Good Companies Don’t Always Make Good Stocks
I was recently going through a new client’s portfolio and found it full of the likes of Coca-Cola, Kimberly-Clark and Campbell Soup — what I call (pseudo) bond substitutes. Each one is a stable and mature company. Your mother-in-law would be proud if you worked for any one of them.
They have had a fabulous past; they’ve grown revenues and earnings for decades. They were in their glory days when most baby boomers were coming of age. But the days of growth are in the rearview mirror for these companies — their markets are mature, and the market share of competitors is high. They can innovate all day long, but consumers will not be drinking more fizzy liquids, wearing more diapers or eating more canned soup.
If you were to look at these companies’ financial statements, you’d be seriously underimpressed. They paint a stereotypical picture of corporate old age. Their revenues haven’t grown in years and in many cases have declined. Some of them were able to squeeze slightly higher earnings from stagnating revenue through cost-cutting, but that strategy has its limits — you can only squeeze so much water out of rocks (unless someone like 3G Capital takes the company, sells its fleet of corporate jets and starts mercilessly slashing expenses like the private equity firm did at Budweiser and Heinz). These businesses will be around ten years from now, but their profitability probably won’t be very different from its current level (not much higher, but probably not much lower either).
However, if you study the stock charts of these companies, you won’t see any signs of arthritis; not at all — you’ll have the impression that you’re looking at veritable spring chickens, as these stocks have gone vertical over the past few years. So this is what investors see — old roosters pretending to be spring chickens.
Let’s zoom in on Coke. Tweet this! Unlike the U.S. government, Coca-Cola doesn’t have a license to print money (nor does it have nuclear weapons) . But it is a strong global brand, so investors are unconcerned about Coke’s financial viability and thus lend money to the company as though it were the U.S. government. (Coke pays a very small premium to Treasury bonds.) Investors ignore what they pay for Coke; they only focus on a singular, shiny object: its dividend yield, which at 3 percent looks like Gulliver in Lilliput (fixed-income) land.
