Chit Chat Stocks - Celsius Energy Drinks, Meta Platforms, and Spotify Uncertainty With Alex Morris (CELH, META, SPOT)
Episode Date: April 14, 2024The Investing Power Hour is live-streamed every Thursday on the Chit Chat Stocks YouTube channel. This week, Alex Morris from the TSOH Investing Research Service joined the show to discuss: (08:07...) International Expansion and Distribution Partnerships for Celsius (27:09) The Future Growth of Netflix and the Potential of an Ad-Supported Tier (41:00) Spotify's Stock Performance and Future Prospects (55:23) Insights from the Piper Sandler Teen Survey (01:02:45) The Importance of Data and Financial Metrics in Analysis Find more from Alex here: https://thescienceofhitting.com/ ***************************************************** Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChitChatStocks Follow us on Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/chitchatstocks Follow us on Substack: https://chitchatstocks.substack.com/ ********************************************************************* Options are not suitable for all investors and carry significant risk. Option investors can rapidly lose the value of their investment in a short period of time and incur permanent loss by expiration date. Certain complex options strategies carry additional risk. There are additional costs associated with option strategies that call for multiple purchases and sales of options, such as spreads, straddles, among others, as compared with a single option trade. Prior to buying or selling an option, investors must read and understand the “Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options”, also known as the options disclosure document (ODD) which can be found at: www.theocc.com/company-information/documents-and-archives/options-disclosure-document Supporting documentation for any claims will be furnished upon request. If you are enrolled in our Options Order Flow Rebate Program, The exact rebate will depend on the specifics of each transaction and will be previewed for you prior to submitting each trade. This rebate will be deducted from your cost to place the trade and will be reflected on your trade confirmation. Order flow rebates are not available for non-options transactions. To learn more, see our Fee Schedule, Order Flow Rebate FAQ, and Order Flow Rebate Program Terms & Conditions. Options can be risky and are not suitable for all investors. See the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options to learn more. All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA & SIPC. See public.com/#disclosures-main for more information. ********************************************************************* FinChat.io is The Complete Stock Research Platform for fundamental investors. With its beautiful design and institutional-quality data, FinChat is incredibly powerful and easy to use. Use our LINK and get 15% off any premium plan: https://finchat.io/chitchat/?lmref=J3bklw ********************************************************************* Check out https://www.firmreturns.com/ for value-focused equity research Use our link and get a 20% discount on a premium plan: firmreturns.com/chitchat ********************************************************************* Disclosure: Chit Chat Stocks hosts and guests are not financial advisors, and nothing they say on this show is formal advice or a recommendation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome to Chit Chat Stocks. On this show, hosts Ryan Henderson and Brett Schaefer analyze
businesses and riff on the world of investing. As a quick reminder, Chit Chat Stocks is a
CCM Media Group podcast. Anything discussed on Chit Chat Stocks by Ryan, Brett, or any
other podcast guest is not formal advice or recommendation. Now, please enjoy this episode.
Okay, welcome in everyone. I believe we are live. This is the Investing Power Hour
number 106. And today we have a special guest, Alex Morris from the TSOH Investing Research
Service, subbing in for Ryan and he is gone on a company retreat with our good friends at
FinChat.io. Alex, I think this is the first time doing this format, a little bit more fun,
a little bit less preparation, I guess I would say a little bit more off the cuff. So how are
you doing? And excited to have you here. Good. Thanks for having me. I'm hoping we're gonna do
a lightning round at some point. I'm ready to ready to make some bold claims. Let's do it.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This is where we test out ideas. And then listen back a week or two later
and go, did I really say that? I because I actually disagree exactly with what I just said
there. But yeah, I think we could start off, just kick things going with your Celsius energy drink
and also kind of the comprehensive energy drink write up. And we're going to get into that. But
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Full disclosures in podcast description. U.S. members only. All right, Alex, let's get into it.
Celsius. I thought it was an interesting write-up. I read it in preparation for this.
And I guess maybe first, what were your big takeaways from, I think, your first look at
the company? Yeah, first look at the company, unfortunately, because it's actually not too
far from where I'm at. So it's a company I should have known about previously. I'm not a big
energy drink consumer, but I should have noticed what's been happening on store shelves for the
last, I mean, five, 10 years, even maybe not Celsius specifically, but in terms of, in terms
of some of the clear customer preference changes, uh, particularly at, you know, C stores and things
like that. Um, I should probably step back. My, my interest in the company really, really ties
into my interest in another beverage company, Fevertree, which operates more in the, in the
alcohol mixer space, you know, really tonics and club soda and things like that. Um, and just
thinking about what that business is today and how it can evolve over time or in my opinion already
is is starting to evolve albeit at earlier stages and as i as i was framing in my head
where they are where they may be trying to go in some of these large well-established beverage
categories i started thinking about a company like celsius that again before i had dug in my
perception was kind of that the energy drink category and i've confirmed this subsequently
The energy drink category has really two major players, particularly in the United States, in the form of Monster and Red Bull.
They account for about 70% of the category when you include the brands that Monster controls.
But obviously, the core brand is the big boy for them.
And I just thought about how Celsius came to market, to me, how different it feels from a traditional energy drink, who's likely to consume it versus who is likely to consume a monster energy drink by comparison.
And as I started digging more and more on that, I started listening to, as I always do, I started listening to interviews with the CEOs and reading on the history of the companies.
And I stumbled upon the Odd Lots podcast, which they've done episodes on Monster and Celsius, most notably with analysts from Stiefelman, Mark Astrakhan, who clearly he's been following it for, I think, 20 years or so now, basically back to the inception of kind of the US.
opportunity and someone who's just clearly very well versed on how it's played out over time,
particularly in terms of the distribution part of the equation, which I think is fascinating and
is really critical for even understanding how one of these brands can go from, in the case of
Celsius, they've gone from 50 million in sales five years ago to 1.3 billion last year and
presumably a lot of growth left ahead. And that's really all US at this point. They haven't even
really scratched the surface internationally in a very small way.
So anyways, just going down that way of thinking
and just trying to understand how these things happen,
and then obviously you can look at Monster as an earlier iteration of Celsius
that has similarly gone from, I think it was 100 million in sales in 2002.
A decade later, it was 2 billion in sales,
and last year I think was north of 7 billion.
