The Bitcoin “Penny Stock”

For almost a decade, Bitcoin has periodically captured the attention of the public. Sometimes for its technological potential, sometimes as an object of ridicule, but often times for its boom / bust cycles that have fueled the limitless imaginations of speculators.

Since the start of this year, Bitcoin and alt-coins have once again captured the attention of the public.

market-price-(usd)

Not only has Bitcoin risen dramatically in price, potentially minting hundreds of millionaires and possibly a few discrete billionaires, the blockchain, alt-coins, and ICOs appear to be carrying us at light-speed into a radically democratized and de-centralized future.

I’m not here to speak to the technological appeal of blockchains — for which there are many — as there are many more qualified minds that can do that better than I can.

However, I do have news for you:

Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in price year-to-date has more to do with the technicals and conditions normally found in penny stocks than likely any long-term fundamental factors. 

Before you immediately dismiss the rest of this post because you suspect my argument is for lower prices, I will be upfront and tell you that that is not the case. I have no particular view on whether cryptocurrencies will go up or down. My goal is simply to discuss what I believe has been the primary driver of upward momentum and leave it for the reader to assess whether these conditions will continue favorably or potentially reverse. Having observed the rise of many penny stocks, I have seen few that don’t eventually come crashing back down in dramatic fashion when the conditions that made the rise possible cease to persist.

The Anatomy of a Penny Stock Shooting Star

Most penny stocks never amount to anything. But occasionally, a few rise and rise and rise in dramatic fashion. Sometimes up to thousands of percents within a few days or months.

For example:

HGENCVSI

Every penny stock shooting star begins with a similar set of conditions: Limited information, micro market capitalizations, and extremely low liquidity.

All of these factors come together to maximize the chance that a / any penny stock can be easily manipulated to trade on everything but fundamentals.

Fundamentals are usually the enemy of penny stocks since most of these have no long-term successful business models. What they might have are seductive stories – potential to change the world, potential to transform society, and the most seductive story of all, the potential to make you very rich very quickly. Limited information creates the right environment to nurture these stories because whatever information you can get becomes definitive. The siren song these stocks sing are already powerful in and of itself, but even more so when there are no other credible voices of caution.

Micro market capitalizations further nurture this environment because it usually keeps professionals away. By virtue of having a small market cap, it is nearly impossible to make meaningful amounts of money for the professionals (e.g. shorting), and thus many that could see through the risks of penny stocks are not engaged. Retail investors also popularly assume that many long-term winner once began as penny stocks:

Investors who have fallen into the trap of the first fallacy believe Wal-Mart, Microsoft and many other large companies were once penny stocks that have appreciated to high dollar values. Many investors make this mistake because they are looking at the “adjusted stock price,” which takes into account all stock splits. By taking a look at both Microsoft and Wal-Mart, you can see that the respective prices on their first days of trading were $21 and $16.50, even though the prices adjusted for splits was about eight cents and one cent, respectively. Rather than starting at a low market price, these companies actually started high, continually rising until they needed to be split.

-Investopedia, The Lowdown on Penny Stocks

But the most important one of all – low liquidity. It is through low liquidity that penny stocks gain their immense volatility. As money pours in (or out), low liquidity guarantees that trades will easily move penny stocks like a leaf-blower through a forest floor.

Why Some Penny Stocks Soar While Others Languish and are Simply Forgotten

Many retail investors have limited ability (or perhaps desire) to conduct research on companies. Many retail investors are simply chartists. But to become a shooting star, penny stocks need a story. Although the most seductive story of all is always the same – you can be rich very quickly – even speculators usually demand a story that has some semblance of fundamental long-term potential.

