저자: BillAckman · 외국인
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빌 애크먼의 넷플릭스 투자 분석 영상으로, 구독 모델의 강점과 넷플릭스의 가격 결정력·규모의 경제를 근거로 장기 긍정적 견해를 제시한다. 애크먼의 넷플릭스 투자 배경: 퍼싱스퀘어가 약 310만 주(10억 달러 이상)를 매입해 주요 주주가 되었다고 발표. 주가는 2021년 11월 약 690달러에서 약 370달러로 약 50% 하락한 상태였고, 구독자 증가 둔화와 보수적인 경영진 전망으로 급락했다. 투자 논리 - 구독 모델: 구독 사업은 반복 매출이 크고 자동 결제로 이탈이 적다. 신규 고객 확보 비용(약 150달러 추정)이 높은 만큼 기존 구독자 가격 인상의 효과가 크다. 투자 논리 - 가격 결정력과 규모의 경제: 구독자 2억 명 기준 월 1달러 인상 시 연 약 24억 달러의 추가 매출이 생기며 대부분 순이익으로 전환된다. 콘텐츠 투자비(2021년 약 170억 달러)는 구독자 증가에 따라 1인당 부담이 줄어든다. 리스크: 기술 기업 특유의 변화 속도와 과거 노키아·코닥·블랙베리 같은 몰락 사례. 넷플릭스는 DVD 우편 대여→스트리밍→자체 콘텐츠로 전략을 여러 번 전환해 이를 극복해 왔다는 평가. 잉여현금흐름: 2015년 9억 달러, 2016년 116억 달러, 2017년 -20억 달러, 2018년 -29억 달러, 2019년 31억 달러, 2020년 약 20억 달러, 2021년 약 -1억 달러. 구독자 증가와 가격 인상으로 향후 큰 현금흐름이 나오면 재투자·자사주 매입·배당이 가능하다는 것이 애크먼의 가정. 결론: 장기 관점에서 넷플릭스의 구독 기반과 가격 결정력을 높게 평가하는 투자 논리를 제시하며, 단기 주가 방향에 대한 구체적 예측은 없다.
다듬은 글
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has the power to influence markets with his words. Unlike most investors , he rarely buys and sells stocks. That's why it's a big deal when Bill Ackman announces a new investment in his Pershing Square fund, which everyone is watching closely. Ekman recently announced on Twitter that he had purchased over 3.1 million shares of Netflix.
This stake is worth more than $1 billion and makes Ekman and his fund one of Netflix's largest shareholders. Well, I won't lie. As someone who closely follows Bill Ackman's portfolio and investment strategy , this investment came as a bit of a surprise, to be honest. This is because Netflix is a technology company, and in past interviews, Bill Ackman has said that he does not invest in technology companies.
So, this raises the billion-dollar question. Why did Bill Ackman invest in Netflix? Luckily for us investors, we have the answer and we don't have to guess. Ekman released a three-page letter detailing his thoughts on investing in Netflix. I've gone through the letter line by line and in this video I'll provide the main points you need to know.
More importantly, I will include theses that you can apply to your own investment portfolio and research process. All I ask in return is that you click the " like" button. Seriously, that's all I want. Okay, now let's move on to the analysis. Netflix shares have been in a difficult position in recent months.
Just a few months ago, in November 2021, the shares were trading at around $690 a share. The shares have now fallen by almost 50% and are hovering around $370 a share when Ackman announced that his fund had acquired a significant stake in the company. Here's what Bill Ekman said about it . We purchased more than 3.1 million shares of Netflix Inc., NASDAQ: NFLX, making us one of the company's 20 largest shareholders.
The opportunity to buy Netflix at an attractive valuation emerged when investors reacted negatively to the subscriber growth in the last quarter and management's short-term forecasts . The significant drop in Netflix's share price has been further exacerbated by recent market volatility. As Ackman hinted, Netflix shares fell nearly 20% almost instantly when the company reported that its subscriber growth was lower than Wall Street analysts had expected.
Even worse, management's 2022 subscriber growth forecast turned out to be lower than many investors expected. At the time of publication of the report, Netflix's market capitalization was about $225 billion. This means that a 20 percent collapse in Netflix's stock price caused the company to lose over $40 billion in its market value almost instantly.
This precipitous drop in the stock price opened up a buying opportunity for Ackman . I think this is a lesson that other investors can learn from this situation. Make a list of companies that you like and that you think would be a great investment at a good price. While the stock price may be too high to buy right now, the Netflix situation shows how quickly things change, and you should be prepared to act immediately.
