Report
Valens Research

Valens Equity Insights and Inflections - 2021 05 11

GOOGL is at the center of multiple macro tailwinds for the economy currently, between the
At-Home Revolution, the Internet of Things, and the ubiquity of digital advertising. These are likely to offer sustained tailwinds for the company's profitability and growth, and yet the
market is pricing UAFRS-based ROA (Uniform ROA or ROA') to decline going forward with
growth at the low end of historical levels. Even Wall Street analysts realize this is highly
unlikely going forward.

Not only does the company have impressive tailwinds, the company's management team
under CEO Pichai and CFO Porat have focused the company on aggressive, but smart and
profitable investment strategies to maximize returns and growth. Management's bullishness, both in terms of their tailwinds from their advertising business and their offerings as part of the At-Home Revolution, point to continued strong tailwinds for the
company that the market is going to continue to recognize, driving the stock higher.

Considering management's confidence about seeing fundamental tailwinds, the company's
strong outlook about growth, and pessimistic market expectations for Uniform ROA declines, there appears to be equity upside for GOOGL going forward.

HD Q4 2020 Embedded Expectations Analysis – Market expectations are for record-high Uniform ROA, but management may have concerns about growth, margins, and demand

DE Q1 2021 Embedded Expectations Analysis – Market expectations are for record-high Uniform ROA, and management is confident about sales growth, roadbuilding, and R&D spend

ADSK Q4 2021 Embedded Expectations Analysis – Market expectations are for record-high Uniform ROA, but management may have concerns about growth, renewal rates, and new bookings

GOOGL, ADSK, DE, HD, AEP, AYI, BBY, CPB, DELL, ENBL, EXC, GM, KR, MTN, MU, SNX, TDOC, TJX, WRI, XEC
Underlyings
Acuity Brands Inc.

Acuity Brands is a provider of lighting and building management solutions and services for commercial, institutional, industrial, infrastructure, and residential applications. The company's lighting and building management solutions include devices such as luminaires, lighting controls, controllers for various building systems, power supplies, prismatic skylights, and drivers, as well as integrated systems designed for various indoor and outdoor applications. In addition, the company provides services across applications that primarily relate to monitoring and controlling lighting and building management systems through network technologies and the commissioning of control systems.

Alphabet Inc. Class A

Alphabet is a holding company. Through its subsidiaries, the company is engaged in a collection of businesses, which its primary business is Google. The company reports all non-Google businesses collectively as Other Bets. Google's main products and platforms are Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Play, Search, and YouTube. The company also provides advertisers with tools that help them attribute and measure their advertising campaigns. In addition, Other Bets includes Access, Calico, CapitalG, GV, Verily, Waymo, and X, among others. Other Bets primarily engages in the sales of internet and TV services through Access as well as licensing and research and development services through Verily.

American Electric Power Company Inc.

American Electric Power Company is a public utility holding company. The public utility subsidiaries of the company provide electric service, consisting of generation, transmission and distribution, on an integrated basis to their retail customers. The service areas of the company's public utility subsidiaries cover portions of the states of Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Transmission networks are interconnected with distribution facilities in the territories served. The company's service company subsidiary provides accounting, administrative, information systems, engineering, financial, legal, maintenance and other services.

Autodesk Inc.

Autodesk is a design software and services company. The company is engaged in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software and services. The company's product offerings include: AutoCAD, which is a customizable and extensible CAD application for design, drafting, detailing, and visualization; AutoCAD Civil 3D, which provides surveying, design, analysis, and documentation solution for civil engineering; CAM Solutions, which is a computer-aided manufacturing software that provides solutions for computer numeric control machining, inspection, and modeling for manufacturing; and Inventor, which provides tools for 3D mechanical design, simulation, analysis, tooling, visualization, and documentation.

Best Buy Co. Inc.

Best Buy provides computing and mobile phones, consumer electronics, appliances, entertainment, services and other products. The company operates two reportable segments: Domestic, which is comprised of the operations in all states, districts and territories of the U.S. under various brand names including Best Buy, bestbuy.com, Best Buy Direct, Best Buy Express, Best Buy Mobile, Geek Squad, GreatCall, Magnolia and Pacific Kitchen and Home; and International, which is comprised of all operations in Canada and Mexico under the brand names Best Buy, Best Buy Express, Best Buy Mobile, Geek Squad and the domain names bestbuy.ca and bestbuy.com.mx.