Because of that, many penny stock shooting stars begin with a sponsor that formulates this story and sells it to potential speculators. These sponsors are the ones that get the flywheel going. Story formulation is not the hard part, but how do you convince speculators that there is potentially a lot of money to be made? The easiest way is to show that a lot of money has already been created, but don’t just sit there or you will miss out on all the rest! By targeting low liquidity penny stocks, a sponsor can buy a meaningful amount of stock initially, which drives up the price because of the low liquidity. This creates the initial gains that will eventually draw in other speculators. Once the flywheel is in full motion, the sponsor will quietly sell down the initial purchase at a handsome gain, leaving speculative followers with the aftermath.

This is known as pump-and-dump:

The same scheme can be perpetrated by anyone with access to an online trading account and the ability to convince other investors to buy a stock that is supposedly ready to take off. The schemer can get the action going by buying heavily into a stock that trades on low volume, which usually pumps up the price. The price action induces other investors to buy heavily, pumping the share price even higher. At any point when the schemer feels the buying pressure is ready to fall off, he can dump his shares for a big profit.

-Investopedia, Pump and Dump

Regardless of how sophisticated you are with the markets, I’m quite certain most people know that pump-and-dumps never end well (unless you are the sponsor or a speculator that recognizes a pump-and-dump for what it is and are able to get out in time).

Drawing Parallels to Bitcoin

So what are the parallels to Bitcoin and alt-coins? Simple, all the conditions that make penny stocks potential vehicles for speculation have been present in Bitcoin and alt-coins.

Firstly, Bitcoins and alt-coins are new areas driven by technology that has not matured and continues to evolve. This creates an environment that is a vacuum for information that is necessary to judge the long-term fundamentals of the asset class. In addition, the amount of technical knowledge needed to understand cryptocurrencies mean that a small subset of people can establish themselves as the de-facto experts on the future and possibilities of cryptocurrencies. Regardless of whether these expert opinions are well-placed or not, they formulate and control the story and overwhelmingly the story has been about the potential for cryptocurrencies to change everything – your life, your finances, government, everything.

Cryptocurrencies in the aggregate recently accumulated a market cap of >$160bn, certainly not micro cap under any definition. However, we should view that in light of the 30-40x growth within the past year. We need to consider the market cap before the rise, and even as recently as October of last year, the aggregate market cap of all cryptocurrencies according to Coinmarketcap.com was as low as $13bn.

Cryptocurrency Market Cap

And as with penny stocks, the most important factor of all – low liquidity. I cannot overstate how important this factor is for understanding why Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies began a sudden rise less than a year ago.

Let’s take a look at Bitcoin trading volumes over the last 6 months (via data.bitcoinity.org):

6m Bitcoin Volume.jpg

We can observe a few spikes here and there, but overall the volumes have been fairly steady. Do note that volumes rose significantly as the recent sell-off intensified in August / September.

But the more informative chart is to see what volumes have done over the past year – you will be shocked:

Bitcoin 2 Year Volume

Volumes absolutely collapsed between December and January. In fact, liquidity nearly entirely dried up.

Where did the liquidity declines come from? Cutting the data another way, we can see which exchanges were responsible for most of the trading over the past two years: BTCChina, Huobi, and OKCoin. These three exchanges were responsible for close to 90% of all Bitcoin trading over the past 2 years, but suddenly the entire volumes of all three exchanges evaporated at the end of last year.

Bitcoin Volume by Exchange

The drop in volumes was due largely to Chinese regulations tightening up the trading of cryptocurrencies. Coindesk featured an interesting article highlighting this dynamic earlier in the year.

Due to the significant decline of Bitcoin trading volume earlier this year, I believe it is clear that Bitcoin’s low liquidity created conditions that are normally only observable in penny stocks. This low liquidity likely allowed well-meaning technologists and venture capitals that are true believers of cryptocurrencies to inadvertently act like sponsors akin to those of penny stock schemes. The buying of cryptocurrencies into extremely thin liquidity created the initial 5x-10x gains that would later bring masses of retail speculators.

Do All Shooting Stars Eventually Burn Out?

Here’s the thing – with penny stocks, the rise usually comes to an end because the sponsor sells out at the top. The sponsor considers when s/he has maximized the number of speculators (or prey depending on how you look at it) that can get pulled in and then will sell out at the top. Sponsors always have an endgame of getting out before the crowd finds out.