So, and the stock price performance for both of them,
obviously monster over a longer period of time,
has just been absolutely stellar.
So anyway, just doing a lot of digging on that,
just connecting some dots.
And yeah, I think it's a fascinating category.
And, you know, you can always obviously ask the question,
is any of this kind of predictable?
And my response somewhat would be a good place to start
for trying to predict these things would be to look at the ones
that have done it subsequently to try to get your arms around
what were the key factors that got them there.
Yeah, that's what we thought when looking at Elf Beauty.
I'm hearing an echo in the background.
Can you hear that, Alex?
No.
Maybe that's, I don't know.
Maybe that's just my end.
Okay, well, we've had, I guess, some shows on Elf Beauty.
And that's another one that's just kind of similar to Celsius.
It's gotten really popular with a different entrance into the marketplace from a different, you know, perspective.
As you mentioned, Celsius going for healthier, going for different demographics.
And the conclusion we came to is, I don't know if we can predict, you know, proactively when this is going to occur.
Because I could tell you that Celsius in maybe 2021, like, yeah, this brand has got a lot of momentum.
It's pretty clear and you can see it happening.
But could you could I have said that in 2017, 2018 before, you know, a ton of the games happened?
I'm not so sure. We have some questions from the audience. I mean, you answered some of it real quick on that point.
It's perfect because because Bang probably would have been the company that you would have put in that place three, four or five years ago.
And another it's another energy company that actually is right around the corner from me.
You know, I think it's it's a great point.
And you can look at things like these press releases on, hey, we've got distribution now in C stores.
We have distribution at Walmart.
I think on that one, and granted, this is benefit of hindsight to some extent, the brand positioning there, if you look at the product and you look at the flavors and think about what they're truly selling relative to someone like Monster, I think it's an interesting thought exercise in terms of how differentiated that was and how defendable their position would be as someone like a Monster adjusted to a new competitor coming out.
to the space but to be sure it's still not obviously it's not a sure thing to predict these
things yeah exactly um here's a couple questions we have from the comments here i guess they're
all really related one does celsius have much international international presence no we
mentioned that i mean this i think james uh is from the united kingdom he says we have monster
and red bull here but i don't think i've seen celsius does alex have any theories for why
celsius hasn't expanded internationally like they have in the u.s um and then some guy says
it's popular amongst residents and doctors as he is a surgical resident which makes sense
kind of going for just that type of demographic that they're going after i think maybe an answer
go ahead quick is the main thing that's happened here well one obviously as i said five years ago
was a 50 million dollar business they're just getting right they're just getting their feet
under them even in the u.s and that market opportunity is still uh you know it seems like
there's a significant amount of white space ahead still the real game changer here for them
and there's there's history here in terms of the distribution i'd highly recommend people listen to
the odd lots podcast the one that mark astrakhan was on the the change that happened here was in
august of 22 pepsi invested in celsius and will now be riding their distribution and particularly
in terms of international. It's a much more efficient way for them to try to figure out
that part of the puzzle. So long story short, they really haven't even started yet. It's just
getting underway now. And I can pull up some data for Monster real quick, just to give some context.
You look at Monster in 2010, international business was still less than $200 million.
Last year, it was $2.7 billion. Comparable numbers for the US are $1.1 billion and $4.4.
So, you know, even Monster in 2010, which the brand took off very quickly from launch in 2002, even eight years later, it wasn't even a $200 million business internationally.
And, you know, their game-changing moment was the 2014 deal with Coca-Cola, where Coca-Cola essentially said, we're going all in on Monster as our energy bet.
You guys can ride.
And they got an equity stake as part of that.
They contributed some cash.
But you can take our brands.
you're our energy play now, and you can ride our rails to try to expand internationally,
which so far has been, I'd say in a lot of ways, a really smart deal for both parties.
Yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense for Pepsi, especially because it seems like Celsius is
encroaching on Gatorade's turf a bit. And I bet they saw some numbers where people are switching
away from that. And then Celsius benefits, as you mentioned, because convenience store space
is so important in getting that top shelf, getting a wide presence within those convenience
stores. I mean, if you look at Amazon or Costco, where Celsius has done extremely well, that's not
necessarily a place where I would think Pepsi has their advantage, but that's only a small part of
the energy drink market. Let's see, one more question.
Just add one more. Add one more as we're thinking about the bang and Celsius comparison. That's the
kind of data point for me that I'd pull out and go, okay, there's something about this that
there's a different type of customer who's shopping in Costco and Ecom for that type of
product, especially in my mind, relative to C-Store. And there's obviously overlap on a lot
of these things, but it starts to open your mind in terms of, okay, who actually is the target demo
here? And once you get to that point, the next question for me becomes, what is the actual price
competition? For someone who's a core Celsius customer, what's the deal at retail for a monster
energy drink that would convince them to switch. You might argue they're not even substitutes
because they're not really overlapping customers at the extremes for both of those brands. I'm not
sure that was ever true for Bang to the same extent. So it just, it speaks to kind of positioning
and what your brand is and what your opportunity is long-term. Right. All right. We have a question
here that says, does Alex think there's anything unique between the domestic consumer, which I
assume he means the United States and Canada, and then the international consumer's taste
preferences for energy drinks that might slow celsius down well that's a tough one i think
i don't know if you can speak for everyone from every country but what do you think it seems like
one thing that's clear from looking at monster which i'm working on now and it's going to be
the write-up for for monday following last monday celsius write-up what's clear for monster
nationally is that well one they've taken a portfolio of brands approach they call out
frequently as an example affordability as one of the the key selling points for for two of their
brands, Predator and Fury. But the other thing that's clear from the numbers I gave a minute ago
on revenues, obviously they're at an earlier stage here, but if you do X U.S. and look at revenues
and think about what consumption must be like, it's less than one-tenth of what it is in the U.S.
