“Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.” – Benjamin Graham
“I am a better investor because I am a businessman and a better businessman because I am an investor.” – Warren Buffett
Most investors define themselves along a couple of axes: Technical vs fundamental, value vs growth, long vs (and/or) short, contrarian vs momentum, large cap vs small cap, etc. These labels are well understood and established conventions.
However, these labels distract from what is most important when it comes to investing – an understanding of the underlying business.
Whether you are a fundamental investor, a value investor, a growth investor, a contrarian investor, all of these labels serve only to illustrate the “how” and not the “what” or “why”. It seems remarkably odd that few investors refer to themselves as a Business Model Investor, which I believe is a much truer expression of the essence of investing.
The Benefits of Focusing on Business Models
Though I bear the risk of promoting myself to Captain Obvious, I think it’s important to call out what’s important – investing is most likely to succeed when we think of ourselves as buying businesses, and buying businesses entail understanding the business model and how it works.
I believe this is distinctly different from just understanding a company’s products, describing Porter’s 5 Forces, and assessing strategic vision / management.
Understanding business models can help us uncover great companies with sustainable businesses that otherwise may not be apparent.
The Scourge of Retail
Today, most investors understand Amazon’s outsized impact on traditional brick & mortar retailers including the venerable Walmart. But it was not that long ago that many assumed brick & mortar would be able to leverage their larger scale (at the time) to ward off Amazon and other threats. Surely, Walmart with all its might and low prices can take the fight to Amazon if it wanted to. And of course, brick & mortar had the benefit of strong earnings / cash flows, whereas Amazon had none of the 1st and few of the 2nd (still has essentially no earnings today but cash flows are a massively different story). These were prevailing views just 3-4 years ago.
I think this is a perfect example where business model investing has been far more fruitful. All of the traditional retailers did have a scale advantage (not anymore), but scale is not a business model. Scale is merely a competitive advantage, and a disrupt-able one against a well-funded competitor.
Amazon has the benefit of a better business model. It’s a retailer that did not have to carry the significant costs associated with physical stores or sales staff. From a business model investing perspective, it takes just a few words to understand Amazon’s advantage. These advantages are not as easily understood from just looking at historical financial statements (of which earnings look terrible and earnings-based ROIC looks laughably poor). Understanding these advantages require thinking of the business model holistically.
Finding the “Most Valuable Company in the World” in No Man’s Land
Apple, the most valuable company in the world, is a curious case. It continues to thrive in the metaphorical graveyard of tech. Few companies have survived (and thrived) for long in tech hardware because the fundamental forces at work are overwhelming – commoditized products, persistently declining prices (not least driven by Moore’s Law), fragmented landscape with too many competitors to count…Generally a terrible industry. And all of these elements are likely to remain true for the foreseeable future, leading many investors to make the case that sooner (and perhaps rather than later) Apple will succumb to the same forces that has brought down Nokia, Motorola, HP, etc.
But that view ignores Apple’s different (and unique) business model within the tech hardware industry.
From a consumer perspective, Apple’s business model is simple – sell highly-designed, premium products where every element / component is customized for use.
But from a strategy standpoint, Apple’s business model is secrecy. Whereas Apple’s peers like to run their companies like scientific experiments in broad daylight, Apple’s business model is to play the cards close to their vest. Is it any mystery then why Apple has been and will continue to be a disruptor of the industry? Nearly everything that can potentially disrupt Apple is brandished in broad daylight years before the hero’s blade is finished forging. Apple knows what’s coming from nearly everyone else, but does the rest of the industry know what’s coming from Apple?
And how does this business model address the overwhelming forces of the tech hardware industry? It allows Apple to differentiate their products with non-commoditized hardware, which can be monopolized for a (short, e.g. 1 year) period of time. Apple has to keep fighting these forces, but it’s a perpetual 1 year advantage until ideas run out (and the human race has demonstrated for 10,000 years that there are many more ideas than we can pursue).
Apple’s vertically-integrated product model also has the advantage of getting innovations to customers far faster than peers. Google is a very able peer in the smartphone OS space, but their innovations are taking on average about 3 years to get into customer hands. The majority of their customers are still using an OS that shipped in 2014 or earlier.
One should rightfully assume that tech hardware is a tough space, but from a business model perspective, it’s easier to see that Apple plays a different game and should have been apparent long, long before Apple became a household name or the world’s most valuable company.
Business Model Differentiation Worth More than “Competitive Advantages”?
One idea that I’ve been turning over in my mind is the importance of having a differentiated business model rather than just pure “competitive advantage”. After all, BHP and Rio Tinto have the unbreakable competitive advantage of immense scale in an industry where large mines cannot be willed from thin air through cash alone. But I do not think it is a stretch to say that BHP and Rio Tinto do not have differentiated business models and are bystanders to the same industry forces that buffet their peers.
Are differentiated business models the most important thing?