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2021-06-24
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Pfizer: A Wide Moat Business At A Fair Price
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{"i18n":{"language":"zh_CN"},"detailType":1,"isChannel":false,"data":{"magic":2,"id":128495644,"tweetId":"128495644","gmtCreate":1624526548488,"gmtModify":1634004865037,"author":{"id":3574932076648170,"idStr":"3574932076648170","authorId":3574932076648170,"authorIdStr":"3574932076648170","name":"madamadam","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/85ca08d3e491ab7b1e1d9764da08e767","vip":1,"userType":1,"introduction":"","boolIsFan":false,"boolIsHead":false,"crmLevel":4,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"individualDisplayBadges":[],"fanSize":1,"starInvestorFlag":false},"themes":[],"images":[],"coverImages":[],"extraTitle":"","html":"<html><head></head><body><p>liked</p></body></html>","htmlText":"<html><head></head><body><p>liked</p></body></html>","text":"liked","highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/128495644","repostId":1137537223,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1137537223","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1624523813,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1137537223?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-06-24 16:36","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Pfizer: A Wide Moat Business At A Fair Price","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1137537223","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nAt its current price levels (~$39), an investment in Pfizer represents a wide moat business","content":"<p><b>Summary</b></p>\n<ul>\n <li>At its current price levels (~$39), an investment in Pfizer represents a wide moat business for sale at a fair price.</li>\n <li>The moat is rooted in technological lead, scale, intellectual property, and a strong pipeline.</li>\n <li>As a result, the business enjoys high profitability, return on capital employed, and heathy perpetual growth prospects – the hallmarks of a long-term compounder.</li>\n <li>Investment at the current price provides excellent potential for double-digit return in the long term.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><b>Thesis and Background</b></p>\n<p>The healthcare sector is a great place for value investors, ranging from legends like Warren Buffett to ordinary investors like myself for many good reasons. It caters to fundamental human needs that are not going to change or go away anytime soon. All signs show that the need will only intensify with population growth, longer life expectancy, more interconnected world, et al. The major players like Pfizer Inc (PFE), due to their established lead and scale, are especially well poised to capitalize on such secular trend.</p>\n<p>At its current price levels (~$39), an investment in PFE represents a wide moat business for sale at a fair price. The short-term risk is very manageable given the current entry valuation, the success with their COVID vaccine, and the support from the dividend yield. In the long term, thanks to their profitability and return on capital employed, investment at the current price provides excellent potential for double digit return.</p>\n<p>Before going into any further details, it would help to briefly summarize my investment philosophy to provide a context. I am a long-term, conservative, and value-oriented investor. I hold a rather concentrated portfolio with about a dozen stocks. I rarely buy and very rarely sell. So you will see me writing about a handful of holdings multiple times from different angles. If you like reading in-depth and multifaceted coverage on the same holdings, I am your guy.</p>\n<p>My goal for my stock holdings is to generate<b>D</b>ouble-<b>D</b>igit return during a<b>D</b>ecade, and that is why I nickname my portfolio the DDD portfolio. Currently my portfolio holds the following 9 stocks. Using the date Ifirst publishedthe DDD portfolio on 5/31/2021 as the inception date, its performance on a weekly basis is summarized in the following two charts. It has been a really short time compared to my horizon, but so far so good fortunately.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/4cb3acede81613b3761fd70078b79286\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"420\"></p>\n<p>Source: Author</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/11117eef882381e86fc7ad1e929b15d8\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"364\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Source: Author</p>\n<p><b>The businesses and the moat</b></p>\n<p>Pfizer Inc. is a research-based, global biopharmaceutical leader engaged in the discovery, development, manufacture, and distribution of healthcare products. It offers medicines and vaccines in various therapeutic areas, encompassing internal medicine, oncology, vaccines, immunology, rare disease, et al.</p>\n<p>For pharmaceutical companies at this scale, it is all about A) bringing blockbuster drugs (with market value exceeding $1B per year) to market, and B) having a healthy pipeline of potential blockbusters. And PFE is doing a terrific job on both fronts as you can see from the following two charts.</p>\n<p>As seen from the first chart, PFE boasts a collection of blockbuster drugs including Vyndaqel ($1.2B sales in 2020), Prevnar ($5.8B sales), Xeljanz ($2.4B), et al. And in 2021, PFE just added another blockbuster into its production line: the Covid vaccine. PFE was the first to gain FDA approval for its COVID-19 vaccine, and the vaccine is already PFE's top-selling drug as of 2021 Q1. The vaccine brought in $3.4B of sales during 2021 Q1! These blockbuster drugs are about 5 years on average away from patent expiration.</p>\n<p>This where the pipeline comes in. As seen in the second chart, PFE also maintains a healthy pipeline to prepare for the future. This large pipeline consists of ~100 total drugs. The lifecycle for a drug development (from the lab to the market) could take more than a decade. And therefore, the drugs in the later stage of the development, i.e., Phase 3 or later, are more important. And as can be seen, PFE has a total of 33 of them currently. Not all of them will be a blockbuster. And here is how the scale of PFE matters. Thanks to its scale, it does not need all of them to be blockbusters. It can afford the inevitable misses.