That may be availability, it may be just building out those markets, but it's clear that energy
drink consumption, generally speaking, outside the U.S. is not at the same place that it's at
global so there there certainly is some component of this is actually
as highly demanded internationally as it as it appears to be in the u.s
right and i do like that they're going slowly they're trying um to go into markets that
i think are at least the most similar to the united states maybe like australia you know
english-speaking market um new zealand as well and then the united kingdom but i do like that
they're going slowly one other note and it's actually in something we had here uh from the
piper sandler teen survey is they surveyed them on energy drink trends and let me zoom in so i can
see the actual data so they said they looked at the three big brands in the united states
monster red bull celsius and they said essentially you know what's your favorite brand among
teenagers and for monster was 26 red bull 25 and then celsius 17 but celsius over indexed
to younger people while red bull and monster under index so i think that's also a good sign
for celsius that as people are in their teen years and probably their 20s and anecdotally
this lines up of what i'm seeing people are drinking these type of brands and hopefully
they'll i think the bull case for celsius and obviously the stock trades at a very premium
in multiple of the bulk cases that people are going to grow up with Celsius as
they have with some of these other ones as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think you, you, you see things like over indexing,
I mean, to other relatives, other energy brands,
it over indexes to women probably skews potentially a bit younger in some
cases. Um, but also,
also introduces older consumers to the category who would not have joined
previously. And then again, on a channel mix perspective,
over-indexed to e-com and club and under-indexed to C-store.
Some of that's just getting the infrastructure built out, in my opinion.
And actually, they have little sayings like, if it's cold, it's sold, things like that.
You need to have the right placement in-store.
And you would imagine in a C-store, you're competing for a relatively limited amount
of real estate, and you have very tough competitors who you're trying to take that real estate
from.
And that's where something like the Pepsi deal becomes pretty darn important in terms
of...
It's one thing to have – the measure that they use is called ACV just in terms of is my product available in these stores.
It's great to have an ACV, but you also need to have placement in the store that actually matters, whether it's coolers, et cetera.
So there's layers to all this.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Anything else on energy drinks?
I guess you just wrote – maybe talk about what you're covering at TSOH Research among the product.
Yeah, I did Celsius this past week, which, again, is tied really into this ongoing fever tree interest that I have.
And I'm going to write a monster here next week.
And, yeah, I'm just really trying to develop a better understanding of what this category looks like.
And I really think it's, as I think back in terms of, I mean, outside evaluation, right,
but just thinking about someone like Warren Buffett and Coca-Cola in the 90s, early 2000s,
and thinking about where is Coke's mindshare
maybe underperformed relative to those expectations,
I think there has been an actual consumer desirability change
in terms of energy's gone from, again,
immaterial or non-existent category, basically,
to a pretty reasonable-sized portion of the market,
which I think speaks to what's the evolution there
and why does it matter in terms of functionality
and then how do consumer brands effectively play into that?
So it's really interesting to,
to study and to think about.
Yeah.
Okay.
Let's see questions here.
We got a lot today says,
Oh,
we got some on streaming companies.
Maybe we can talk about that quickly.
Let's see.
What would it take for Alex to turn positive on Warner brothers,
max subscribers to grow in the streaming profits to start replacing runoff
network studios to become a major profit center.
And I guess thoughts on paramount was another person.
So maybe any thoughts on subscale players right now and how they're doing?
Yeah, I just think it continues to be very difficult. And I have a general aversion to names where I have fear about the combination of financing, financial leverage, and reflexivity in terms of stock price being a mechanism for M&A or something else where you're ultimately dependent upon what that currency is worth.
So not to say that's too applicable for WBD in particular, but it is something I think about.
On Paramount, you know, I don't want to layer on people when it's already not going particularly well.
But I think it's an instructive example in terms of when you're investing, particularly being a long-term investor, you know, not letting price or valuation kind of drive the boat.
And I think especially for the people who are listening to this who are younger, I think if you asked any of them two, three, five years ago, you know, are their core properties more or less relevant in 2024 than they are today?
I think almost all of them would assuredly say that they're going to be less relevant to some extent unless they do things that would have proven quite impressive in hindsight.
for people who have been following it for a bit longer
and understand some of the corporate history
and the ownership issues, you know, what's happening now.
I think you would have put a reasonable probability
on it not going as well as minority shareholders
would hope that it would.
So these are just some,
I think they're just some of the realities of,
and that's not to say you can't make investments
in a situation like this
or that it won't work out wonderfully, potentially.
I just think it's, you see these things
and you start to go, okay,
as I'm thinking about what type of investor I want to be,
Um, what are the things that are kind of in a no-go zone for me, regardless of valuation?
And I think you can see in this case in particular, when they go poorly, I mean, again, this stock
was at what, $30 or something, a handful, excluding the crazy, the crazy pump and dump
thing, whatever that was called.
I think it was at probably 30 bucks.
You know, now we're talking about a good deal might be at half of that price.
So it's, it's a situation that no matter how you spend it, I mean, you can do well from
where a takeout happens but it surely has not gone as well as planned um and you know i think
again some of those lessons i think if you step back and look at it honestly
it's not too surprising that a lot of the things played out the way that they did
so it's just something to think about as an investor in terms of what's driving your
research process and where that's where that's leading you to in terms of portfolio holdings
okay so we're getting some of the commenters are saying there's an echo still so maybe you
can move the mic a little away from where the audio is coming out okay i'll turn off my uh
i'll turn off my headphones that might work yeah maybe try that how about now
let's see it's when i'm talking so i think that's when i'm talking so i think oh i think my mic is
picking up or excuse me your mic is picking up my input my output so you need to move the mic away
from your output speaker oh boy i got a mute button on this thing yeah uh yeah it should be
on the bottom where it says mic you can just press that button sort of like zoom
i'll mute while you're talking maybe that'll fix the problem yeah okay that's beautiful all right
let's see other questions on streaming does alex think there's going to be a pattern of
consolidation and subsequent price
raises in the subscale streamers?
Hasn't this been a question for like three or
four years now?
Yes, 100%.
It's been a question for a long time and it's
the thesis that myself
viewed as
quite likely at one point in time
and I've soured more on that as
time has gone by. Partly given
the incentives of some of the players and
again, I think Paramount's an instructive one.
It really took
getting to a breaking point for
For us to get here, you could clearly argue that in terms of the trajectory of EBITDA as an example, that something should have been done sooner and that the the likelihood of success with the current plan is at a minimum in question.
So I think the incentives of the key players, as you think about Sherry and you think about
Zaslav and you think about someone like Brian Roberts and Bob Iger, I just think there's
a lot of interest that may or may not be aligned with minority shareholders and the outcomes
they're looking for.