Campbell Soup Company

Campbell Soup is a manufacturer and marketer of food and beverage products. The company's reportable segments are: Meals and Beverages, which includes the retail and foodservice businesses in the United States and Canada, and the meals and shelf-stable beverages business in Latin America; Snacks, which consists of Pepperidge Farm cookies, crackers, fresh bakery and frozen products in United States retail, including Milano cookies and Goldfish crackers, and Snyder's of Hanover pretzels, Lance sandwich crackers, Cape Cod and Kettle Brand potato chips, Late July snacks, Snack Factory Pretzel Crisps, Pop Secret popcorn, Emerald nuts, and other snacking products in the United States and Canada.

Cimarex Energy Co.

Cimarex Energy is an independent oil and gas exploration and production company. The company's operations are mainly located in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. The company's operations are focused in two main areas: the Permian Basin and the Mid-Continent. The company's Permian Basin region encompasses west Texas and southeast New Mexico. The company's Mid-Continent region consists of Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle.

Deere & Company

Deere & Co. operates the following segments: Agriculture and Turf, which manufactures and distributes a line of agriculture and turf equipment and related service parts, including utility tractors, tractor loaders, combines, cotton pickers, cotton strippers, and sugarcane harvesters; Construction and Forestry, which manufactures and distributes a range of machines and service parts used in construction, earthmoving, road building, material handling and timber harvesting, including backhoe loaders and crawler dozers and loaders; and Financial Services, which finances sales and leases by the company's dealers of new and used agriculture and turf equipment and construction and forestry equipment.

Dell Technologies Inc Class C

Dell Technologies is a holding company. Through its subsidiaries, the company designs, develops, manufactures, markets, sells, and supports a range of products and services. The company's reportable segments are: Infrastructure Solutions Group, which includes servers, networking, and storage, as well as services and third-party software and peripherals; Client Solutions Group, which includes desktops, thin client products, and notebooks, as well as services and third-party software and peripherals; and VMware, which provides compute, cloud management, networking and security, storage and availability, and other end-user computing offerings.

Enable Midstream Partners LP

Exelon Corporation

Exelon is a utility services holding company engaged in the generation, delivery and marketing of energy through Exelon Generation Company, LLC and the energy distribution and transmission businesses through Commonwealth Edison Company, PECO Energy Company, Baltimore Gas and Electric Company, Potomac Electric Power Company, Delmarva Power & Light Company and Atlantic City Electric Company. Through its business services subsidiary Exelon Business Services Company, LLC, the company provides its subsidiaries with a variety of support services.

General Motors Company

General Motors designs, builds and sells trucks, crossovers, cars and automobile parts. The company also provides automotive financing services through its subsidiary, General Motors Financial Company, Inc. (GM Financial). GM Financial provides retail loan and lease lending across the credit spectrum. GM Financial provides commercial lending products to dealers including new and used vehicle inventory floorplan financing and dealer loans, which are loans to finance improvements to dealership facilities, to provide working capital, and to purchase and/or finance dealership real estate. Other commercial lending products include financing for parts and accessories, dealer fleets and storage centers.

Home Depot Inc.

The Home Depot is a home improvement retailer. The company provides its customers an assortment of building materials, home improvement products, lawn and garden products, and decor products and provides a number of services, including home improvement installation services and tool and equipment rental. The company also maintains a network of distribution and fulfillment centers, as well as a number of e-commerce websites. The company provides a number of programs for its Professional Customers to meet their particular needs, and for its Do-It-Yourself and Do-It-For-Me customers, the company provides a number of installation services. The company also provides tool and equipment rentals for its customers.

Kroger Co.

Kroger operates as a retailer. The company also manufacture and process some of the food for sale in its supermarkets. Supermarkets are operated under one of the following formats: combination food and drug stores (combo stores); multi-department stores; marketplace stores; or price impact warehouses. The combo stores provide food and organic sections, pharmacies, general merchandise, pet centers and perishables such as seafood and organic produce. Marketplace provide grocery, pharmacy and health and beauty care departments as well as perishable offering and general merchandise area that includes apparel, home goods and toys.

Micron Technology Inc.

