Counterpoint Global Insights One Job Expectations and the Role of Intangible Investments CONSILIENT OBSERVER | September 15, 2020 Introduction Here’s a profile of a company. Do you want to buy the stock? This company will be profitable for each of the next 15 years. Both sales and net income will grow at close to a 40 percent compound annual rate. The company will also initiate a dividend in the third year, which will grow at nearly a 50 percent compound annual rate through the end of the period. Here’s another profile. Do you want to buy the stock? This company will have negative free cash flow for each of the next 15 years. The level of debt will grow at a 34 percent compound annual rate over this time. Its cash balance will start at 2.5 percent of sales and will dwindle to 2.0 percent by the end of the period. The answer to both questions should be “yes.” As you may have guessed, this is the same company, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., from 1972- 1986. The annual total shareholder return of Walmart’s stock during this period was 29 percent versus the S&P 500’s 11 percent. You would be forgiven for thinking the first profile sounds better than the second one. The company was consistently profitable and grew its top and bottom lines at a healthy clip. Establishing and raising the dividend also signaled management’s confidence in the future. The price-earnings ratio may have been high at times but at least there were earnings. We can’t say the same for many of the companies going public today. Nearly 40 percent of companies listed in the U.S. in 2019 lost money, up from fewer than 20 percent in the 1970s. 1 The negative free cash flow in the second profile tells you only that the company invested more money than it made. The firm required external financing, which led to rising debt and slim cash balances. But the second profile omitted the key fact that Walmart’s annual return on invested capital averaged 18 percent during that time, a level well in excess of its cost of capital. It spent more than it earned, but its investments had a high payoff. AUTHORS Michael J. Mauboussin [email protected]Dan Callahan, CFA [email protected]
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Counterpoint Global Insights
One Job Expectations and the Role of Intangible Investments
CONSILIENT OBSERVER | September 15, 2020
Introduction
Here’s a profile of a company. Do you want to buy the stock?
This company will be profitable for each of the next 15 years. Both
sales and net income will grow at close to a 40 percent compound
annual rate. The company will also initiate a dividend in the third
year, which will grow at nearly a 50 percent compound annual rate
through the end of the period.
Here’s another profile. Do you want to buy the stock?
This company will have negative free cash flow for each of the next
15 years. The level of debt will grow at a 34 percent compound
annual rate over this time. Its cash balance will start at 2.5 percent
of sales and will dwindle to 2.0 percent by the end of the period.
The answer to both questions should be “yes.” As you may have
guessed, this is the same company, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., from 1972-
1986. The annual total shareholder return of Walmart’s stock during
this period was 29 percent versus the S&P 500’s 11 percent.
You would be forgiven for thinking the first profile sounds better than
the second one. The company was consistently profitable and grew
its top and bottom lines at a healthy clip. Establishing and raising the
dividend also signaled management’s confidence in the future. The
price-earnings ratio may have been high at times but at least there
were earnings. We can’t say the same for many of the companies
going public today. Nearly 40 percent of companies listed in the U.S.
in 2019 lost money, up from fewer than 20 percent in the 1970s.1
The negative free cash flow in the second profile tells you only that the
company invested more money than it made. The firm required
external financing, which led to rising debt and slim cash balances.
