Cisco, Apple und Wahrscheinlichkeiten ... - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[BullishBear]

Folgenden interessanten Artikel habe ich auf http://www.fool.com gefunden.

Fazit: Apple mag nicht ein so guten Business zu sein, wie Cisco, aber es gibt einen Unterschied zwischen dem Business und der Aktie. Wenn man sich in ein noch so gutes Geschäft zu einem sehr hohen Preis einkauft, wird man letztlich weniger Gewinn machen, als ein Anleger, der sich in ein weniger gutes Geschäft auf einem billigen Niveau einkauft. Zum Darübernachdenken ... - viel Spaß!

BullishBear

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Cisco, Apple, and Probabilities

If you pay too high a price for a business, even a great business, you may undo the effects of years of favorable business developments. Consider Cisco and Apple: While Cisco may be the better business than Apple, Cisco`s price may make it a worse investment than Apple in the long run.


By Whitney Tilson
October 16, 2000


Boy! My column last week sure struck a nerve! Some people didn`t take too kindly to being warned -- OK, maybe "Be very, very afraid" was a little dramatic -- about owning hugely valued technology stocks, especially when (in my opinion anyway) this sector is experiencing a speculative bubble bursting, Friday`s rebound notwithstanding.


I want to be clear that I was not forecasting a general stock market decline, or even a blow-up of the entire technology sector. In fact, I think much of the market -- and even large swaths of the tech sector -- are reasonably valued. But simple math makes it virtually certain that the great majority of stocks -- tech or not -- trading at multiples of hundreds of times earnings (in some cases, hundreds of times sales) will severely disappoint. When and how quickly this will happen, I have no idea.


If I were to summarize my earlier column in one (long) sentence, it would be: I believe that the probabilities are very low that over time the six companies I cited (and many more), however fine, will be able to grow quickly enough, given their sizes, for their extremely richly valued stocks to compound at much of a rate at all -- and if they so much as hiccup, there`s a long way to fall (see Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Home Depot (NYSE: HD), and many more). I guess it`s a sign of the times that this is viewed as controversial or offensive.


Some of the more eloquent emails I received were: "Loser" and "You are an idiot. Thanks a lot you jerk." Or "You are an idiot. Don`t try and drive down the prices with your `foolish` scare tactics. Nobody is listening to you." But those were the exception. Most people who took the time to email appreciated a reasoned argument -- whether they agreed with it or not -- that made them think. And that`s all I`m trying to do: Get people to think sensibly about stocks.


The first step to doing so is to distinguish between a stock and a company. Many of the people who emailed me argued that I just didn`t understand what a great business Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) is -- or EMC (NYSE: EMC) or Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) -- and what a fool I am for buying a dog like Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL). Well, as I pointed out more than once, I don`t quibble that Cisco is a fabulous business -- certainly superior to Apple -- but price matters! Brian Graney touched on this topic in last week`s column, "Great Company, Bad Stock," and Warren Buffett put it succinctly in his 1982 annual letter to shareholders: "For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments." (Incidentally, I highly recommend that you take the time to get the best investment education available -- and it`s free! -- by reading Warren Buffett`s annual letters from 1977 to 1999.)


Over time, there are three primary drivers of a stock`s return: what the market does, how the company performs, and how much you paid for the stock. I don`t spend much time thinking about the former, as I think interest rates, overall economic growth, the public`s enthusiasm for stocks and the like are inherently unpredictable. But thinking sensibly about what a company`s future might hold and to what degree its current valuation reflects that future is far more predictable. That doesn`t mean there`s any certainty, but one can certainly develop scenarios and assign probabilities to them. Doing this sensibly is the key to successful investing, as investing is at its core a probabilistic exercise.


Let`s take a look at Cisco and Apple, two of the companies I mentioned in last week`s column. Today, I`ll give a quick overview of each company, and then next week I`ll try to develop some future scenarios and estimate their probabilities. (I picked Cisco because it is a well known, widely held stock, but I could just as easily make the same arguments for any of the other five stocks I highlighted last week -- and dozens more.)


Cisco
Cisco is one of the finest companies of all time. It dominates its markets, is growing at a phenomenal rate, is hugely profitable, and has an exceptional management team. It has very attractive financial characteristics, as the company generated robust free cash flow of $2.1 billion on $18.9 billion in sales in the past year, an 11.2% margin. (I define free cash flow as cash flow from operations minus cap ex. I also subtracted Cisco`s $2.5 billion in tax benefits from the employee stock option plan -- nearly equal to net income of $2.7 billion. More on this in a future column.)


The market certainly agrees with my assessment of Cisco, awarding it a market cap of $395 billion at Friday`s closing price of $56.06. If you subtract cash and short-term investments of $5.5 billion and very conservatively estimate that Cisco`s $15.0 billion in non-cash investments is worth $5.0 billion, then the company`s enterprise value is $384 billion, equal to 182 times trailing free cash flow.


Apple
Apple isn`t nearly as good a business, even when it`s firing on all cylinders, as the company relies on a steady stream of innovative new products to fuel its growth, many of which are very popular but some aren`t, making its earnings a bit erratic. Of course, each time the company hits a rough spot, as it has recently, it`s hard to know whether this is just a bump in the road or the beginning of a terrible decline back to the dark days of 1996 and 1997. In a spooked market that panics at even the slightest hint of uncertainty, the questions around Apple`s future have crushed the stock.


With its stock at $22.06 on Friday, Apple`s market cap was $7.2 billion. If you add $300 million of long-term debt and subtract $3.8 billion of cash and value $1.2 billion in non-cash investments at a conservative $400 million, then Apple`s enterprise value is $3.3 billion. The company generated $722 million of free cash flow (assuming a full 35% tax rate; the actual figure was $807 million) on sales of $7.4 billion in the most recent 12 months, a 9.7% margin, so it is now trading at a mere 4.6 times trailing free cash flow.


