Opinions
Zachary Curry 
Alphabet Inc
GOOG-Q
COMMENT
May 19, 2015
Stock price when the opinion was issued
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Premium contentHighlights from their July 23 report: sales of $96 billion, up 14%' operating margins of 32%, flat year over year; Google Cloud expanded revenues by 32% as AI-driven demand for cloud infrastructure remained solid; YouTube ad revenue rose 13% to $9.8 billion; and Google Search grew 12% year-over-year, up from 10% growth last quarter, despite the rise of chatGPT. Other metrics in its favour: 20.87x PE, lowest among the Mag 7 and far from the S&P's 25.9x, and a beta of 1.0, calm for a megatech company.
Not a lot of meaningful competition. Good earnings growth at 13-15%. Not expensive at 20x forward PE. AI and cloud momentum is key moving forward. Ad platform continues to be the monster out there. Will perform well as macro conditions and ad budgets improve. Strong cash position provides resilience during tough times and could lead to aggressive share repurchases, which helps with EPS.
The cloud services business started generating positive operating income, but the other ones are negative. There is so much underlying value in GOOG. The big risk is regulation, but if forced to break up, then parts of the business will sell off. GOOG generates tons of free cash flow, and are great in allocating capital. Offers big value.
(Analysts’ price target is $220.46)The cloud services business started generating positive operating income, but the other ones are negative. There is so much underlying value in GOOG. The big risk is regulation, but if forced to break up, then parts of the business will sell off. GOOG generates tons of free cash flow, and are great in allocating capital. Offers big value.
(Analysts’ price target is $220.46)You need to focus on the types of queries that go in. If he wants to learn about uranium and nuclear powering data centres, he'll do a deep dive on ChatGPT. But if he needs new shin pads or a hockey stick, he'll go on Google to find a vendor.
So the search volume is changing in intent, and Search queries in Google are becoming much more commercial. YouTube is an absolute beast.
Dumping a high-growth tech stock then planning to buy back at a lower price is a lot harder than you think. He sold GOOG after the Justice Dept. called GOOG a monopolist. Then, GOOG went up and the Justice Dept. did not break up GOOG. He didn't get back into the stock. In fact, GOOG is worth more if it is broken up into separate companies. He has tremendous remorse over selling it. Lesson: trading is the enemy of many investors.
Thinks it's going higher, but perhaps don't buy now. Wait for pullback. There's always a reason for a stock to pull back at some point, but he can't predict the magnitude.
At this level, risk/reward is not as good as entering at a lower price. Trades ~20-21x forward PE, whereas NVDA is trading at 40x forward PE or more. Lots of upside potential in things we're not even talking about yet, such as quantum computing -- freebies that may not be baked into the valuation today.
R&D spending in the last quarter has been quite high. Seem to have some pet projects they keep funnelling money into. On the android side, for example, they continue to give it away for free, but what that does is allow applications and data to be pulled off. That is positive in the long term. The advertising side continues to be dominant. Their shift to mobile, accepting pages that are typically enhanced to work on mobile applications, is another avenue. It really comes down to a longer-term investment horizon and believing they will be able to move around that big advertising elephant. Good value, good cash and a good balance sheet are important in this market. He is positive on this company.