g******n
发帖数: 53185 | | g******e
发帖数: 998 | | g******n
发帖数: 53185 | 3 估计在等CC
【在 g******e 的大作中提到】
: 为什么不到200？
| g******e
发帖数: 998 | | g******n
发帖数: 53185 | 5 conference call
【在 g******e 的大作中提到】
: cc试什么？thx
| g**********g
发帖数: 18118 | 6 ER的流程是先出报表， 然后再电话上说。
很多时候是电话里说的决定方向 | g******n
发帖数: 53185 | 7 cc肯定是打鸡血。这个CEO很高调的，前一阵跳出来点名到姓批判一个重仓卖空nflx的
基金经理。如果这次搞不好，那不是自己打自己嘴巴。
【在 g**********g 的大作中提到】
: ER的流程是先出报表， 然后再电话上说。
: 很多时候是电话里说的决定方向
| g******e
发帖数: 998 | 8 那么好玩。喜欢这个CEO。不过NFLX谈deal是很厉害。business做得不错。当然股票走
势是另一回事。
【在 g******n 的大作中提到】
: cc肯定是打鸡血。这个CEO很高调的，前一阵跳出来点名到姓批判一个重仓卖空nflx的
: 基金经理。如果这次搞不好，那不是自己打自己嘴巴。
| g******n
发帖数: 53185 | 9 是很牛气。
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Responds to Whitney Tilson: Cover Your Short
Position. Now.
A great investor and a wonderful human being, Whitney Tilson recently posted
an article about why he is short Netflix (NFLX). Whitney, who is a major co
-donor with me to charter public schools like KIPP, writes that he has lost
money betting against Netflix, and that he is still short Netflix in a big
way.
At Netflix we mostly focus on building our business and letting the numbers
do the talking. But Whitney is such a big-hearted donor to causes that I
care about that I am writing this open letter for him to try to get him to
cover his short now. My desire is to increase his odds of making money next
year so he can donate even more to the charter public schools that we both
think are important to our country’s future. For the record, I think short
sellers are a positive force in capitalism, and I acknowledge that CEOs are
generally biased in their bullishness on their respective firms.
Whitney’s core short thesis in his article “Why We’re Short Netflix” is:
In particular, we think margins will be severely compressed and growth
will slow over the next year.
This is the natural outcome of his view that:
We don’t believe that Netflix has a better business model, better
management or a meaningful competitive advantage in the business of
streaming movies and TV shows.
Whitney lays out a series of potential issues for us: Our CFO’s recent
resignation; threats to the First Sale doctrine for DVDs; internet bandwidth
costs potentially increasing; declining FCF conversion; market saturation;
weak streaming content; paying more for streaming content; and increased
competition hurting margins. He only has to be right on one or two of these
issues in 2011 for him to make money on his short of Netflix.
Odds are he is wrong on all of them, in my view. Let’s take them one at a
time.
As to the CFO issue, Barry McCarthy is a very accomplished executive who was
working for a successful, younger CEO, so he correctly figured the chances
of him becoming the CEO of Netflix were not high. In early 2004 he had the
same feeling, and let us know that we should launch a search to replace him
by the end of 2004. During that year we entered into a huge fight with
Blockbuster (BBI), and Barry felt it would be low integrity to leave us in
the midst of battle. So, he agreed to stay for a few more years.
By 2008, we had substantially exited from our hand-to-hand combat with
Blockbuster, and he started talking with me about the need for him to
someday soon go seek his future broader role. Two weeks ago, he informed me
that it was time for him to move on. He was willing to stay for up to a year
, like in 2004, if we wanted to do a search. After discussions with the
board, we chose his longest-serving finance lieutenant, David Wells, as our
next CFO, instead of doing an outside search, and announced the transition.
We feel great about David Wells as our CFO, and there was no reason to ask
Barry to stay further. Barry is a super-principled guy, and if there were
any known major danger, he would never have left us. It is precisely because
things look so good going forward that he allows himself to think about his
own career ambitions. Some lucky firm will get him as CEO.