I have no doubts that given the extremely low liquidity in cryptocurrencies today, that if the large cryptocurrency wallets (and yes, there are a number of wallets out there are are very massive in size) were to cash out, downside volatility would be as dramatic as the rise we have seen year to date.

The question is how many of the early “investors” in cryptocurrencies believe enough in the long term to not be concerned about volatility and therefore feel compelled to go back into cash / government-issued currency? If Bitcoins and alt-coins were truly only in the hands of true believers, low liquidity could mean that we continue to see these cryptocurrencies appreciate 50x or 100x or even more from here.

The question is, again, are cryptocurrencies in the hands of true believers?

One anchor that many investors / speculators in Bitcoin fixate on is that the number of Bitcoins that will ever be in existence is fixed (currently growing at a small rate but total that will ever be mined is fixed). Yes – this is true, and perhaps one reason why Bitcoin should appreciate relative to the growing stock of government-issued currency. But 30-40x in 9 months? That’s only possible not because the stock of Bitcoins is fixed, but because the tradable float of Bitcoin has been declining. Just ask yourself how many cryptocurrency investors you’ve heard say that they will buy and sit on it and never sell – these coins are locked away and in effect reduce the tradable float. The tradable float is declining every day.

When will this locked up float suddenly come back to exchanges? That will be a terrible moment.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I’ll leave it up to readers to decide on the direction of prices. I have no view. What I have a view on is that Bitcoin and alt-coins have increasingly become like penny stocks.

I’ll close with a quote from Fred Wilson, a celebrated Venture Capitalist:

I know a lot of people who are true believers in crypto and have made fortunes in it. They are “all in” on crypto and have much of their net worth (all in some cases) invested in this sector. I worry about them and this post is aimed at them and others like them. It is fine to be a true believer and being all in on crypto has made them a lot of money. But preservation of capital is about diversification and I think and hope that they will take some money off the table, pay the taxes, and invest it elsewhere.

-Fred Wilson, Diversification (aka How to Survive a Crash)

Beware – even the faith of the true believers may waiver.

The World’s Most Valuable E-Commerce Company

Is possibly going to be Alibaba very soon.

Amazon vs BABA

For a long while following it’s IPO in 2014, investors were highly skeptical of Alibaba. Many still are, but many more are starting to recognize Alibaba’s incredible dominance in China. More importantly, as mentioned briefly in my post Tencent vs Alibaba on the Quest to Go Global, the company stands a fairly good chance of going global.

Despite the rising enthusiasm for Alibaba, the company appears to be underrated. A few examples:

  • As of FY16, Alibaba reported gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $547 billion across its e-commerce platforms. Amazon does not report GMV but estimates peg it around $300 billion.
  • Alibaba had annual active buyers of 466 million as of 2Q17. Amazon does not report annual customer count, but Statista pegs it at ~300 million.
  • Alibaba owns approx. 1/3 of Ant Financial, which is the world’s largest fintech co. Amazon has surprisingly limited interest in fintech.

Amazon is rightly known as an aggressive competitor, but Jeff Bezos once squared off with Jack Ma in China and lost (Amazon was also relatively late to China). Both are now vying for control of India. But their strategies could not be more different: Amazon is essentially carrying out a very similar playbook to the one in the US (superior distribution/logistics + Prime), while Alibaba has gone the fintech route and leveraging that to enter e-commerce.

Will be interesting to see how India plays out since Amazon is determined to not let India slip out of its hands and is currently near pole position.

Predicting the Potential of “New Electricity” by Looking at the Lessons of “Old Electricity”

Andrew Ng (former Chief Scientist at Baidu, Co-founder of Coursera) is fond of referring to AI as the “new electricity”. Similar to how electrification ended up transforming every single industry during the 20th Century, AI is broadly expected to have similar (if not greater) impact in the coming years.