And then the other big kicker has been, in my mind, Netflix being abundantly clear that
they have no interest in acquiring assets that are not perfectly aligned with where
they're trying to go, i.e. they do not want to pick up a bunch of linear networks. I think it's
a very difficult situation. I'm pretty sure I wrote this a handful of years ago now. I learned
a lesson watching Walmart adjust after Doug McMillan became CEO in 2013 or 2014. He really
put an emphasis on we have to figure out e-com, but really omnichannel in terms of keeping the
stores relevant as they made that transition. And I'd say it's largely been a successful
effort. The point is it's been about 10 years and for a long time, earnings were
basically unchanged over that entire period. It's very expensive, time-consuming, et cetera,
to put yourself back in the right place after having missed a major change in how an industry
has evolved. And in the case of the media companies, it's just clear that the earnings
power is largely derived from a distribution channel that is going away. I mean, you can
speak to the data that we saw in the team survey. It's not good, obviously. And it just continues
used to be tough it has been tough and um yeah i'm not much of a my investment philosophy doesn't
really go into the dumpster diving type of type of approach so it may work out well here but for
me it's just something that i generally speaking i'm trying to stay away from especially from the
players that are the most challenged yeah and i think for any anyone watching which i believe
the video will be out on youtube and spotify we have a chart here from our friends finchat.io
of free cash flow at Paramount Global. And one thing I think should be noted here is that I
believe they have a lot of debt on this company too. So this is not even including some of those
liabilities as well. If we look at 2018, free cash flow peaked at about $3 billion, and then
it's just declined ever since. In the last two years, I mean, 2022 was negative, 2023 was barely
positive so they don't really seem to have the flexibility as opposed to a netflix let alone
the giant technology companies they're competing with amazon you know youtube and uh apple tv which
i guess apple's more subscale i think you look at this and you're like okay well maybe the studios
get bought out and maybe there's an acquisition here but is that the entire investment thesis
it can work out but it's kind of it seems unpredictable especially as you mentioned
netflix isn't going to buy anyone disney probably isn't because they already made their big
acquisitions years ago um not too long ago i guess but they made their big legacy play with fox
um and then i it doesn't seem likely that amazon already bought i guess mgm studios it doesn't
seem likely that they would go anywhere there youtube is its own thing they're not going to
acquire you on apple probably not it's like where will who is going to buy paramount and maybe it's
a merger of warner brothers discovery and paramount but is that like going to solve any of the issues
i i don't think so i think the as it relates to the big tech players i think it was interesting
to hear annie jassy today the cnbc interview with andrew ross sorkin talk about the i is it i robot
is that what it's called yeah the the robotic vacuums yeah talking about that deal and and
the regulatory environment in the u.s and you know it's just if i was any of those companies
i'd be very very reticent to even try one of these deals well outside of the regulatory
considerations i'd be a bit reticent to try and do it but especially after considering that
that component i just i think that's very very difficult so you know this has long been batted
around that you can flip the P&L pretty significantly at Paramount by shutting down
D2C and pursuing a licensing strategy. And that's just self-evident. That is true.
They have to actually want to do it and they have to actually give up everything they spent the last
couple of years working towards. And again, you're dealing with a situation where your incentives or
your perspective on how to do things may be different from the people who have control of
the entity. So it's just the reality of being an investor. Okay. One more thing on streaming.
Does Alex see Netflix's future growth as mostly coming from the ad or ad-free subscribers? Does
he see Netflix reaching enough scale for a functional advertising network? I would recommend
going to listen to our overview of Netflix and the end of the streaming wars with the UN,
Francisco Oliveira from, I believe, right at the beginning of 2024, right at the beginning of this
year. But I guess any updates on that? Any quick thoughts for the questioner?
Yeah, I'd still plug our... I think it was April 20. I think we did it in April 2022. Maybe it was
March. I'd also plug that Netflix conversation because it was a little messy back then. We had
fun on that one, as I remember. On the advertising versus ad-free, I'm personally still a little bit
up in the air. I continue to have this view that there's something really nice about being in the
position where you are the mainstay service that people subscribe to and the one that they use
the most. I mean, if you look at engagement data, it's pretty clear that's used multiples more in
terms of hours per account than a lot of the other services. I like the idea of being the
ad-free provider there and letting other people fight for, I might watch XYZ show, but I got to
watch ads while I'm doing so. And the consumer experience feels a little bit less clean and
compelling than what I have through Netflix. I still think there is rationale for having
the ad supported tier. And I think it'll be really interesting to see how they navigate
something like the WWE deal. And if they put ad slots into that product, or if they try to
turn it into something where it can basically be consumed without ads, given the unique aspects of
that, I'm going to say sport for lack of a better term, but that property. So I think it'll be
interesting to see. I'm pretty confident that it will become a decent sized business over time,
just because it'll reach a consumer that maybe doesn't have the ability or willingness to spend
for the ad-free product, especially as it gets more and more expensive with time. But I don't
know if it'll become a huge part of the business, but I could very well be proven wrong at that
we have netflix uh united states and canada paid net membership additions from our friends at
finchette and it looks like it's re-accelerated in recent quarters and i think it's probably
because the password sharing cracked on as well as the advertising tier and i guess
it's interesting to think
like i don't know how much more room they have to grow at least in the united states and canada
from this, because if you go back to, again, our conversation from 2022, there was a lot
of pessimism about they hit a ceiling, their ability to grow was considered maybe done
in the United States.
At least that was the big feeling.
Now it seems to be flipped to the opposite again, where there's a lot of optimism about
quarterly additions of a few million, at least every quarter, not just in the US, but globally.
And here's a question that I've thought about.
Do you think they're ever going to introduce a free tier?
I think I may have asked you this before, but would that be surprising?
To compete with the biggest competitor now, YouTube.
Well, even outside of YouTube, one thing that's, I mean, obviously YouTube is the elephant in the room.
But one thing that's clear from the Nielsen data and the commentary from these companies is that the fast services, the Tubies, the Plutos, the Roku channels of the world are seeing a significant amount of growth and engagement.
And they are finding a place in the marketplace that certainly seems to work for, again, potentially a subset of consumers, but maybe a meaningful subset of consumers.
So, you know, it seems like a stretch for me that Netflix is going to get there.