On the First Sale doctrine, which only applies to DVDs and provides our
right to rent a DVD after its first sale, even Whitney acknowledges that any
potential change would not happen for several more years. Given the rate of
our streaming growth, by the time there was any change to the First Sale
doctrine, we would be not very sensitive to DVD costs. This issue is not a
material threat to 2011 results, and thus not a potential reason to be short
Netflix now. Perhaps Whitney was just trying to be thorough.
Next in Whitney’s catalog is the issue of potentially increasing internet
bandwidth costs, given the recent fracas between Level 3 (LVLT) and Comcast
(CMCSA). The cost of sending or retrieving a gigabyte of data has fallen
every year for at least 30 years. Advances in technology are making all the
parts of data transmission cheaper and cheaper, roughly following Moore’s
Law. The odds that the cost of moving a gigabyte of data materially increase
in the next few years are extremely low. It is vastly more likely that the
costs continue to fall as component prices fall. There is some chance that
consumer ISP networks like Comcast will prevail in their battle to not only
charge consumers of data, but also charge suppliers of data (e.g., Google (
GOOG), Netflix, Apple (AAPL), etc.). This has been an ongoing battle for
many years.
A valid concern over the long term is how much power the consumer ISP
networks will have to charge data suppliers (i.e. content). In the case of
ESPN3, however, it is the reverse: ESPN3 charges consumer ISP networks like
Comcast for the privilege of transporting the ESPN3 data to the ISP’s
consumers (in essence, Comcast and peers are forced to share some of the
revenue of the $45 per month broadband package with ESPN3). We don’t have
any plans to go the ESPN3 route, but the odds of material negative Netflix P
&L impact from broadband pricing trends in 2011 are very low.
Moving to more interesting angles, Whitney documents our recent decreased
FCF conversion due to us paying for content earlier than we had in the past.
With this angle, Whitney does draw a little blood. Our new CFO David Wells
and our content team are all over our need to get more consistent about pay-
by-quarter for content going forward rather than pay-by-year, even if it
means we’ll pay a little more. We will be working to improve the FCF
conversion trend in 2011. On a long term basis, FCF should track net income
reasonably closely, as it has in the past, with stock options as an offset
against small buildups in PPE and prepaid content. Nearly all of our
computing is through Amazon (AMZN) Web Services and CDNs, which are pure
opex.
Next in the litany of Whitney threats is market saturation. In 2011, this is
unlikely to affect us. Streaming is growing rapidly; it is propelling Hulu,
YouTube, Netflix and others to huge growth rates. Streaming adoption will
likely follow the classic S curve, and we’re still on the first part (
acceleration) of the S curve. Since we expanded into streaming, Netflix net
subscriber additions have been 1.9m in 2008, 2.9m in 2009, and over 7m this
year (estimated). While saturation will happen eventually, given the recent
huge acceleration of our business specifically, and streaming generally,
saturation seems unlikely to hit in the short term.
The next issue is what Whitney calls our “weak content.” While Whitney may
think “Family Guy” is weak content, our subscribers do not. Furthermore,
our huge subscriber growth to date has been built on this “weak content,”
so imagine how much upside we have as we improve our content, as we are
always trying to do. I think what Whitney may be misunderstanding is that at
$7.99 per month, consumers don’t expect to have everything under the sun.
A variant of this misunderstanding is when DirecTV (DTV) advertises against
Netflix, calling out some Netflix content weaknesses. When an $80 per month
service is picking on an $8 per month service, the $8 per month service just
gets more attention from consumers and grows even faster.
Moving on to the widely-discussed issue of increased content costs, it is
true that we are paying more for any given piece of content than we were two
years ago, and that in two years, we’ll pay more than we pay today. Part
of our goal as a business is to make money for content producers and to
become one of their largest and best revenue sources. Fortunately, our
subscriber base is growing fast enough, and DVD shipments are growing slow
enough, that we can afford to pay for the existing streaming content we have
, and also get more content. We try not to comment on specific deals, like
the Starz renewal, as that rarely helps us get deals done.