This post by Oscar Li does a great job encapsulating Andrew Ng’s thoughts as shared during a recent lecture at Stanford.

The social and business ramifications are easy to extrapolate / imagine: Anything that you can do now, you can do better with more AI and data. And as the technology that underpins AI continues to improve and the datasets continue to grow, AI will allow us (or machines) to do whole new things not possible before.

If you’re like me, it’s actually quite overwhelming to ponder the full implications of AI. But if AI is on track to transform the world like how electricity did, we should be able to learn some lessons and create some useful predictions by looking at what happened a century ago.

Lessons from Electrification:

  1. Everyone Electrified and then Electricity was no Longer a Differentiating Factor: Today, companies that use AI and data have an advantage over those that don’t. A similar dynamic existed a century ago. Retailers that were electrified had an advantage over those that didn’t. Factories that were electrified had an advantage over those that didn’t. Eventually all businesses either adopted electrification or were out-competed. However, once electrification was fully borne out, it was no longer an advantage. A similar dynamic also played out with air conditioning in the middle of the 20th century where early adopters had an advantage, but once every retailer adopted air conditioning, it became a necessity rather than an advantage.
  2. Electricity Changed How Business was Done But Had Less of an Impact on the “Jobs to be Done”: Electrification allowed businesses to extend their hours of operations, drastically increasing efficiency and productivity. Electrification also brought about new machinery and tools that similarly improved efficiency. In other words, electricity made businesses (and people) better at their craft but had less of an impact in terms of the goals that businesses pursued. Retailers remained retailers. Manufacturers remained manufacturers. Service providers remained service providers. This is perhaps the most interesting takeaway (or contrast) with current assumptions around AI – namely that AI will necessarily lead to “new” products / services.
  3. The New Business Model Created by Electrification was the Electric Utility: Although electrification had large ramifications on how existing industries operated, the only key new business model to emerge appears to be the electric utility to provide the fuel for the disruptive technology (I’m not quite sure if this statement is entirely accurate – if any readers have supporting evidence for / against, please do share). Similarly, how many new business models should we anticipate in the coming AI explosion? It’s clear that AI will be important for existing industries, but how many new types of businesses should we expect? Perhaps a “data utility”, but what else?
  4. Other than Utilities, No One Made Money on Electricity: Once every business adopted electricity, it was no longer a differentiating factor by and of itself. As a result, electrification become purely a cost of doing business. Only utilities made money off of electricity. Can this be extrapolated to AI and data? Will it purely become a cost of doing business?
  5. Electricity Led to a “Cambrian Explosion” in Hardware: Although electrification appeared to merely change how businesses were run, it did lead to many new hardware products such as light bulbs, phonographs, radios, televisions, etc. Turned out that the best way to monetize electricity other than operating a utility was to produce hardware. This was the genesis of General Electric. Perhaps that is also what we should expect of AI.

These are just a handful of lessons. There are probably more that can be added to this list.

Taking these into account, it’s not outrageous to ponder whether AI can truly be monetized if not offered as B2B service (e.g. the utility model) or bundled with hardware (e.g. Amazon Echo, Siri / Google Assistant / Cortana in devices). Are there alternate monetization pathways if neither of these are feasible?

One thing that is an interesting contrast between AI/data and electricity is that AI algorithms and datasets are not commodities like electricity. Every utility’s product is the same. But AI algorithms and datasets are not interchangeable. What are the implications of having non-interchangeable “fuel” for one of the most disruptive technologies of the 21st Century?

Tencent vs Alibaba on the Quest to Go Global

Finally catching up on some reading: Bloomberg published an excellent profile on Tencent and the co’s strategist, Martin Lau. I highly recommend the article as it not only goes through the history of the company, but reveals the type of thinking and mentality that has helped Tencent become one of the most successful companies in the world.