I think you'd have to, you know, they'd have to be able to backfill that in some way, whether it's, you know, a significantly higher ad load or a much better ability to price those ads, whatever it may be.
Seems like a stretch, but I never say never at this point.
I just say one other thing on the comment about password sharing, which I think this really speaks to the problem that a lot of these other players have.
Again, as I was talking about, like the Walmart, when you're late to something, it's not that you're just late and then you catch up.
These things kind of snowball on you and get harder and harder with time.
I think password sharing is a great example where, you know, the HBO Maxes of the world, the Disney Pluses of the world are a little bit behind on the rollout of this.
They have to figure out the tech and how to actually do it effectively.
They have less surface area to kind of test it over in the way that Netflix did when they, you know, embarked on that endeavor.
um it's just it's messier when you're again you're a little bit late to the party and you
may or may not have sufficient scale to kind of figure out how to do this thing the right way
another clear example of this is as you mentioned with disney and fox you know we're many years past
the the deal being completed and they still haven't really figured out exactly what their
product portfolio is in D2C and whether or not they want to do entertainment bundles
or all-in bundles with sports as well, if they want a single offering, if they even
want Hulu at all.
HBO actually got really lucky in my mind that they merged Discovery Plus and HBO Max at
the time because Discovery Plus was a completely irrelevant product with low single-digit million
users, most likely in the United States.
It's the problem is a lot more difficult for Disney when you have 40 million Hulu customers and, you know, whatever number of Disney plus tens of millions of Disney plus customers.
It's a lot harder to navigate that.
OK, do we shut this down?
Do we force it all into one thing and hit everybody with the price hike overnight?
Again, these problems, I think the extent that you don't solve them today, they just become more and more difficult tomorrow.
I agree. I agree.
it seems like the more things the every year that goes on seems like the narrative or any of the
narrative the story the numbers they haven't really changed that much in streaming over the
last five or ten years it's really you know netflix is winning youtube is also dominating
and none of disney did okay for a while but maybe maybe they can catch up but a lot of players are
still remaining subscale and it's going to be extremely difficult now let me talk about
I have a question for you real quick in that same vein.
And I know my assumption is you're a very big YouTube user, given some of the conversations we've had, as I am.
And years ago, they made a push into kind of traditional entertainment programming.
And eventually they kind of folded and didn't do that anymore.
Now they do things with channels and other stuff where you can kind of get that content, but it's not part of YouTube, really, per se.
If you were them, would you reconsider having a more buffet offering of all the type of programming that exists out there?
Or would you kind of live more with the kind of UGC backbone that they kind of have?
I think I would focus on what they're good at and build, you know, the technology is getting better and better,
easier and easier for people to do high quality stuff on their own without the need of a giant
studio. I think just building the tools for that would be more beneficial for them. And then
getting TV advertising dollars to flip over to them. Because if you can get that,
and I don't even know what the exact number is, it might be much higher,
$30, $40, $50 billion a year that's spent on linear TV advertising in the United States,
and you can flip that to places like YouTube
and get a lot of share there,
that's going to be a huge incentive
for these subscale studios,
maybe even larger studios
to put stuff out on YouTube,
make a good amount of money from that.
And yeah, sure,
you can also sell it to someone like Netflix,
but I think YouTube should stick
with its core competency.
I don't really see how...
I mean, you know it as good as anyone.
It took Netflix a long time to get that
to build their own studio and start building up consistent, you know,
quality content without licensing it.
Or, you know, I guess there's a difference between, you know,
buying something from Steven Spielberg versus hiring your own thing
and building it from scratch.
I think YouTube would have a hard time doing that
and they would already be really far behind.
So I'd say stick with what you're doing.
I mean, they continue to gain market share.
And I think, I mean, we look at, I have the thing from the Teenage Survey, too, is the same thing from what you post of the market share among streaming devices, except even more stark, where Netflix and YouTube dominate, you know, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime and Hulu do okay.
but if if among the teens and the younger people especially you know in the united states i'm
assuming globally it's similar if their dominant usage is youtube and netflix i i think that
their market share just is only going to grow over the next five or ten years because and this
is without seeing the data i would assume people 60 and over it's much less on youtube and netflix
i'd say that with pretty high certainty yeah i always find it fascinating on youtube that the
Nielsen data that shows them with the leadership, the leading position for TV viewership.
It's a TV metric, and it doesn't even, you know, you think about what that probably looks
like on phones.
I mean, I don't think it's probably crazy to say that their position in phones may be
twice as strong as it is on the TV side, maybe three times as strong.
Like, it's pretty insane to think that they have the leading position in terms of TV consumption
where all of, or a vast majority, my guess would be of quality,
you know, scripted entertainment programming probably happens.
You know, when you pull out your phones and maybe some people do it.
For me, I would never consider really the outside of being on a flight
or something, watching a movie on my phone
versus constantly have YouTube open on my phone.
They have put themselves in a very strong position.
And to your point, I think I'd probably lean more into
how do we start closing this gap between the two
through tools and technology as opposed to as opposed to taking another jump at it
yeah it's almost like netflix said back in the day and maybe it was the hbo guy that set up
they said netflix has to become hbo before hbo can become netflix netflix definitely did that
but now maybe the next level is netflix has to i don't know if they have to become youtube but
they have to defend themselves from youtube maybe maybe i'm sure both can win but youtube maybe has
an opportunity to become a little bit more like netflix as netflix tries to go into this
advertising stuff which is is encroaching more on youtube's turf it'll be an interesting battle
to see for sure and i think it's hard to see how both those get dethroned at least
outside of some niche markets like say smaller countries in east asia but yeah all right i'm
going to hit some new topics. You basically wrote Spotify's stock price is causing you
some pains. After selling it, maybe we can talk about that. But I want to talk about some of our
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be in the show notes as well all right alex do you want to talk spotify i'm in the same boat as you
i uh i've not appreciated these games but sure we can i should talk to firm returns about fever
tree maybe they can uh they can help you on that one the uk name um yeah i mean spotify is uh
And the stock, what does the stock do from, what'd it go from 250 or 300 down to how low
to 75, maybe something like that?
75 is correct, yeah.
75, where are we at today?
Back to 300?
Yeah, 300.
I owned it for a decent chunk of that ride.
