저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
팔란티어가 3분기 30% 성장과 흑자 기조를 유지하며 현금이 늘고 있음을 짚는다. 투자자 입장에서 자사주 매입은 현재 가치 대비 소극적으로 보며, 배당은 현 시점에서 부적절하다고 본다. 고객 투자나 M&A는 리스크가 크다고 평가하고, AIP 부트캠프와 R&D 투자는 긍정적으로 본다. 금리가 크게 떨어지면 현금 활용 방안을 더 서둘러야 한다고 말한다.
다듬은 글
pener gets a super rally to close out the post Thanksgiving Black Friday above $67 a share and honestly if you asked me in the beginning of 2024 that we would be where we are today I definitely have a healthy amount of skepticism but a pleasant surprise is always welcome now this had me thinking about pound here and where they are today and how they got here which a lot of it is their turnaround and growth of course and overall expectations increasingly becoming more positive but also what can they do to keep this going and grow even faster fundamentally as a business and for me at least it always comes back to that juicy cash pile that it's continually increased quarter after quarter and some may see this actually as a problem but I'll let you be the judge of that yourselves and you can let me know your thoughts on that below now the big caveat though is we know there's still stock-based compensation crutching this up allowing them to operate with less cash expenditures but the flip side of giving ownership to those delivering the company brings us to the Chicken and the Egg coming first and that problem around who's actually driving what but let's put that aside for now and talk about that $4.5 billion elephant in the room their cash and treasuries now I think it's first important to acknowledge pounder has achieved their 30% year-over-year growth again in Q3 of 2024 this has been without some huge expenditure to boost their business we can see in their operating expenses the growth in their sales and marketing and R&D is mainly where they increase operating expenses with a slight growth in GNA but nothing out of this this world to make it look like they just threw a bunch of cash and drove that turnaround and growth and this is continuing to maintain their margins and gap profitability which got them into the S&P 500 so this discussion around cash may not even be necessary since they've already achieved this without dipping into their funds so looking at their balance sheet first we need to note the conversation and thought exercises over a longer period of time on speculating around pter using their cash pile at least in the short term I wouldn't expect any deviation from what they've already done considering what I just talked about them achieving growth without it but also on their balance sheet here of 3.8 billion dollars is sitting in marketable Securities as treasuries and taking advantage of the recent High interest rate environment the liquid cash is only around $770 million and that's more than enough in liquidity for their current operations and looking at their debt on the liabilities current and non-current they've got plenty of funds considering 700 million of this is current deferred revenue and customer deposits so with that out of the way setting the premise what can we do with this cash of ours and do these options even make sense so first is something they've already been doing actually the past few quarters buying back shares now I'm not a fan of them wrapping this up at all in their current state today anything they do right now is more symbolic and they can keep those small BuyBacks just for the sake of doing it but ramping this up doesn't make sense to me where there's continued dilution anyways overshadowing this when and if they reach a mature state of slowing growth and have faed out being a growth company but still with a reliable huge cash Jing machine then it makes sense to give a bigger piece of the pie back to shareholders over time when they retire shares and a good valuation relative to the fundamentals today there's still a lot of growth and expectations priced in so why utilize our cash for buying into that when I'd rather just have them use the cash to drive real growth in the numbers for future quarters so BuyBacks is still an option of course and will probably continue in small amounts but not Top Choice at all for me and I know my smart audience is already privy to this too and my feelings on the subject but dividends right now is silly and not what I'd want to see in the near future at all Plus at least personally for my tax liabilities I'd prefer BuyBacks over dividends anyways now the first more interesting usage of cash is them investing in other companies preferably customers and partners where they try to outperform the rate of return they're getting on treasuries I'm still not a fan of this idea and there are two big challenges here first is the risk-free rate of return on treasuries is attractive even if you can beat that interest rate what is the risk associated of underperforming plus the headaches in managing this and the possible Optics around the whole thing obviously if you Choose Wisely and things actually out perform then we'll all be happy but that's a risk for management to pull off considering no one is forcing them to do this right now their backs are not in the corner and it's not even necessary at this point in time since they are D trading returning growth the second big challenge with this is we already saw this around with their Spa Investments a few years back first it looks like you're buying Revenue so moving cash into a company that in turn is just going to pay you back for services with the cash and or shares and we know this turned ugly for those lofty valuations deflating and many not even recovering so I think it's just not worth it for the headache unless they become super selective and have really done a good job on working with these Partners or customers and then have that much more confidence in them as an investment although you can argue to to you're just upping the risk for no reason because if they are successful in the end naturally the revenue should from these customers grow over time so why double dip when you don't have to then On a related note is acquiring companies with this cash pile now pounder has built out their ecosystem on top of the anology and there's just a certain level of understanding and culture when you build something in all the other products off of this with the tribal knowledge that they've already establish and then going through a couple mergers myself as an employee the challenges in integrating and applying synergies between the companies come together is a Time intensive and as well as the risk of falling things or just wasting resources is always around the corner now I would actually say that this is interesting though in using their cash to acquire companies not necessarily for their products but the underlying intellectual property paler continues to publish their own patents and many other tech companies too and this is how modes are established even if you are attacking the same problem your way of doing things getting patented might give you an edge that is yours to keep and acquiring this to buff up the your pantent portfolio is something I would be interested as a shareholder as long as it's worth our while and considering how careful management has been treading so far with the cash I trust that they wouldn't waste this on some redundancies or inadequate intellectual property I have no idea of course who would be a great Target but with $4.5 billion dollars they may be able to just get a small and upand cominging company that is still private and in their Radars and who knows they could be worthwhile to consume and maybe that's an upcoming competitor that we can get rid of but maybe you can argue pounder's culture of creating working products could be necessary to supercharge whatever that company's been working on now the most attractive usage of cash in my opinion is just plain investing in our own business directly now sales is not what I'm talking about here because they've gone down this road a couple times and seems like this did not pan out however investing in AIP boot camps seems to be working because the AI Market is still figuring itself out and all the use cases Associated a technical salesperson could only do so much in educating perspective customers whereas maybe a forward deployed engineer running a boot camp with the customer themselves on their own data sees how they can really fully leverage the software then once they figured it out the value of the product becomes that much more apparent and leading to the big tcvs that pouncers touted on their earnings presentations so for sure this path has Beed Fruth already so why not double down this even more and maybe they've already done this but doesn't necessarily manifest into a huge cash expenditure so even better now the other ways we see them invest in themselves is R&D and this has gone up but isn't like a huge lump sum as I mentioned earlier it could be more of the nature on actually creating new products and Technology where throwing cash doesn't have much marginal value rather than just purely working on the problems themselves and just having that culture built around it but I trust management to throw more resource when necessary if it's better for the longer term performance of the company even if it does eat a little into the short-term margins so with all of these straightforward options like I mentioned in the beginning Pounders demonstrated returning growth all while their cash grows it can just be the nature of the Beast that throwing money at things that's just not necessary or worth it for them and even if this feels is the money-making machine they are today is already working I trust management to increase expenditures if it truly can supercharge growth so my assumption here is that since they haven't they don't think it's worth it so in the meantime with interest rates where they are today I don't mind them continuing to accumulate their risk-free return from the treasuries but if interest dramatically Falls over time I'd expect more urgency in finding a better way to utilize our cash so I'm curious to know your thoughts on the growing cash pile below and I'll see you in the next video
Comments 0