Electric truckmaker Rivian Automotive reached a stock market value of US$91-billion at the time of its initial public offering last year despite having sold only a handful of vehicles.BRENDAN MCDERMID/Reuters
Sign up for the new Globe Advisor weekly newsletter for professional financial advisors on our newsletter sign-up page. Get exclusive investment industry news and insights, the week’s top headlines, and what you and your clients need to know.
For anyone who watches the stock market for a living, the recent car crash in technology stocks has been mesmerizing. There are plenty of reasons to believe it isn’t over.
That’s not so much an issue for Big Tech, although the wealth erased since the start of the year is significant. Between them, the five biggest tech companies have shed almost US$2.6-trillion. That’s a decline of 26 per cent, twice the drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
There are still some serious questions. Amazon.com Inc. AMZN-Q is suffering an uncharacteristically severe adjustment after a massive spending binge, while the issues facing Meta Platforms Inc. FB-Q as the former Facebook tries to reposition itself as a metaverse company are little short of existential. But in general, Big Tech’s premium to the rest of the market has been largely erased and the companies’ defensive qualities are likely to show through in tougher economic times.
Rather, the axe is now hanging over high-growth tech companies. That’s where valuations became most stretched and where the market is having most trouble finding its nadir.
As investors grope for more appropriate financial yardsticks with which to judge these companies, as well as the right valuation multiples to apply to those metrics, volatility is likely to remain high.
Multiples of revenue were a favourite that growth investors used to chase stocks higher, at least until the turn that set in last November. On that measure, there’s ample room for further declines, particularly as markets often overshoot on the way down as well as on the way up.
Zoom Video Communications Inc. ZM-Q is now trading at less than six times this year’s expected sales, a far cry from the revenue multiple of more than 85 it peaked at in 2020.
But Tomasz Tunguz at Redpoint Ventures calculated last week that even after an approximately 70 per cent fall, cloud software companies still trade at a 50-per-cent premium to the price-to-revenue multiples they were at in 2017.
Revenue multiplies are also quickly falling out of favour as investors try to assess the sustainability of companies that were built for growth but are encountering financial shock and potential economic downturn.
Both investors and tech executives are starting to turn away from two favourite profit measures that took hold among tech investors as the market boomed – earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA); and net earnings that exclude stock compensation costs.
Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc. UBER-N, told staff at the ride-hailing company this week that in a harsher financial climate, it was time to ditch the company’s EBITDA targets and become cash flow positive.
After burning through almost US$18-billion since 2016, it’s fortunate for him that Uber was already on the brink of reaching this milestone – although it will take a new focus on costs to become sustainably profitable on this measure.
Many other tech companies, accustomed to the ready supply of cash in the good times, are still a long way from reaching the free cash flow milestone.
Handing out restricted stocks to staff, meanwhile, has become a cash-free way for many companies to find talent in a red-hot tech labour market without hurting the measures of earnings to which Wall Street has paid most attention.
Workers have come to look at stock compensation as a guaranteed supplement to their regular income rather than the option lottery it once was. As Dan Loeb of Third Point LLC wrote to his investors this week, that will force companies either to raise cash pay to keep workers happy or issue much more stock, something that will dilute existing shareholders but wouldn’t be evident to anyone still looking at non-GAAP measures of profits.
Meanwhile, there are many other companies that have no profits on any measure and very little in the way of sales, making it all the harder for the market to find a bottom.
Electric truckmaker Rivian Automotive Inc. RIVN-Q reached a stock market value of US$91-billion at the time of its initial public offering last year despite having sold only a handful of vehicles.
After plunging 80 per cent, Rivian may have found a floor of sorts; on Wednesday of last week, it was trading at almost exactly its book value, thanks to the US$15-billion of net cash sitting on its balance sheet. That turned out to be a good foundation for a 14 per cent bounce on Thursday, after the company reported earnings.
Many companies in a similar position don’t have that kind of balance sheet to fall back on. That is particularly true of the SPACs, or special purpose financing vehicles, that were used to bring early-stage companies public.
As the flight from risk continues, even today’s stressed valuations may come to look overly optimistic.
© The Financial Times Limited 2022. All Rights Reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.
For more from Globe Advisor, visit our homepage.