Here's what Ackman had to say about it. We've always admired Netflix as consumers and as investors, but we've never owned a stake in the company before. Netflix is the main beneficiary of the rise of streaming and the decline of linear TV thanks to better service, a huge amount of quality content, global improvements in network bandwidth, and the proliferation and improvement of viewing devices.
Speaking of research and company lists—that brings us to the sponsor of this video, the Quarter app. I approached Quarter with an offer to become a sponsor because the app made the process of preparing for this video much easier for me. I was able to read transcripts of Netflix reports and learn what Wall Street analysts think about the company.
The best thing about this app is that it is completely free. Download the app from the link in the description . Okay, back to the video. Bill Ackman may have graduated from Harvard, but you don't have to have a Harvard degree to understand why he likes Netflix . This is a subscription model with high levels of recurring revenue and huge growth potential.
Subscription business models have become extremely popular among investors and have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. To be honest, to a large extent this attention is justified, as such business models can be very attractive. To show how effective a subscription can be , let's look at the simplest example —the classic lemonade stand.
In this example, we will take Jack and Jill. Jack has a lemonade stand on a busy street. The number of glasses of lemonade sold per day depends on many factors. The weather, the number of people passing by, and even whether passersby have money to pay for the lemonade. Jack starts each week with zero sales, hoping to make a profit within the week.
On the other hand, we have Jill, who also has a lemonade stand on the side of the road. But beyond the lemonade stand, Jill is very effective at marketing and has a unique strategy. She also has customers who get one gallon of lemonade delivered straight to their homes at the beginning of the week. Every week, Jill manages to add a few more customers to her lemonade subscription service.
Let's say that within a few months, Jill has 50 customers signing up for her weekly lemonade delivery. This means that each week, Jill knows she will have at least 50 lemonade sales to customers on her subscription list. Compare this to Jack, who, as I said earlier, starts from zero sales every week.
This example , although very simplified , shows the power of the subscription business model. You don't have to look for new clients every day like Jack. With a subscription business model like Jill’s, you acquire a customer once through a subscription, and they remain your customer every week or month.
In the case of Netflix, they have over 215 million subscribers. Let's assume that each subscriber pays $10 per month. This means Netflix is starting the month with $2.15 billion in revenue without acquiring a single new customer. Subscription business models benefit from this aspect of human behavior, which psychologists call the law of least effort.
Please note that once you subscribe to Netflix, they charge you automatically. Imagine how much lower your subscription renewal rates would be if you had to enter your card details every month. Since the subscription renews automatically and the payment amount is relatively small, most people don't even notice it.
Subscription models are so powerful because most such consumer companies have customers who forget about the subscription but continue to pay each month. Not bad if you're a Netflix shareholder. Truly the best management team and a unique high-performance culture. Netflix founder Reed Hastings wrote a very popular book that has the words " Netflix" and "culture of reinvention" in its title.
The best way to sum up Netflix's culture is reinvention. Bill Ackman has not invested in technology companies in the past for this reason. While a technology company may have the most dominant technology and product now, that doesn't mean it will be the same in 5 years. The list of technology companies that were once leaders and then quickly faded away and began to struggle for survival includes Nokia, Kodak, Blackberry, Yahoo, and even the legendary IBM.
But that's the nature of technology. What is state-of-the-art technology today will become obsolete in the not- too-distant future . As a result, it is difficult to predict the performance of a technology company 5–10 years ahead, as Aman likes to do for his investments. That's why his portfolio consists of companies like Lowe's, a home goods retailer , Chipotle, a quick- service restaurant chain, and Hilton, a hotel chain.
But Netflix is an unusual technology company, as it has successfully changed strategy several times throughout its existence. Netflix started as a mail-order DVD rental company. You ordered the disc you wanted, and Netflix sent it to you. This was extremely innovative at the time. The first turning point came when the company moved from this business model to streaming, where a customer could instantly access a library of content over the internet.
And then there was another twist. Netflix quickly realized that by only offering movies and TV shows from other companies, they had nothing unique that could easily be copied by competitors. Therefore, Netflix decided to start developing its own exclusive content, available only on their platform. Netflix has completely focused on creating original content.
So much so that in 2021 the company spent $17 billion on its development. It's rare for a company to pull off one strategic pivot , let alone two, like Netflix. And Aman believes this is a direct result of Netflix culture. Economies of scale and the highest quality of leadership content will contribute to further growth and expansion of the company's powerful competitive moat.