I mean, as with everything at TSO, which is Investment Research Service, I have all the,
any times I made any changes, I called it out and tagged it on the spot ticker.
So you can find that there if you're a subscriber.
I sold it.
I can't remember how long ago it was now, but let's just say well below today's share price.
And a big part of my thinking was, as I looked at another holding in Meta and thought about what year of efficiency meant for them and how they proved out, you know, the business and particularly on the FOA side.
um i i struggled to see that spotify was taking uh the need for a similar year of efficiency as
seriously and my argument at that time and still today would be that uh the impetus was on them
much more so than than meta probably to do that in terms of a you know consolidated p about pnl
type of thinking um shortly after i wrote that they did that so uh the timing didn't look doesn't
look too good in hindsight but good on them for doing what i think they needed to do effectively
and you know some of the stuff around price increases i think it's a little bit still up
in the air how those negotiations went um what the what the terms of the agreement look like at
the end of the day but you know expanding into new verticals like audiobooks and and demonstrating
material consumer interest and using that product and then potentially finding ways to parse out how
how the pricing works or finding ways to you know make their argument to the labels a little bit
clearer i obviously the situation at at tiktok and the fight that they're having with i can't
remember which label it was but one of the huge labels is you know it's an interesting development
that that maybe makes those guys think huh spotify's you know truly a partner at the end
of the day, how do we do things that are incrementally mutually beneficial to both
parties? So the company's looking like it's in somewhat of a better position than it was
six to 12 months ago. I think the cost side of it is really the bigger one. I think it's
an open question how far that will go or how sustainable it will be. But that is certainly
an important part in terms of the profitability of the business. What did you get wrong?
let's see i mean i think it was the big thing was similar to you where
there was a narrative that they were going to trim on costs i guess they got caught up the
same thing as many of the technology consumer internet players did in the pandemic where they
projected growth to be higher going forward and then we had the covet overhang and they kept
saying that, but it was multiple quarters before they actually had to turn their employee base.
And we did the same thing where we sold out of the position right before they announced the 20%
layoff. And I think going into it though, what we got wrong is that podcast advertising was
going to be slower and a little bit more niche of a grower than we assumed at first. And I think
we underestimated how hard it is to build a self-serve advertising platform from scratch.
So it's going to take them many years to do that. Now, I think they've made a lot of progress in
that over the last three to four years, but there's still a lot of progress to make. And
we kind of thought they could, you know, perhaps wrongly, we thought they could build that within
a couple of years and match, you know, say YouTube's level of self-serve advertising,
but on the audio side. So that was a mistake. We were a bit too over-optimistic there.
But then I think everyone has underestimated how little the price hikes have impacted churn, because it seems like they're even, maybe this would come back to bite me, but they were almost in a better position than Netflix was five, six, seven years ago to raise prices without any worries about churn impact.
Yeah, I think that's certainly fair.
I think what will be interesting to see, and this is true for Netflix, YouTube, someone like Roblox even in a certain capacity, it's interesting to see over time, you know, the company focuses on MAU growth and rightly so.
I think it's a relevant metric.
As with all metrics, it has to be kept in context and over time its relevance can differ.
It can become more important or less important.
And I think as you look at MAU growth and see the contribution from rest of world in particular, and then you look at the premium subscriber growth rates and look at the penetration rates in rest of world, I just think there's a big outstanding question in terms of ability and willingness to pay for a service like Spotify as you talk about the next person who's added as an MAU.
And, you know, going full circle in this conversation, that is someone who may be very satisfied using YouTube, for example, as a competitive product.
And I just I'm not sure that the propensity to pay is there as it stands today.
But again, maybe as the product evolves over time and as new things are added, maybe you can convince people that to pull out their credit card to the extent that they have one.
But so far, and I've posted, you know, I've posted this on TSOH multiple times.
Maybe I've done so publicly on Twitter as well.
If you look at the penetration rates in terms of rest of the world, they have significantly declined over the past two or three years.
And management used to talk about, I think it was a six to nine month lag, maybe it was nine to 12 on MAU to premium kind of conversion as people obviously start using it more and find a reason to pay.
I just really struggle to believe that that's actually held up in terms of some of these newer markets.
yeah that is interesting and just to be clear for the listeners that is essentially when they went
to other countries for example their biggest i believe from mau perspective is india or perhaps
indonesia from these new markets the percentage of maus that convert to premium subscribers that
pay which are honestly the maus don't really contribute much to revenue at all and may never
given the model that they have with freemium and not a very strong advertising business
it i want to broke is probably the wrong term but it's a lower percentage and i think there
are still questions like compared to netflix netflix has i think a lot less uncertainty
than a spotify going forward um yeah spotify was much cheaper i guess uh you know if the
stock's at $75. But for one, in a lot of different markets, there has to be a way different go-to
market strategy. And I don't know how much of their users are actually going to contribute
revenue to them. Second, I get confused sometimes on what their value proposition is supposed to be
to a customer. When they add on these audio book things, they talk about this new super premium
tier that they're working on they talk about adding audiobooks but then subtracting it from
you know and having two separate tiers there i worry about the confusion for consumers on what
exactly they're getting with spotify but then on a positive note and i'm not i don't know if this is
this is probably not a competitive advantage and it's maybe not something to bet on but they have
continuously i would say delighted their customers by creating just really innovative products i
recently saw they're working on something that and this is in aligning with the labels as you