For the uninitiated, Tencent is one of the “BAT” trinity (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) that dominate the Chinese tech space. The Chinese are increasingly living their lives in a “digital-first” manner, and as a result, BAT’s influence extends across nearly all aspects of Chinese life in a way that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple can only wish (and try to replicate with limited success thus far). All three players operate across nearly all verticals including social, video/entertainment, e-commerce, search, browsers, app stores, delivery, cloud services, payments, finance, and many more. They have gone beyond being just software/service companies to essentially digital lifestyle companies.

Despite the BAT moniker, investors view the strengths of each company quite differently.

Generally, Baidu (the company with search as its core strength) is viewed as the weakest. Unlike Google’s dominance in the US, Baidu has struggled to find its place in China’s highly digitized mobile world were users largely spend their time in Tencent or Alibaba’s walled gardens. Whereas Google has been able to run its search crawlers through the open internet and through the Android platform (majority global share), Baidu does not have the luxury of a dominant mobile platform nor access to the increasingly large amounts of data that is generated outside of the browser.

Of the remaining two, Alibaba and Tencent are generally neck-and-neck. Alibaba absolutely dominates in e-commerce and payments/finance while Tencent owns the incredibly sticky WeChat messaging super-app with a fast growing payments solution. Nonetheless, investors overwhelmingly consider Tencent to be a much stronger business with a 1yr forward P/E of 45x to Alibaba’s 34x despite similar growth rates according to consensus estimates. The difference in perception largely comes down to the fact that investors consider WeChat to be mostly un-disruptable while Alibaba is currently contending with a sizable #2 player in JD.

However, I believe that perception is misplaced especially when we consider Tencent’s and Alibaba’s prospects for going global.

The Bloomberg article mentioned above highlights the challenges that Tencent faces in trying to export its WeChat model abroad:

Then there’s the matter of Facebook Inc. and WhatsApp, which have a huge market advantage pretty much everywhere outside China. Going overseas, Lau says, “is essentially the challenge of every Chinese company. We tried to make WeChat international. The reality was that there were other products in the market already.”

Tencent faces a much more formidable competitor in Facebook as they try to expand abroad, while the global e-commerce landscape is much more benign for Alibaba. E-commerce is much more fragmented on a global scale, and Amazon is nowhere near as dominant on a global scale as Facebook is for social networking.

The valuation gap between the two companies only make sense in a China-specific context. In a global context, why should that gap exist?

Disclosure: I have no direct beneficial interest in Tencent (700 HK) or Alibaba (BABA) as of publishing date and have no intent to initiate a position within the next 48 hours. 

Temptations to Go Beyond Our Circle of Competence

Summer’s full swing has kept me away from this blog, but luckily it gave me some time to think more deeply about a number of ideas and topics.

One of those is: What tempts us to go beyond our circle of competence?

Buffett constantly warns investors against going outside their circle of competence since doing so would mean treading into industries/areas where one would not have an edge. Yet, despite this constant exhortation and strong evidence that sticking to one’s own domain of expertise is a very good strategy, very few seem to follow that sage advice (including myself on a number of occasions in the past – I certainly hope I won’t ever experience another JCP).

Although I am speaking from an investing context, this advice is clearly useful as a general life strategy. I often chuckle when the average Joe wants to teach their doctor about how to deal with certain ailments…

So I gave this question a good think while on a walk.

And then I realized that it’s not so much that we, humans, are terrible at remembering good advice. It’s that the cards are stacked against us.

The investing market has become far more crowded in recent years, and there are far too many bright people chasing similar ideas. In order to truly make a lot money, two things need to happen: 1) You are right about something that nearly everyone thinks is wrong (contrarian), or 2) You are right about something before anyone has even heard about it. And unfortunately, both of these things naturally push us outside of our circle of competence.

Let’s consider the first case where we find ourselves amongst a small minority view. If the opposition is equally smart (and good looking) and working purely within their circle of competence, it is highly unlikely that we, as a minority, would have the right view and also be within our circle of competence. It is highly unlikely in such a situation that both longs and shorts are within their own circle of competence but then come to different conclusions from the facts at hand. These are battleground stocks (like Ackman short Herbalife vs Icahn long Herbalife) and best avoided…clearly one of them is outside their circle of competence. Where the investor base is generally “smart”, the consensus probably holds the right view, and as a result the opportunity for alpha is low.