Netflix's moat, or in other words, its competitive advantage, is the company's original content. Netflix's ability to spread the costs of developing this original content is a perfect example of economies of scale. Let me explain what I mean. Let's say Netflix spends $20 billion each year on creating original content.
For this example, let's take Netflix's subscriber base of 200 million people. If you divide $20 billion in spending by 200 million subscribers, it turns out that Netflix spends $100 per subscriber each year on creating original content. Now imagine that Netflix manages to double its subscriber base from 200 million to 400 million over time.
If spending on original content remains at around $20 billion per year, that would mean Netflix is only spending $50 per subscriber per year. This is a perfect example of what is called economies of scale—in simple terms, it means that as a company grows, it gains the benefits of its size, and the cost of providing a product or service to each individual customer decreases.
This is why subscriber numbers are so important to streaming companies like Netflix . The more subscribers Netflix has, the more people share the costs of developing original content. Pricing power stems from the enormous value it provides to consumers compared to other alternatives. Netflix and other streaming services have led to a trend known as the cable TV decluttering.
This is when consumers cancel their expensive cable TV plan and instead choose a streaming-only service. The current price for Netflix here in the United States is around $15 per month. I'm 24 years old, I'm young, so I've never had cable TV. However, I know that my parents pay about $80–100 a month for their cable TV package.
Frankly, I would rather choose a streaming service like Netflix than cable, even if the price were the same. This gives Netflix huge opportunities in the future. Netflix revenue is a simple equation. The number of subscribers multiplied by the price each subscriber pays. Most of Netflix's revenue growth came from increasing subscriber numbers in this equation.
However, given the value of Netflix's service to customers, the company can significantly increase revenue by increasing the pricing part of the equation. If Netflix can raise the price of its monthly subscription by $1 for, say, 200 million customers, that's an additional $200 million in revenue every month.
How many people do you think would cancel their Netflix subscription just because it became $1 more expensive? But Aman is betting that there will be few of them. This means that Netflix could earn an additional $2.4 billion —that's $200 million multiplied by 12 months—each year simply by raising the subscription price by a measly dollar.
Not bad at all . Significant margin expansion with potential for further improvement due to economies of scale and rapid growth of the company's global subscriber base . This next point ties in quite nicely with the topic of pricing power. The great thing is that Netflix can generate an additional $2.4 billion in revenue just by increasing the price per dollar, because most of that revenue will be converted into the company's net profit.
Think about it. When Netflix increases the cost of a subscription by a dollar, what additional costs does the company incur in connection with this? Almost none. They have already spent billions of dollars on marketing to attract customers and on creating original content. Compare this to Netflix, which grows revenue by attracting new customers.
I've seen estimates that it costs Netflix about $150 to acquire one new customer. This is because marketing and advertising are needed to convince a customer to subscribe to the service. This is why building a subscriber base is a very costly and expensive endeavor. Take Disney for example: the company is spending billions of dollars building out its Disney Plus service.
However, in the case of Netflix, the real magic of the business model comes when they can raise prices for the huge customer base they have already attracted. Improving free cash flow profile, which should allow for continued investment and growth, as well as returning funds to shareholders. As you can imagine, building such a large subscriber base and library of original content doesn't come cheap.
Netflix's free cash flow was $900 million in 2015, $11.6 billion in 2016, -2 billion in 2017, -2.9 billion in 2018, and $3.1 billion in 2019. The company managed to overcome the crisis and generate almost $2 billion in free cash flow in 2020. However, in 2021, the figure turned negative again and amounted to minus $100 million .
Bill Ackman's thesis is that the company will be able to generate a lot of free cash flow in the future, based on everything we talked about earlier in this video. For example: a steady increase in the number of subscribers, spreading the costs of producing original content across a larger user base, and gradually increasing prices for services.
If Netflix manages to achieve all of this, the company will become very profitable and be able to generate huge cash flows for its shareholders. With such cash flow, Netflix will be able to continue to reinvest in the business, create more original content, and expand its subscriber base. Or, if Netflix starts generating more cash than it can use, the company could start buying back shares or even paying dividends.
All of this can be very beneficial for shareholders. So, that's all. Let us know what you think about Bill Ackman's investment in the comments below. I'm interested in hearing your opinion. As always, thanks for watching the video. Be sure to like this video and subscribe to Investor Center if you haven't already , because my goal is to make you better investors by learning from the world's greatest investors. See you next time.
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