Friday, September 6, 2013

Sure, He Called the Top In Apple and He Called the Bottom in Facebook But Tesla Fair Market Value at $67.12? (TSLA)

The stock closed yesterday at $169.93.
From Professor Aswath Damodaran's blog, Musing on Markets:

Valuation of the week 1: A Tesla Test 
I taught the first session of my valuation class, that I previewed in my last post, today. As part of that class, I do what I call a “valuation of the week”, where I pick a company and value it and then post both my valuation (with the spreadsheet and the raw data that I used) and a shared Google spreadsheet for anyone who wants to take my valuation and make it their own (by changing the assumptions). I do this for two reasons. First, I believe that you learn valuation by valuing real companies in real time, not by talking about valuation or reading about it. Second, from a purely selfish standpoint, I pick the companies that I find interesting as potential investments or as real world case studies for my valuations of the week. I find the “crowd valuation” that emerges from this process to be useful in reassessing my own valuations.

As my first valuation of the week, I picked Tesla, for three reasons. First, as a technology company in an otherwise capital-intensive, mature business (the automobile manufacturing business), it stands out. Second, the company has a charismatic CEO, Elon Musk, an ambitious man (and I don’t mean that in a negative sense) with a great deal of imagination. Third,  the stock has taken off in the last year, up more than 500%, fueled by both positive news on the product front as well as on the financial front (increasing revenues, declining losses, paying down of debt). 
At its current stock price of $168.76/share, the market capitalization for the company is more than $20 billion. The question for investors, both in and out of the stock, is not whether the company was a good investment over the last year (of course, it was) but whether it is a good investment today. You can download the most recent annual and quarterly reports for the company.
Using the standard metrics, the company seems  over valued. With revenues of $1.33 billion and an operating loss of -$217 million over the last twelve months, it seems absurd to attach a value of more than $20 billion to the company. At close to 15.4 times revenues, Tesla is being valued more like a young technology company than an automobile company. However, these standard metrics are also often misleading with young companies, since value should be driven not by revenues and earnings today but by expectations for these values in the future....MUCH MORE
HT: Business Insider via Yahoo Finance
And from MoneyBeat:
 Mr. Damodaran is known for unloading his shares of Apple Inc.AAPL -0.69% in April 2012, a move that came just months before the stock peaked that September and proved to be a good call. He also took a chance on Facebook a year ago, around the time the stock was bottoming. In late July after the stock reclaimed its $38 IPO price, he said he sold his position....
Since we're talking Tesla, kudos to Deutsche Bank's Dan Galves:
"Tesla Shares to $160? Five Reasons It Could Happen" (TSLA)