Next week, I will continue with my analysis of Cisco and Apple.


-- Whitney Tilson

Whitney Tilson is Managing Partner of Tilson Capital Partners, LLC, a New York City-based money management firm. Mr. Tilson appreciates your feedback at [e-mail]. To read his previous guest columns in the Boring Port and other writings, click here.

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Quelle: http://www.fool.com
Direkter Link: http://www.fool.com/boringport/2000/boringport001016.htm?ref…

[BullishBear]

Ach ja, bevor ich es vergesse - vielleicht ist folgende Rechnung noch interessanter als o.g. Fazit:

22$ Apple Kurs ergibt eine Marktkapitalisierung von 7,2 Mrd.US$. Wenn wir von 3,8 Mrd.US$ Cash einmal 300 Millionen US$ langfristige Verbindlichkeiten abziehen und 1,2 Mrd.US$, die in Nicht-Cash-Investments stecken mit konservativen nur 400 Millionen US$ bewerten, dann bedeutet das, daß das Unternehmen mit nur 3,3 Mrd. US$ bewertet ist:

+3,8 Mrd.US$ Cash
+0,4 Mrd.US$ Non-Cash (eigentl. 1,2 Mrd.US$)
-0,3 Mrd.US$ Verbindlichkeiten
-------------------------------
=3,9 Mrd.US$ Flüssige Mittel

7,2 Mrd. US$ Marktkap. minus 3,9 Mrd.US$ Flüssige Mittel ergibt 3,3 Mrd. US$ Unternehmensbewertung.

Apple hat in den vergangenen 12 Monaten 722 Millionen US$ freien Cashflow generiert (gerechnet mit vollem Steuersatz von 35% - die tatsächliche Zahl war 807 Millionen US$). Bei einem Umsatz von 7,2 Milliarden US$ Umsatz ergibt das eine Umsatzrendite von 9,7%.

Bei 3,3 Mrd. US$ Bewertung bedeutet das, daß Apple zur Zeit gerade mal mit dem 4,5-Fachen seines freien 12-Monats-Cashflows gehandelt wird.

Nun ja ...

BullishBear

[redcrx]

Tja, da fragt man sich, ob man selbst ein `fool` ist, wenn man eine jetzt nicht näher bezeichnete Company zu 0,13€ kauft oder aber zu 0,31€ ?
Solte man Apple oder Cisco mit irgendetwas assoziieren ?

Gruß, redcrx

[BullishBear]

!

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[dakinky]

Apple Earnings Forecast May Have Gone Overboard

By Prince Maclean ([e-mail])

October 16, 2000


Apple Computer, Inc. is expected to release its earnings for the fourth fiscal quarter of this year on October 18th. On the 28th of September, the computer maker issued a press release warning of a significant earnings shortfall.

According to the press release, the company is expecting earnings per diluted share, excluding investment gains, to fall between $.30 and $.33 -- considerably less than analysts and the street may have been expecting.

Apple stock plunged almost 50 percent in overnight trading following the company`s warning that Thursday evening. The stock ultimately dipped to 52 percent of its value by the close of the markets the following day as shares of Apple became the 8th most traded stock in US History.

But according to reliable sources close to Apple`s financial decision, shareholders may be a little happier when actual earnings are finally released this Wednesday.






According to contacts within the company, Apple may have exaggerated earnings loss for the quarter: "Apple has gone a little bit overboard when forecasting lower revenues," one source said, "in fact they wouldn`t be as bad as originally announced."

Other, independent, Apple sources have reported being told to gobble up Apple stock prior to the earnings announcement, for the company expects shares to surge on "not as bad as previously expected" earnings.

"It wouldn`t surprise me," one trusted analyst told AppleInsider correspondents. "In the past Apple has warned of lower than expected earning and provided figures only to release much more respectable numbers two weeks later."

The company has cited poor Power Mac G4 Cube sales and lower than expected sales in the education market as two of the primary reasons for the lower numbers. Apple also only recently introduced the $799 iMac and new iBooks, and is currently juggling several product transitions, which includes a dead spot in its PowerBook offerings.

Apple will release its official results after the close of the stock market on Wednesday and will host a conference call at 2 p.m. (PDT).


http://www.appleinsider.com





dakinky

[Turbodyne]

Gute Analyse bzw. Research von BullishBear, gefällt mir sehr.

Zu dakinky: Der G4-Cube ist potthäßlich, aber sehr expensive (!) und Sony bringt nun eine Generation von gestylten PCs auf den Markt, dies ist der Grund, weshalb das Aushängeschild nicht läuft. Die iMacs sind leider in der unteren Kategorie angesiedelt, hier greift das PErformance-Problem von Apple im Vergelich zu Intel-betriebenen Geräten. Prozessoren im Gigaherzbereich fehlen noch komplett.

Positiv ist das nächste Betriebssystem und die Ankündigung neuer Produkte, hoffentlich stehen die noch rechtzetig zu Weihnachten in den Regalen.

Trotzdem der derzeitige Kurs ist ein Witz, KGV von 10-12 je nachdem welche Ertragsprognosen zugrunde gelegt werden. Strong-buy, selbst wenn die heutigen Zahlungen die Erwartungen nicht treffen sollten.

[casinoservice]

@turbodyne
Der cube ist potthässlich?
Warum fragen mich dann 9 von 10 Bürobesuchern, wie teuer so ein Teil ist? Der G4 cube wird seine Käufer finden, mehr als die Pessimisten heute annehmen.

gruss casino