Let’s consider the second case where we find a brilliant new opportunity (a fine gem!) before anyone else has heard about it. These situations usually only come about from two pools of stocks: 1) Small caps, and 2) New companies. Assuming we put in the effort to sift through the long tail of small caps and new companies, we should be able to generate alpha. But here we also find that the world constantly conspires against us to push us outside of our circle of competence! These companies are often in new industries or with untested business models. Though we may deem ourselves to be within our circle of competence, the potential for misjudgment is higher.

In some prior time, investing was a much simpler endeavor, and sticking within one’s circle of competence was likely a much easier task to accomplish. Generating alpha is always easier when “investors” do not understand the basic tenets of fundamental investing. Now the market is crowded, and it seems to me that sophisticated investors are increasingly pushed outside their circle of competence in order to achieve alpha.

What a tough cookie.

 

You Know What’s Better than Owning an Airline?

An airport. 

Airports are natural monopolies. Who wouldn’t like owning a natural monopoly?

And unlike other natural monopolies such as local utilities, airports tend to be higher growth assets (air travel is less penetrated than electricity). 

At a high level, airports receive revenues from 2 sources: 1) fees on passenger tickets, and 2) commercial revenues generated in airports (e.g. rents from terminal vendors, parking fees, baggage fees, etc).

Airport business models are generally superior to airline business models in nearly every single way:

  • Usually exempt from competition at the local / micro level – Many cities only have one airport. Only in extremely high-trafficked areas will there be multiple airports serving the same catchment area, but that’s a rich problem to have.
  • Less cyclical than airlines – Airports generally receive a large proportion of revenues as fees from passenger tickets. During recessions or downturns, airlines are incentivized to cut prices to keep planes full. That behavior supports passenger flow, which acts as a countercyclical buffer for airports.
  • Beneficiary of irrational airline competition – Since airports are more levered to passenger flow than ticket prices, irrational competition between airlines (e.g. low ticket prices) could lead to higher passenger flow, while airline income statements bear the cost.
  • Lower sensitivity to commodity prices – No need to worry about direct impact of oil (although there is some indirect impact if oil prices change enough to affect ticket prices and air travel demand).

There are no publicly traded airports in the US, but many well-trafficked airports around the world are privately operated and publicly listed. And a cursory glance at 10-year stock price performance illustrates the lower volatility and range of outcomes for airports vs airlines.

Mexican American Airports (ASUR MM – Cancun, GAPB MM – Guadalajara, OMAB MM – Monterrey) vs Mexican Airlines (Aeromex, Volaris) and Pan-LatAm/Brazilian Airlines (Gol, Copa)

The Mexican airports have seen stock price increase anywhere between 4x to 9x over the last 10 years. The Mexican airlines have only been public for less than 2/3 of the timeframe but have not even doubled. I have also generously left out the Mexicana bankruptcy in 2010. Gol has declined by 93% over the last 10 years. Copa has done decency well, returning 4.7x.

Mexican Airports

Mexican Airlines

European Airports (KBHL DC – Copenhagen, FHZN SW – Swiss, FLU AV – Vienna, FRA GY – Frankfurt) vs European Airlines (IAG LN – British Air/Iberia/Aer Lingus, RYA ID – Ryanair, EZJ LN – Easyjet, NAS NO – Norwegian Air, AB1 GY – Air Berlin)

European airlines have done decently well (excluding Air Berlin, which has lost 96% of value in 10 years), mainly because of the low-cost carriers Ryanair and Easyjet. As a result, airlines have kept up decently well with airports but with higher volatility, nonetheless.