mentioned where on tiktok type social media services um remixes of songs are popular but
the artists are a bit mad about that because they don't get licensing back from that and they're
like using their their art spotify is creating a label an artist sanctioned uh remix thing for
for users that'll probably be very popular among younger users that they can then take
and use on you know social platforms or something like that but when you make it
uh that remix you know they still obviously give the money back to the artist so
it's an uncertain story and i still think the company's gonna like it's one where i think
revenue like yeah i could see them growing revenue 10 15 20 a year for a long time but
at this price you know it's more of a question okay can they expand margins that's the big bet
here i think it's to the to the way you said in the remix is i think it's been a very interesting
switch on this investment in terms of the story and you know 12 18 24 months ago a rising topic
of discussion was tiktok's music offering a standalone music offering and and you know what
impact that might have on mau and obviously premium sub growth over time and some of these
emerging markets. And again, I think it's fascinating that that's almost completely
flipped from what's happening with TikTok right now is something that plays into the hand of
Spotify and into the hand of the labels, ensuring that they're a partner that can continue to thrive
to some extent because they're going to operate within certain rules that apparently TikTok is
less concerned about operating within. I'm not sure if there's been recent updates on that in
the last week or two that i've missed but the story was pretty messy here as of late so um it's
it's very interesting to think about i just looked at the numbers a second ago just for
clarity on the thing that you explained on premium penetration penetration for people
about five years ago the premium penetration and rest of world markets was in the mid-30s
mid-30s percentage of maus um that's before the stream on market launches where they kind of went
they started going after a longer tail of geographies that they had not operated in
previously. But the rest of world premium penetration as of the end of 23 was down to
like a mid-teens percentage. So again, you're adding, it's great to add tens of millions of
MAUs every year. But as Brett said, the ARPU on that customer for the ad-supported offering,
especially in these markets, is very, very low. And it puts a lot of weight on your ability to
convince them to go to the premium tier. And they have not shown a great ability to do that
as of late. There might just be a lag. That could be the argument. But they clearly have
work to do on that part of the equation. Yeah. It seems like the vast, the way more
important question is whether they can consistently raise prices, say, by $1 a year,
maybe $1 every two years in Western Europe, East Asia, North America, some of the wealthier markets
that they're in. That seems like from a revenue perspective, at least over the next five to 10
years, it's going to be much more important. Anything else on that, Alex, excuse me, before
we hit another topic? No, I think you're definitely right on that. But again, I think part of the,
again, a big turning point for me on this investment was the most recent round of
negotiations. And my read on what actually happened was Spotify was the last one to get
a deal done. And I think they, and I would recommend people go back and read what I wrote
at the time because it'll one, be timely and two, it'll be a better version of what I'm trying to
say here. But I think they ultimately gave in, in terms of what that negotiation looked like,
and they were not going to be able to get what they had set out to get. And they accepted the
reality of the situation. Going forward, price increases, they do benefit from in some capacities,
They don't benefit from it as much as they might have if they negotiated, you know, higher take rates on those incremental increases, which was an idea that was obviously discussed previously.
You know, even things like partitioning out audiobooks or something, that's still a negotiation at the end of the day with the labels in terms of how they think about those economics being split.
It's not, Spotify doesn't have a God-given right to get, you know, better economics on that portion of the listening.
So it's all a negotiation.
I think Spotify has a very strong hand in those negotiations, but the realities of that market are also pretty similar to how they were a handful of years ago.
So it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out, that's for sure.
Yes, for one thing, I think it's clear there is a lot of uncertainty, also a lot of potential upside, but a lot of things can go wrong as well.
I want to talk and close out with a final section on the Piper Sandler teen survey.
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only all right i sent you this document beforehand um it's one that i'm really fascinated looking at
every time but it also scares me away from investing in a lot of consumer stuff because
i go well i have no idea that this is happening what crocs are dying i don't know um any big
take i'll let you go first and then i can give some of my takeaways any big takeaways that stood
out from this survey my first one as i told you right before we hopped on is somewhat jokingly
they had a list of like the top 10 music artists or something for teens and i felt pretty depressed
to know i hadn't heard of like seven of them before so that shows that tells you how locked
in i am to what the younger generation cares about something i'm also learning from uh the
discussions around match group and online dating and and what the you know call it the young 20s
data is looking for in the marketplace. It feels or sounds like it's quite a bit different from
what people were looking for when I was in my 20s, but take that for what it's worth.
In terms of the survey, yeah, I think one of the more interesting things as I think about
some of those brands, I mean, Nike's a really prominent one. I think about them in a market
like basketball shoes in the US where they have an extremely dominant position and I don't really
see that changing. But I think if you look on the margin, it's similar to what they saw
on apparel against Lululemon and other brands that have come up over time.
You see it now with On and tie-ins that these
newer brands will have in running shoes or tennis shoes with major
athletes. I think it's all very interesting and
it's something I continue to think about. But
I'm not that confident on how it plays out over time.
Did you look at, let's see, did you see the e-commerce favorites? Because I think that was
really what stood out to me is that, and there's like 100 slides here. So maybe, I don't know if
we looked at all of them, but what I thought was super interesting, and again, this is teenagers,
so I'm not sure the exact age rate. So essentially just think younger people. And if we look at fall
2022, Amazon was 52% of upper income favorite websites, which is essentially like upper income
teenagers and what's their favorite e-commerce website. But in spring 2024, that's jumped to 61%.