But the second profile omitted the key fact that Walmart’s annual
return on invested capital averaged 18 percent during that time, a level
well in excess of its cost of capital. It spent more than it earned, but its
1 James Mackintosh, “Money-Losing Companies Mushroom Even as Stocks Hit New Highs,” Wall Street
Journal, January 9, 2020 and Feng Gu and Baruch Lev, “How to Distinguish Between GAAP Losers and Real
Losers,” Lev The End of Accounting Blog, February 6, 2020. For analysis of why these companies can be
valued highly, see Masako Darrough and Jianming Ye, “Valuation of Loss Firms in a Knowledge-Based
Economy, Review of Accounting Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, March 2007, 61-93. 2 Alfred Rappaport and Michael J. Mauboussin, Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better
Returns (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001). 3 Steven Crist, “Crist on Value,” in Beyer, et al., Bet with the Best (New York: Daily Racing Form Press, 2001). 4 Nai-Fu Chen, Richard Roll, and Stephen A. Ross, “Economic Forces and the Stock Market,” Journal of
Business, Vol. 59, No. 3, July 1986, 383-403. 5 Merton H. Miller and Franco Modigliani, “Dividend Policy, Growth, and the Valuation of Shares,” Journal of
Business, Vol. 34, No. 4, October 1961, 411-433. 6 Stewart C. Myers, “Determinants of Corporate Borrowing,” Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 5, No. 2,
November 1977, 147-175. For a breakdown of steady state versus future growth for 24 companies from early
2020, see Bartley J. Madden, Value Creation Principles: The Pragmatic Theory of the Firm Begins with
Purpose and Ends with Sustainable Capitalism (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020) 101. 7 Michael J. Mauboussin and Dan Callahan, “What Does a Price-Earnings Multiple Mean? An Analytical Bridge
between P/Es and Solid Economics,” Credit Suisse Global Financial Strategies, January 29, 2014. 8 Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 15-22. 9 Carol A. Corrado, Charles Hulten, and Daniel Sichel, “Measuring Capital and Technology: An Expanded
Framework,” in Carol A. Corrado, John Haltiwanger, and Daniel Sichel, eds. Measuring Capital in the New
Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Carol A. Corrado, Charles Hulten, and Daniel Sichel,
“Intangible Capital and U.S. Economic Growth,” Review of Income and Wealth, Vol. 55, No. 3, September
2009, 661-685; and presentation by Carol Corrado available at
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/event/Corrado%20Presentation.pdf. 10 “Accounting for Research and Development Costs,” Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 2,
October 1974. 11 Urooj Khan, Bin Li, Shivaram Rajgopal, and Mohan Venkatachalam, “Do the FASB’s Standards Add
Shareholder Value?” Accounting Review, Vol. 93, No. 2, March 2018, 209-247. 12 Baruch Lev, “Ending the Accounting-for-Intangibles Status Quo,” European Accounting Review, Vol. 28, No.
4, September 2019, 713-736. For a detailed discussion of accounting for intangibles, see Thomas A. King,
More Than a Numbers Game: A Brief History of Accounting (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), 131-
143. 13 Nicolas Crouzet and Janice Eberly, “Understanding Weak Capital Investment: The Role of Market
Concentration and Intangibles,” NBER Working Paper No. 25869, May 2019 and William Lazonick, “Profits
Without Prosperity: Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market and Leave Most Americans Worse Off,” Harvard
Business Review, Vol. 92, No. 9, September 2014, 46-55. 14 Luminita Enache and Anup Srivastava, “Should Intangible Investments Be Reported Separately or
Commingled with Operating Expenses? New Evidence,” Management Science, Vol. 64, No. 7, July 2018,
3446-3468. 15 Thomas Friedman, a foreign affairs columnist at the New York Times, argues that 2007 was a pivotal year
because of the long list of technologies and companies that were launched. See Chapter 2, “What the Hell
Happened in 2007?” in Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the
Age of Accelerations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). 16 Charles R. Hulten, “Decoding Microsoft: Intangible Capital as a Source of Company Growth,” NBER
Working Paper 15799, March 2010. 17 Ibid., 8. 18 Carol A. Corrado and Charles R. Hulten, “Innovation Accounting,” in Dale W. Jorgenson, J. Steven
Landefeld, and Paul Schreyer, eds., Measuring Economic Sustainability and Progress (Chicago: University of
19 For a detailed explanation of this process, see Tim Koller, Mark Goedhart, and David Wessels, Valuation:
Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies–Seventh Edition (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020),
467-481. 20 Bill Lewis, Angelique Augereau, Mike Cho, Brad Johnson, Brent Neiman, Gabriela Olazabal, Matt Sandler,
