Scott McNealy was CEO of Sun Microsystems during the dot com bubble. After the bubble, he said,
“At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking?”
For comparison, the price to revenue ratio of Oatly is above 25 according to Yahoo Finance.
Retail investors allow for some whole new valuations of “I recognize that, so I’ll buy it.”
There’s a long history of retail brands being “overvalued” so I don’t this this is that novel or particularly interesting.
I mean Twitter IPO’d almost 8 years ago and isn’t profitable, still.
Oatly is a super popular brand that I see lots of people talk about. Since it’s popular that may explain the price, independent of fundamentals.
People make lots of money off this psychology so it may not even be a bad buy, if you’re into this sort of thing.
ConAgra is $18B and Kraft is $50B so this seems super high for something that’s in competition with International Delight coffee creamer. I think Danone is $50B for everything.
“At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking?”
For comparison, the price to revenue ratio of Oatly is above 25 according to Yahoo Finance.