So they're actually still gaining market share, which is quite fascinating given the fact that
places like Timu are spending billions upon billions of advertising revenue to try to
compete with them. Yeah, Shein is doing quite well. They're actually the second player with
7% market share. But I think it's kind of amazing how popular Amazon is, given that it's seen as
almost the old, boring, almost the Walmart or the Costco level. It's surprising to me that this is
still popular among teenagers as a brand. And I think it's a testament to their moat and their
strategy of focusing on the customer first. Yeah. Maybe a comment I'd tie to the stock
market more broadly and the big tech companies and thinking about the regulatory pressure around
like a deal like iRobot, which I think most reasonable people would say is kind of completely
crazy that it's a deal that gets blocked. But I think it's a reflection of kind of that idea in
terms of there are five or 10 companies. I mean, there's more, but there's five or 10 that are
very, very well known that are incredibly well positioned going forward. And they've
built brand positions and modes that, again, like to the conversation on Netflix and some
of the laggards, like the mode seems to, in many ways, widen over time and to cross the divide
becomes more and more difficult. And, you know, I think regulators are struggling with the question
of what do you actually do about that outside of blocking some immaterial, you know, VR fitness app
acquisition in the case of Meta or some immaterial home robot vacuum cleaner acquisition in the case
of Amazon. Outside of that, it's kind of unclear what do you do, especially when surveys like this
one show that consumers are actively choosing to engage with those companies. So it's a difficult
problem to the extent that it actually is a problem. Maybe it isn't a problem. That's also
worth discussing right right now you follow meta uh much closer than i do and one thing i thought
was again another pilot for them in this survey is that instagram has started to regain a meaningful
amount of market share versus tiktok have you i don't know is it was that surprising to you at
all or is that something you've seen you know them talk about as you've covered this company
each quarter i don't i mean i think it's i think the concerns about tiktok have certainly lessened
over time and i think what they've done on reels and their ability to kind of follow quickly and
and iterate i think has kind of become more and more apparent they've given some data along the
way that would make this particular data not be too surprising to me i mean i i think an asset
like Instagram, they showed the strength that it's had. And I was joking with my good buddies
that people know, Bill Brewster and Francisco Olvera, the other day talking about, you know,
the way that at least I am with like Twitter and with stocks and investing. It's just interesting
to think that there's an audience that's whatever, let's say 10 times larger than the Twitter
audience and it's their entire lives as opposed to just stocks or investing, which I guess for me,
that's pretty much close to my entire life. But it's just interesting to think about how dominant
that that that platform is and how you know i'm not too surprised that this company found a way to
ultimately adjust to what they faced on the att idfa side and they've also done so in terms of the
of the you know tiktok threat side one other thing which i thought was interesting from
that leak um with the instagram revenues that you know what i'm referring to
i i think i saw a tweet about it but maybe i don't think every listener had but maybe you
can explain so long story short some government regulator i believe it was leaked uh you know
they have access to that information revenues for instagram over the past i believe was five years
and obviously you can use that to back into uh revenues for the non-instagram portion of the
business and i think people might be fascinated to know that from 18 to 23 from this one source
that i saw the estimate for the revenue category for core facebook was 15 annualized which i think
Like if you ask, I mean, some people might still not believe it when they hear the data,
but if you ask anybody five years ago or three years ago what the growth rate was going to
be for Core, for Facebook Blue, I don't think they would have come up with a number anywhere
near there, which, you know, again, I think that requires actually studying the business
and understanding things like ARPU and the realities of usage versus what people might
say in surveys and things at times.
So all very interesting.
yeah i mean the narrative is way was way off on the the big blue ad i mean i was i was a doubter
as well and what's interesting is that it's grown but instagram is also
it seems like it still has a long runway to grow we'll see we'll see what happens
and what's fascinating about meta is they've gone over the last couple of years from a what you
might call a defensive position to now they can play offense again and i don't think anyone even
even someone like you that follows the company very closely would have predicted that that this
could happen this quickly no no absolutely not i if i i was i was happy enough to hold through
all the pressures that we saw in in in 22 and i kicked myself a little i mean not just because
of the stock price performance, obviously. I kicked myself a little bit for not playing offense
when it really became clear that the year of efficiency stuff was showing up on the FOA side
and that the concern that FRL was just going to continue to consume a growing portion of the FOA
income. And FOA income was under a lot of pressure at that time. When that concern kind of faded,
I do kick myself a little bit for not playing offense. But yeah, even just holding through
that period was very rough and the stocks, you know, up 5x or whatever subsequently. So
speaks to, you know, people like to say price drives narrative or something along those lines,
which is certainly true. But a lot of times there are things that are actually happening
at the business that it's not as easy as, it's not as easy just going against the price, I think,
in a lot of cases. Yeah, I think a good way to put it is price drives narrative,
but also exaggerates the narrative is probably a good as good way to put it um i think we want
to close out here we're a little over an hour but i think you know this piper sandler data
gets thrown around every quarter or i don't know uh every half year and you look at there's so much
data in the report and i think it can confirm or you know that you like or dislike a company
whatever data you want to choose right how do you use or not you know in writing your research
building your portfolio for tsoh investing research how do you utilize this sort of data
within your research because as you mentioned if you looked at probably this survey in 2018 they
would have said facebook's dead so i'm just curious if you utilize this at all or it's not
part of your process i data like this i use more as a as a starting point especially for something
like let's say i didn't know about on as a as a brand or you know some of these lululemon competitors
which i still don't know about because it's not i don't follow lululemon particularly closely and i
don't know a lot of the close competitors but to the extent that something here suggested
change was afoot i would use it as a starting point to dig in more i really and facebook's a
very good example right in terms of obviously you have to have belief in the data the company's
providing you but i i always was much more focused on the data that facebook was giving in terms of
maus and taus and revenues and and the things i could pull out from ad impressions and pricing and
because that stuff's real versus a lot of these other things may have shades of truth in them
and then at the other end of the spectrum when you get into a lot of you know press reports and
things like that maybe just completely basically fabricated or very exaggerated um so i and and
the other funny thing is too when you follow a meta or an airbnb with airbnbust and you you see
recurring themes over and over again you have you have the framework going you know this is talked
about two years ago and you can you again you can come back to the actual data to kind of form a
more informed, you know, understanding what's going on. So I think it's interesting to look
at in terms of just asking new questions, but I don't really trust these things in terms of
actually providing me the answers if, especially if I have, you know, publicly available financial
data to then go kind of test it against. Right. It's, I think, I think Bezos said
this recently where he's like, if the data and anecdotes, usually you want the data and
anecdotes to match up. But if one's not, you got to really figure out which one is wrong. And
sometimes the anecdotes can be right and the data can be wrong. Sometimes the data can be right and
the anecdotes can be wrong. If you have a comment here that I think you'll enjoy along with the
Airbnb narrative is Netflix, which that provided another investing opportunity as well. But we're
running a little bit long today. Thank you, Alex, for joining us. I guess for anyone still listening,
where can people find your work? Where can they see all this good research?
Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me. I thought this was really, really great conversation. Yeah. You can find me over at the TSOH Investment Research Service, scienceofhitting.com. And it's, as Brett knows, I put out research every Monday and every other Thursday. It's company specific research, it's investment philosophy discussions, and then prior disclosure of all portfolio changes and then quarterly returns.
So it is complete transparency, basically, in terms of my whole research process and
investment process.
So I do stuff on Twitter every once in a while, but that's the best place to go.
All right.
Let me hit the disclosure.
We are not financial advisors.
Anything we say on the show is not formal advice or recommendation.
Ryan or any podcast guests may hold securities discussed in this podcast, may have held them
in the past, and may buy, sell, or hold them in the future.
thank you for all the listeners tuning in uh as a note these go live every thursday at around 12 30
p.m eastern time but you can still watch the replays on youtube or listen to the replays
on your podcast player of choice spotify apple podcast wherever
thank you again everyone and we'll see you next time
Bye.