European Airports

European Airlines

Chinese Airports (694 HK – Beijing, 600009 C1- Shanghai, 600004 CH- Guangzhou, 357 HK – Hainan) vs Chinese Airlines (1055 HK – China Southern, 670 HK – China Eastern, 2610 TT – China Air, 600221 CH – Hainan Air, 753 HK – Air China)

Out of the various geographies, China appears to be the most volatile, even for the airports. Airports have done fairly average, returning 56% to 2.9x over the last 10 years. However, similar to the other geographies, airport performance is better clustered than airline performance. Airlines have returned anywhere from -65% to 4.8x.

Asian Airports

Asian Airlines

Seems to me that airports are generally one of those assets that you can buy and tuck away for a very long time. 

Disclosure: I have no direct beneficial interest in any airline or airport mentioned as of publishing date and have no intent to initiate a position within the next 48 hours. 

Pandora – Fast Fashion or Fad Fashion?

What would you pay for a well-regarded, branded business that is expected to grow revenues and net income around 10% CAGR for the next 3-5 years with industry leading margins, high returns on capital, and low capital intensity?

And better yet, given that this business has low capital intensity, the company generates and distributes high free cash flows back to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks, bringing total shareholder returns to 15%+ per year?

That’s Pandora (the jeweler) in a nutshell.

And unusually, Pandora trades at just 12.5x trailing P/E (~10.5x 1yr forward P/E) and 10x trailing EV/EBITDA (~8.5x 1yr forward) based on analyst estimates.

Were the multiple to revert closer to branded peers or the index as a whole, that would potentially add another 40-50% return. Realizing that over a 3-5 year period would add an additional 10-13% return per year, bringing total returns to 25%-30% CAGR.

Of course the natural question to ask is why the market doesn’t see or believe the story? It all comes down to durability of the core product.

A Brief History of Pandora

Pandora is a Danish jeweler that was established in the 1980s. Although it’s been around for quite a long time, the company’s modern formula for success did not come about until the early 2000s when Pandora launched the charm and bracelet product.

Pandora Charms.png

The bracelet forms the core of the product, but the charms is where the magic lies. Through the selection of charms, Pandora customers (almost exclusively female) can personalize their bracelets and switch it up depending on the occasion. Today, Pandora carries a catalogue of more than 700 different charms, covering nearly every occasion and personal taste imaginable.

Through this product, Pandora embarked on a fantastic journey of growth with revenues expanding >12x between 2008 and 2016.

Pandora Revenue Growth.png

Pandora Today

Today, charms makes up ~60% of revenues with another ~20% coming from bracelets. The remaining 20% is composed of rings, earrings, and necklaces – categories that were mostly launched after 2013 in order to expand Pandora’s portfolio.

Pandora sells through 3 formats – concept stores, shop-in-shops, and multi-branded. Concept stores are standalone Pandora stores where the customer experience is designed and tightly-controlled by the company. Over the past few years, Pandora has been shifting the mix from predominantly shop-in-shop and multi-branded towards concept stores.

And layered on top of the channels, Pandora either runs the stores themselves or acts as a franchisor. Currently, 38% of revenues are generated through Pandora owned concept stores while the remainder is generated by franchisees or 3rd party distributors. In owned stores, Pandora captures the full retail price, while in franchise/3rd party stores, Pandora sells into those channels at a wholesale price. The difference is 2.4x (i.e. $100 worth of wholesale goods would fetch $240 if sold within owned stores).

Charmed or Cursed?

So far, the charms business has performed exceptionally well. Not only has it attracted a large customer base, it is also distinctly Pandora, which is an unusual feat of differentiation in the jewelry business. Jewelry tends to be a fairly commoditized industry (the inputs are commodities and final products are usually not distinguishable across brands) so product differentiation is usually non-existent except perhaps in ultra-high-end jewelry.

But that is exactly the paradox here – Pandora is not an ultra-high-end jeweler (Pandora’s price points are $25-$200), and the company sells a product that is quite non-traditional for a jeweler.

The prevailing thinking is that Pandora charms are a fad. One day customers will get over it, and sales will plummet. 