Investors sometimes see the content cost threat as an issue around our
margins. But we have no intention of overspending relative to our margin
structure, and there is no specific content that we “must have” at nearly
any cost. In our domestic business we spend 65-70% of revenue on COGS (which
is mostly content and postage). So if content costs rose faster than we
expected, then in practice we’d have less content than otherwise, rather
than less margin. This would ultimately show up in less subscriber growth
than we wanted from a not-as-good-as-it-would-otherwise-be service; it would
not likely show up as a sudden hit to margins. Management at Netflix
largely controls margins, but not growth.
Turning to competition, there is a legitimate short thesis in the unknown of
who enters directly against us and when. Some offerings like Hulu Plus have
some content we do not, but we are making progress on that gap. In the near
term, some of our subscribers will also subscribe to Hulu Plus, but very
few will quit Netflix because we have lots of streaming content that Hulu
Plus does not. For a competitive firm to materially hurt our growth, they
have to have some positive differentiator (price, additional content,
integration, etc.), and then they have to market their service effectively.
This wild-card of major new competitor offering great content and marketing
aggressively is the single best near-term short thesis, but no one knows if
it will happen in 2011.
The core competitive barrier for direct competitors is brand/subscriber-
evangelism. Our large subscriber base is very happy with Netflix, and tells
their friends about Netflix. That means that the cost of acquiring the
incremental 1m subscribers is lower for us than for a competitor, and thus
our net additions are higher. There are also lots of other smaller
competitive barriers, but the happy subscriber base is the big one.
Another competitive threat is TV Everywhere. If MVPDs (multichannel video
programming distributors) are successful at getting their subscribers (which
is practically everyone) to use TV Everywhere, which is free, instead of
Netflix, for streaming video, then the market opportunity for supplemental
services like Netflix and Hulu Plus will be much smaller. There is no
additional profit for MVPDs in TV Everywhere, but they are motivated to slow
the growth of supplemental services because of the fear that someday the
combination of ESPN3, Netflix, CNN.com, Hulu, YouTube, and others could be
an effective MVPD substitute over the internet. The TV Everywhere threat
will grow over time, but is unlikely to bite in 2011 in a short-satisfying
manner.
An issue that Whitney did not bring up is potential Netflix international
expansion that would shrink global margins in the short term. We announced
in October that we were so pleased with our initial results in Canada, which
, if trends continue, will mean we can get to breakeven there one year from
launch, that we were likely going to invest heavily in further international
expansion, and that if we did so, it would be to the tune of a $50m hit to
global operating income in the back half of 2011. We think the international
opportunities for us to build profitable businesses may be quite large, but
the rapid expansion will lower global operating margins as long as there
are additional markets in which we can wisely invest. Starting next year we
’ll break out domestic versus international for investors so they can track
our progress for themselves.
To wrap up, I have to agree with my friend Whitney that there are many risks
ahead for Netflix, that our valuation is substantial, and that it is
possible that one could make money shorting Netflix today. But shorting a
market leading firm as it is driving a huge new market is a very gutsy call.
On balance, I would rather have my co-philanthropists on the long side of
this particular bet.
Whitney: Short or long, I look forward to dinner and drinks together in the
New Year.
Respectfully, your ally and admirer,
-Reed
【在 g******e 的大作中提到】
: 那么好玩。喜欢这个CEO。不过NFLX谈deal是很厉害。business做得不错。当然股票走
: 势是另一回事。
| x*******l
发帖数: 542 | 10
还要看第二天有没有analyst拍马屁
【在 g**********g 的大作中提到】
: ER的流程是先出报表， 然后再电话上说。
: 很多时候是电话里说的决定方向
| | | g******n
发帖数: 53185 | 11 没有upgrade没天理啊
【在 x*******l 的大作中提到】
:
: 还要看第二天有没有analyst拍马屁
| g******e
发帖数: 998 | 12 very nice article， clear， specific， and straightforward。
thanks alot。
【在 g******n 的大作中提到】
: 是很牛气。
: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Responds to Whitney Tilson: Cover Your Short
: Position. Now.