Sandra Schrauf, Kevin Stange, Andrew Tilton, Eric Xin, Baudouin Regout, Allen Webb, Mike Nevens, Lenny
Mendonca, Vincent Palmade, Greg Hughes, and James Manyika, “US Productivity Growth, 1995-2000,”
McKinsey Global Institute, October 1, 2001. 21 Vijay Govindarajan, Shivaram Rajgopal, Anup Srivastava, and Luminita Enache, “It’s Time to Stop Treating
R&D as a Discretionary Item,” Harvard Business Review, January 29, 2019. 22 Asher Curtis, Sarah McVay, and Sara Toynbee, “The Changing Implications of Research and Development
Expenditures for Future Profitability,” Review of Accounting Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, June 2020, 405-437. For a
more general discussion of R&D, see Anne Marie Knott, How Innovation Really Works: Using the Trillion-
Dollar R&D Fix to Drive Growth (New York: McGraw Hill, 2017). For a macro discussion, see Nicholas Bloom,
Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” American
Economic Review, Vol. 110, No. 4, April 2020, 1104-1144. For evidence that R&D expenses generate more
uncertain payoffs than do capital expenditures, see S. P. Kothari, Ted E. Laguerre, and Andrew J. Leone,
“Capitalization versus Expensing: Evidence on the Uncertainty of Future Earnings from Capital Expenditures
versus R&D Outlays,” Review of Accounting Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4, December 2002, 355-382. For a discussion
on R&D’s ability to explain asset returns, see Woon Sau Leung, Kevin P. Evans, and Khelifa Mazouz, “The
R&D Anomaly: Risk or Mispricing?” Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 115, June 2020, 105815. 23 Katharine Adame, Jennifer Koski, Katie Lem, and Sarah McVay, “Free Cash Flow Disclosure in Earnings
Announcements,” Working Paper, June 3, 2020. 24 Sanjeev Bhojraj, “Stock Compensation Expense, Cash Flows, and Inflated Valuations,” Review of
Accounting Studies, forthcoming and Qi Sun and Mindy Z. Xiaolan, “Financing Intangible Capital,” Journal of
Financial Economics, Vol. 133, No. 3, September 2019, 564-588. There is evidence that companies use more
long-term equity compensation when the returns to SG&A spending are high. See Rajiv D. Banker, Rong
Huang, and Ramachandran Natarajan, “Equity Incentives and Long‐Term Value Created by SG&A
Expenditure,” Contemporary Accounting Research, Vol. 28, No. 3, September 2011, 794-830. 25 Mauboussin and Callahan, “What Does a Price-Earnings Multiple Mean? An Analytical Bridge between P/Es
and Solid Economics,” 17. 26 Matthew A. Stallings, “The Potential Impact of Lease Accounting on Equity Valuation: Implications of Cost of
Capital and Free Cash Flow Estimates,” CPA Journal, Vol. 87, No. 11, November 2017, 52-56. More
technically, the financing component of the lease cost is moved to the financing section while the depreciation
stays as an operating expense. 27 Amazon.com, Form 10-K, 2019, 29. 28 For an excellent discussion of the economics of intangible assets, see David Warsh, Knowledge and the
Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006). For
applications to technology, see Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the
Network Economy (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999). 29 Paul M. Romer, “Endogenous Technological Change,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 98, No. 5, Pt. 2,
October 1990, S71-S102. 30 Haskel and Westlake, Capitalism Without Capital, 56-88. 31 Joseph A. DiMasi, Henry G. Grabowski, and Ronald W. Hansen, “Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry:
New Estimates of R&D Costs,” Journal of Health Economics, Vol. 47, May 2016, 20-33. 32 American Telephone & Telegraph Annual Report, 1908. See
https://beatriceco.com/bti/porticus/bell/pdf/1908ATTar_Complete.pdf. Thanks to James Currier, “The Network
Effects Manual: 13 Different Network Effects, NFX, January 9, 2018. 33 Thomas Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne, "Strategies for Two-Sided Markets,"
Harvard Business Review, Vol. 84, No. 10, October 2006, 92-101. 34 W. Brian Arthur, “What’s Your Law?” Edge.org, 2004. See www.edge.org/response-detail/10639. 35 Steve C. Lim, Antonio J. Macias, Thomas Moeller, “Intangible Assets and Capital Structure,” Journal of
36 “US PE Breakdown: 2019 Annual,” PitchBook, January 9, 2020. 37 Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing, 2018), 22-26. 38 Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in
Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 275. 39 Peter L. Singer, “Federally Supported Innovations: 22 Examples of Major Technology Advances That Stem
from Federal Research Support,” Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, February 2014. 40 W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009);
Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: HarperCollins, 2010); and John H.
