most of the added revenue will be pure profit so over time if netflix can continue growing its user base and the amount of cash they need to spend on content will take up a much lower percentage of revenue and thus free cash flow should at some point constantly be positive so as i said ekman seems to believe in exactly this narrative and in his letter to shareholders that i have referenced earlier he laid out his reasons for investing in netflix and let me just reference three of the reasons he laid out right here so the first one was an improving free cash flow profile which would allow for continued investment and growth as well as the return of cash to shareholders then substantial margin expansion with the opportunity for continued improvement due to economies of scale and the company's rapidly growing global subscriber base and then lastly and pricing power derives from the enormous value it delivers to consumers compared with other alternatives yeah and with that i think i will wrap it up here so as always may your finances and investments prosper good luck
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