: A great investor and a wonderful human being, Whitney Tilson recently posted
: an article about why he is short Netflix (NFLX). Whitney, who is a major co
: -donor with me to charter public schools like KIPP, writes that he has lost
: money betting against Netflix, and that he is still short Netflix in a big
: way.
: At Netflix we mostly focus on building our business and letting the numbers
: do the talking. But Whitney is such a big-hearted donor to causes that I
| g******n
发帖数: 53185 | 13 那个tilson大概均价$100 per share重仓short nflx。nflx至少能熬到他cover
【在 g******e 的大作中提到】
: very nice article， clear， specific， and straightforward。
: thanks alot。
| x*******l
发帖数: 542 | 14
没地理的事也天天都有...
记得rimm每个ER无论怎么beat，都有analyst站出来一幅世外高人的样子，说你们不要
被数字欺骗
了...
华尔街喜欢谁不喜欢谁和该不该upgrade是两回事吧...
【在 g******n 的大作中提到】
: 没有upgrade没天理啊
| g******e
发帖数: 998 | 15 如果是3x margin，这已经是第三次死了。当然他们有很多hedge和短线套利，不过还是
够惨的。
http://www.marketfolly.com/2010/07/hedge-fund-t2-partners-updat
这个wilson的portfolio有意思。
June, 2010
Here are some of T2's current longs (in no particular order):
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A/B)
Iridium (IRDM)
Liberty Acquisition Corp warrants
BP plc (BP)
Winn Dixie (WINN)
Microsoft (MSFT)
Echostar (SATS)
dELIA*s (DLIA)
General Growth Properties (GGP)
Read more: http://www.marketfolly.com/2010/07/hedge-fund-t2-partners-updated-long.html#ixzz1CBObNMKD
And here are some of the hedge fund's short positions that they've revealed:
Pacific Capital Bancorp (PCBC)
Homebuilders via the Homebuilder ETF (XHB)
For-profit education companies (no specific names mentioned, most likely a
basket)
Barnes & Noble (BKS)
Boyd Gaming (BYD)
MBIA (MBI)
InterOil (IOC) puts
Read more: http://www.marketfolly.com/2010/07/hedge-fund-t2-partners-updated-long.html#ixzz1CBOfHF00
【在 g******n 的大作中提到】
: 那个tilson大概均价$100 per share重仓short nflx。nflx至少能熬到他cover
| g******n
发帖数: 53185 | 16 这是因为rimm已经被炒够了，当年火的时候，一个er从150跳开到200，然后就慢慢涨到230。等被玩够了，再怎么努力也是昨日黄花。
【在 x*******l 的大作中提到】
:
: 没地理的事也天天都有...
: 记得rimm每个ER无论怎么beat，都有analyst站出来一幅世外高人的样子，说你们不要
: 被数字欺骗
: 了...
: 华尔街喜欢谁不喜欢谁和该不该upgrade是两回事吧...
| s******v
发帖数: 4495 | 17 你觉得RIM面对AAPL和GOOG两大对手，还能grow吗？
【在 x*******l 的大作中提到】
:
: 没地理的事也天天都有...
: 记得rimm每个ER无论怎么beat，都有analyst站出来一幅世外高人的样子，说你们不要
: 被数字欺骗
: 了...
: 华尔街喜欢谁不喜欢谁和该不该upgrade是两回事吧...
| x*******l
发帖数: 542 | 18
有没有grow和立刻去死是两回事啊，我只是说花街不公平而已
【在 s******v 的大作中提到】
: 你觉得RIM面对AAPL和GOOG两大对手，还能grow吗？
| l**********o
发帖数: 9952 | 19 恭喜老爷，贺喜老爷，老爷英明神武，一统江湖！
老爷发包子吧～ | s******v
发帖数: 4495 | 20 和传统公司不一样，high tech公司，没有growth，和安乐死是一样的，因为竞争对手在
growth，就是在蚕食他。华尔街不是不公平，是你和钱不是一个思路。
【在 x*******l 的大作中提到】
:
: 有没有grow和立刻去死是两回事啊，我只是说花街不公平而已
|
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