This fear has percolated for a decade, but over the past 12 months, the fear seems to have materialized. Reported like-for-like sales slowed across all regions with the most recent numbers in North America turning negative (this was partially compounded by confusing metric calculations, but I’ll refrain from discussing the nuances to avoid complexity). As a result, the stock has declined approx. 1/3 over the last 12 months.

In essence, the market appears to assume that Pandora is cursed, and one day investors will wake up to find that the charms business has been nothing more than a passing illusion. 

What Makes a Fad?

I challenge that view. Certainly there will come a day in which the charms business will be fully mature, but the performance of the charms business does not carry the usual characteristics of a fad.

For one, Pandora has been selling charms since 2000. If charms were a fad, the customer base would have likely moved on many years ago, yet the charms business still exists 17 years later. If this were a fad, it would certainly be the longest living fad.

Pandora recently conducted a survey of former customers and discovered that many customers remain interested in the brand and would consider buying Pandora products even after 6+ years.

Pandora Customer Consideration.png

In addition, fads usually tend to develop within certain groups (e.g. teens) or geographies. Yet, neither of these are observable within the Pandora customer base. Pandora charms and bracelets are worn across the age spectrum, and Pandora’s products are finding success across the world from the US to Latin America to the UK to continental Europe to Australia and to Asia. The global success of the product suggests broad appeal, and such broad appeal does not suggest a fad. 

A Fast Fashion Business Model

Rather than getting hung-up on whether the product is a fad or not, I think it’s more instructive to think about the business model and how the company operates.

At its core, Pandora is a fast fashion jeweler. Unlike traditional jewelers that have inventory cycles longer than a year and glacial lead times, Pandora’s inventory cycle is less than a year and lead time is only ~100 days. The company is targeting lead times of just several weeks by the end of this decade. Like Zara, the fast fashion retailer, Pandora can respond relatively quickly to customer preferences and adjust the product mix as the data prescribes. No one worries that Zara can’t sell fashion because when they do have a fashion miss on their hands, they can respond and fix the issue within weeks. Pandora is positioned similarly in the jewelry world.

Pandora sells fashion and newness, not “forever”. Diamonds are forever. Pandora doesn’t do diamonds. What Pandora does do is drop 7 collections a year. Every season and holiday brings a new collection, a new reason for customers to pop in and see what else they can add to their collection, in effect creating a recurring customer/revenue streams. Given the low prices, charms are priced to be impulse purchases.

In addition, Pandora is a branded affordable jeweler. Investors and pundits seem to have a tendency to compare Pandora to other branded jewelers, which tend to be higher end. Pandora is no Tiffany. Pandora’s true competitors are mom & pop jewelers. Pandora offers customers a good brand, attractive products at an affordable price, and fashion – everything that mom & pops do not have the scale to offer.

If we consider the business model, it seems more than likely that if charms truly were declining, Pandora has the right business model to quickly adjust and adapt to whatever is next. 

What If I’m Wrong

Pandora is already priced as if the business will cease to exist in 10 years. That’s a fairly large margin of safety given that analysts expect the business to continue to grow at 10% CAGR for the next few years, but a couple of other things offer additional comfort:

  • Jewelry as a category is growing ~5% per year. If Pandora’s above-average growth simply normalized to industry growth, you would still have an okay business for the share price available today.
  • Pandora’s newer categories are growing >50% per year. In just about 3 years, Pandora has launched and grown non-charms/bracelet categories that now represent 20% of total revenues. Within a few years, these categories could represent 40-50% of total revenues, significantly reducing the dependence and fear of charms.
  • If worst comes to worst, Pandora’s continued conversion of franchise stores to owned stores would keep revenues unchanged even if the entire charms business goes away since owned stores generated 2.4x more revenues on an apples-to-apples basis compared to the wholesale channel. 

So the risk/reward looks pretty good to me.

Disclosure: I have no direct beneficial interest in PNDORA DC as of publishing date but I may initiate a position within the next 48 hours.