Holland, Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2012). 41 Arthur, The Nature of Technology, 40. 42 Ilia Dichev, John Graham, Campbell R. Harvey, and Shiva Rajgopal, “The Misrepresentation of Earnings,”
Financial Analysts Journal, Vol. 72, No. 1, January/February 2016, 22-35. 43 For example, see John Hand and Baruch Lev, eds. Intangible Assets: Values, Measures, and Risks (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Anup Srivastava, “Why Have Measures of Earnings Quality Changed
Over Time?” Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 57, Nos. 2-3, April-May 2014, 196-217; Feng Gu and
Baruch Lev, The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Hoboken, NJ: John
Wiley & Sons, 2016); and Vijay Govindarajan, Shivaram Rajgopal, and Anup Srivastava, “Why Financial
Statements Don’t Work for Digital Companies,” Harvard Business Review, February 26, 2018. 44 See Ethan Rouen, Eric So, and Charles C.Y. Wang, “Core Earnings: New Data and Evidence,” Harvard
Business School Working Paper 20-047, June 2020. The authors strip out non-recurring and ancillary items,
which have risen over the decades, to derive “core earnings.” They show that core earnings are more
persistent and relevant for value than are GAAP earnings. 45 Lev, “Ending the Accounting-for-Intangibles Status Quo” and Baruch Lev and Paul Zarowin, “The
Boundaries of Financial Reporting and How to Extend Them,” Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 37, No. 2,
Autumn 1999, 353-385. 46 Rajiv D. Banker, Rong Huang, Ram Natarajan, and Sha Zhao, “Market Valuation of Intangible Asset:
Evidence on SG&A Expenditure,” Accounting Review, Vol. 94, No. 6, November 2019, 61-90. 47 Katharine Adame, Jennifer Koski, and Sarah McVay, “Why Are Investors Paying More Attention to Free
Cash Flows?” Working Paper, May 28, 2019. 48 Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French, “The Cross‐Section of Expected Stock Returns,” Journal of
Finance, Vol. 47, No. 2, June 1992, 427-465. 49 Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French, “The Value Premium,” Fama-Miller Working Paper No. 20-01,
January 30, 2020; Cliff Asness, “Never Has a Venial Sin Been Punished This Quickly and Violently!” AQR
Perspectives, February 19, 2020; and Pushkar Agrawal and Mike Nigro, “Diagnosing the Recent Decade of
Drawdown in Value,” Two Sigma Investments, July 27, 2020. Technically, the ratios are not price-book value
and price-earnings, but rather book value-price and earnings-price. Flipping the ratios made for better looking
exhibits in the opinions of the authors. 50 Baruch Lev and Anup Srivastava, “Explaining the Recent Failure of Value Investing,” NYU Stern School of
Business Working Paper, March 31, 2020. The authors of this paper came to similar conclusions: Noël Amenc,
Felix Goltz, and Ben Luyten, “Intangible Capital and the Value Factor: Has Your Value Definition Just
Expired?” Journal of Portfolio Management, Vol. 46, No. 7, July 2020, 83-99. 51 Meghana Ayyagari, Asli Demirguc-Kunt, and Vojislav Maksimovic, “The Rise of Star Firms: Intangible
Capital and Competition,” Working Paper, April 2020.
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