Micron Technology provides memory and storage solutions. The company's portfolio of memory and storage technologies include Dynamic Random Access Memory, Not And, 3D XPoint? memory, and Not Or. The company's segments are: Compute and Networking Business, which includes memory products sold into client, cloud server, enterprise, graphics, and networking markets; Mobile Business, which includes memory products sold into smartphone and other mobile-device markets; Storage Business, which includes Solid-State Drives and component-level solutions sold into enterprise and cloud, client, and consumer storage markets; and Embedded Business, which includes memory and storage products.

TD SYNNEX CORP

Synnex is a business process services company, providing a range of distribution, logistics and integration services for the technology industry and providing outsourced services focused on customer engagement to a range of enterprises. The company's segments are: Technology Solutions, which distributes peripherals, information technologysystems including data center server and storage solutions, system components, software, networking, communications and security equipment; and Concentrix, which provides a portfolio of solutions and business services focused on customer engagement, process optimization, technology innovation, front and back-office automation and business transformation to clients.

Teladoc Health Inc.

Teladoc Health is a provider of virtual healthcare services. The company provides virtual access to care and capabilities, with a portfolio of services and solutions covering medical subspecialties from non-urgent, episodic needs like flu and upper respiratory infections, to medical conditions like cancer and congestive heart failure. In its behavioral health business, branded BetterHelp, the company serves individuals in the direct-to-consumer market and through business partnerships with other brands. The company's consumer brands, which include Teladoc, Advance Medical, Best Doctors, BetterHelp and HealthiestYou, deliver access to advice and resolution to an array of healthcare needs.

TJX Companies Inc

TJX Companies is an off-price apparel and home fashions retailer. The company's segments comprised of: Marmaxx, which sells family apparel (including footwear and accessories), home fashions (including home basics, decorative accessories and giftware) and other merchandise; HomeGoods, which provides a range of home fashions, including home fashions, including furniture, rugs, lighting, soft home, decorative accessories, tabletop and cookware as well as pet, kids and gourmet food departments; TJX Canada, which operates the Winners, HomeSense and Marshalls chains in Canada; and TJX International, which operates the T.K. Maxx and HomeSense chains in Europe and the T.K. Maxx chain in Australia.

Vail Resorts Inc.

Vail Resorts is a holding company and operates through various subsidiaries. The company's business segments include: Mountain, which operates various mountain resort properties and three urban ski areas, as well as ancillary services; Lodging, which provides a range of services to guests, including owned and managed lodging properties, managed condominium units, National Park Service concessionaire properties, a resort ground transportation company, and the company-owned mountain resort golf courses; and Real Estate, which includes the sale of land parcels to third-party developers and planning for future real estate development projects, including zoning and acquisition of applicable permits.

WEINGARTEN REALTY INVESTORS

Weingarten Realty Investors is a real estate investment trust. The company is engaged in the business of owning, managing and developing retail shopping centers. The company's primary business is leasing space to tenants in the shopping centers it owns or leases. The company also provides property management services to either joint ventures where the company is partners or other outside owners. The company's centers are designed to attract local area customers and are anchored by a supermarket or other national tenants (such as Kroger, HEB or T.J. Maxx). The centers are primarily neighborhood and community shopping centers that often include discounters, retailers and specialty grocers as additional anchors or tenants.

Provider
Valens Research
Valens Research

In 2009, just as the dust was settling from the last major equity and credit market crises, we launched a boutique research firm with the intention of breaking Wall Street’s biases and broken incentives:

  • GAAP and IFRS have failed to provide rules for reliable financial statement reporting
  • Stock analyst recommendations are not grounded in disciplined financial analysis
  • Credit agencies have been set up to grossly fail in their responsibilities to investors and the public markets
  • Utter lack of willingness of major research firms to employ the the most advanced forensic analysis available

We sought to provide investors and company analysts with a source of information that changed all that.
Many years later, our business model remains because little has changed on Wall Street.

  • Corporate credit ratings remain years behind the fundamental underpinnings of company performance
  • Stock analysts continue to make recommendations with deeply inherent biases
  • Research firms have failed to break down the walls between credit, equity, and macroeconomic research
  • The governing accounting bodies have created more leeway for mis-estimates and mis-classifications as financials have become unwieldy and overwhelming

The integrity of Valens Research is founded in our disciplined processes and analytics. No “star” analysts. No corporate advisory relationships. No-nonsense opinions and recommendations.

Analysts
Valens Research

Other Reports on these Companies
Other Reports from Valens Research

ResearchPool Subscriptions

Get the most out of your insights

Get in touch