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Micron is the biggest position of Li Lu's American holdings with Himalaya Capital at 33.86% allocation and it is the only American holding in Mohnish Pabrai's portfolio and Pabrai recently said it was around 20 to 25% of his portfolio but now it has come down. I believe it should be in the mid-teens range right now in his portfolio and Pabrai in his podcast with William Green even said that Charlie Munger believes it will do very well let's watch it "he said I remember one time he told me he said so you bought MouTai I said yeah he said good okay and then recently he said to me you and uh Li Lu collaborated on Micron I said yeah he said the idea came from you I said yeah he said um it will do very well okay I said it's great to have God give that kind of endorsement because I didn't get that in the insurance business" looking at the buys of Pabrai, we can see that he increased his stake by 15% in the first quarter of 2021 while the average stock price was 78 dollars, current price is around 55 dollars so we can say there is a 30% margin of safety from Mohnish's last purchase.
And here we have Li Lu's buys, he increased his position in the third quarter of 2020 by 15.8% while the average stock price was at 48$. So some of the best investors in the world are highly bullish on Micron as we can see, and to find out why let's look at their business. But before we do that, if you like this kind of content please subscribe and drop a like.
So Micron had almost 31 Billion Dollars in Revenue in fiscal year 2022 and they are the fourth biggest semiconductor company in the world. Now we have their revenue by technology breakdown here, and as you can see DRAM dominates with around 75% of Revenue but in this case it is a good thing because their margins are higher with DRAM.
By the way to summarize, DRAM is a temporary storage technology while the NAND is the permanent. Micron can keep higher margins in the drum business because of the triopoli of Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron have managed to successfully build in the DRAM market. The cost of entry in the DRAM market is very high, and that in my opinion builds a mat around these three businesses, as a result the triopoly holds more than 95% of the DRAM market with Samsung at 43% SK Hynix at 27% and Micron 24%.
And looking at their competition we can see that Intel, Kioxia holdings, Samsung, SK Hynix are their biggest competitors, and in their report Micron says that our competitors may use aggressive pricing to obtain market share. They also say that they may have greater resources to invest in technology and they can withstand downturns in the semiconductor markets in which they compete.
As every other investment Micron comes with its own risks as well, I chose three risk factors that are in my opinion the most important. First is the volatility of their market, semiconductor industry is known to be very volatile and that is why Micron is looking so cheap on paper. Investors believe we are at the top of the cycle and the industry will have a downturn soon and so far in 2022 they have been right.
I highlighted here where Micron even says "in some prior periods average selling prices for our products have been below our manufacturing costs and we may experience such circumstances in the future" so volatility is first. The second problem is China, most of the rare earth materials Micron uses to produce chips actually come from China, if China decides to stop the Imports of these materials to American companies to gain advantage in trade wars or to use them for their domestic companies, that causes problems for Micron.
And the third and final risk is again concentration but this time on the buyer's side. As they say on the report "In each of the last three years approximately one half of our total revenue was from our top ten customers." so if these customers choose to take their business elsewhere that causes a huge problem or a huge revenue loss for Micron, and maybe as a bonus risk they are estimating the capex for 2023 to be 8 billion dollars, there are two sides of it first is the revaluation risk, investors might look at this and decide that for a company making around 3 billion in free cash flow that number is too much and decrease the company's valuation.
As we saw with Meta where they are spending around 100 million dollars every day and that caused their valuations to halve, the second is of course their returns, if they can bring the cash flow soon after their Investments are done and functioning that might again cause the stock price to go down and that will be deserved in my opinion.
And now let's look at some valuations for Micron, first let's take a look at their gross margin and as here we can see that in 2020 their gross margin was 31% and in 2022 that number was 45% and their operating income in 2020 was 3 Billion Dollars but in 2022 that number more than tripled to 9.7 Billion Dollars, also the company has 10 Billion Dollars authorized for buybacks which is around 16% of their current market cap, and they are paying a dividend of 46 cents which is 0.8% yield on the current price.
Now finally we will be looking at p/e ratios which are kept to last on purpose. Micron's trailing 12 months p/e ratio is 6.9 whereas it's forward 12 months p/e ratio is 47.17. You might think to yourself, that is terrible their earnings are going down. But actually higher p/e ratios are a very good time to buy cyclical companies.
This is the p/e ratio history for Micron and here you can see that in the second month of 2017 their p/e ratio was at 41 and this is the stock price history for Micron and in the beginning of 2017 the price was at 28$ where p/e was over 40, but as you can see in just a year Micron almost doubled. And here is a news from Bloomberg where they say memory chip makers don't want this boom to end in another bust and I want to highlight this part where they say "Now, as the current boom continues, all three companies want investors to believe that things will end differently this time.
instead of competing with each other for market share by lowering prices, "protecting profitability" has become the industry's new mantra." So to summarize I believe Micron is head I win, tails I don't lose much type of investment which Mohnish has praised before ,in my opinion Mohnish and Li Lu believe that Micron along with Samsung and SK Hynix has managed to build a strong triopoly with a fat moat around DRAM business and their margins are here to stay.
Micron on paper looks like a fast growth stock that is valued as a value company, because investors believe their cycle have peaked and they are going down from here. So I guess we can say that Micron is also a contrarian investment, if that is the case and Micron's margins are here to stay, I think the stock can easily triple but even if it's not Micron has more cash in hand than their debt and the stock is already priced like their peak is behind, given it's down 42% from its highs.
My personal opinion, the semiconductor sector is in a secular growth for at least another decade, and I do own some Micron stock as well. So that was it for today, I hope you liked it and please subscribe if you did other than that I'll see you in the next one.
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