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/274b7e5bc8ed32603e922232dbdba5d0\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"349\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Source:Pfizer 2020 annual report</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/8eba34c481717e6f2cfaa6f316498aa2\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"181\"></p>\n<p>Source: Pfizer 2020 annual report</p>\n<p><b>Profitability and Financial Strength</b></p>\n<p>Thanks to its technological lead and scale, PFE enjoys superior profitability and financial strengths both relative to other peers in the same sector and also to the overall market, as illustrated by the following chart. The profitability is simply superb on every metric - both in absolute terms and in relative terms when compared to its peers.</p>\n<p>The business is also in a very strong financial position, as exemplified by the next chart. Its interest coverage (operation income divided by interest expense) is more than 16x. In other words, it only takes about 6% of its operation income to cover its interest expenses. In contrast, the interest coverage for the overall market represented by S&P 500 is about 6x. Also as shown by the orange line in the chart, thanks to its strong profitability (and terrific return on capital to be detailed later), the business can also afford to pay off pretty much all the remaining income as dividend after covering its debt and maintenance CAPEx.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/2df9ddd5bfc780fb81922d0bf07dfb2f\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"315\"></p>\n<p>Source: Seeking Alpha.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/b29a25abfa0354c92c5dfb7ab49243ff\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"398\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Source: Author based on data from Seeking Alpha</p>\n<p><b>The valuation</b></p>\n<p>As can be seen from the following numbers in the table, at its current price levels, PEF is about fairly valued or slightly discounted depending on which valuation metric you use based on its historical valuations. In terms of absolute valuation, its current valuations (price/cash flow ratio around 14.5x) is also very reasonable for a wide moat business leader. Many consumer staple businesses (like food and drinks business) are valued above 20x cash flow because they cater to an eternal human need. Yet in my view, PFE caters to an equally eternal human need with a wider moat.</p>\n<p>As such, the short-term risk is very manageable given the current entry valuation, especially considering the upcoming boost from their COVID vaccine. And also, the above average dividend yield would help to support the return should any short term turmoil occur.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/28f2c7c3ec96007a14b507da34b0eb02\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"88\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\">Source: author and Seeking Alpha</p>\n<p><b>Long-term return and perpetual growth rate</b></p>\n<p>If you, like this author, are a long-term investor who subscribes to the concepts of owner's earning, perpetual growth rate, and equity bond, then the long-term return is simpler. It is \"simply\" the summation of the owner's earning yield (\"OEY\") and the perpetual growth rate (\"PGR\"), i.e.,</p>\n<p>Longer-Term ROI = OEY + PGR</p>\n<p>Because in the long term, all fluctuations in valuation are averaged out (all luck at the end even out). And it doesn't really matter how the business uses the earnings (pay out as dividend, retained in the bank account, or repurchase stocks). As long as used sensibly (as PFE has done in the past), it will be reflected as a return to the business owner.</p>\n<p>OEY is the owner's earnings divided by the entry price. All the complications are in the estimation of the owner's earnings - the real economic earnings of the business, not the nominal accounting earnings. Here as a crude and conservative estimate, I will just use the free cash flow (\"FCF\") as the owner's earnings. It is conservative in the sense that rigorously speaking, the owner's earnings should be free cash flow plus the portion of CAPEx that is used to fuel the growth (i.e., the growth CAPEx). At its current price levels, the OEY is ~6.6% for PFE (~15x price to FCF).</p>\n<p>The next and more important item is the PGR. To understand and estimate it, we will need to first estimate the return on capital employed (\"ROCE\"). Note that ROCE is different from the return on equity (and more fundamental and important in my view). ROCE considers the return of capital ACTUALLY employed, and therefore provides insight into how much additional capital a business needs to invest in order to earn a given extra amount of income - a key to estimate the PGR. For businesses like PFE, I consider the following items capital actually employed:</p>\n<p>1. Working capital, including payables, receivables, inventory. These are the capitals required for the daily operation of their businesses.</p>\n<p>2. Gross Property, Plant, and Equipment. These are the capitals required to actually conduct business and manufacture their products.</p>\n<p>3. There are the following two possible routes here:</p>\n<p>3.1. The first route is to include research and development expenses as a capital investment. As mentioned above, the R&D is the lifeblood for a sustainable pharmaceutical business and is not really an optional expense.</p>\n<p>3.2. The second route is to amortize its intangible book value, mainly consisting of intellectual property and patents. This essentially treats the intellectual properties as capital with a finite lifetime, which I will assume to be five years, the average number of years away from its current blockbuster drugs' patent expiration.</p>\n<p>Based on the above considerations, the ROCE of PFE over the past decade are shown below. As seen, both approaches provided similar results, a good sign of the assumptions. PFE was able to maintain a remarkably high and stable ROCE over the long term: on average 44% for the past decade. To put things in perspective, as detailed in myprevious articlesfor Lockheed Martin (LMT) and General Dynamics (GD), ROCEs for these defense business leaders, who almost enjoy a monopoly moat, are \"only\" in the range of 20% to 30%.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/2bcb7c6b4fc7360c3140a7cbcd7aa511\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"398\"></p>\n<p>Source: Author and Seeking Alpha</p>\n<p>With a 44% ROCE, it means that even if PFE only reinvests 1/10 of its earnings to expand the capital employed, it could maintain a 4.4% PGR (PGR = ROCE * fraction of earnings reinvested = 10% * 44% = 4.4%). And 10% reinvestment rate is indeed the situation here for PFE based on my analyses. As aforementioned, this is a reason that PFE can afford to pay off pretty much all the remaining income as dividend after covering its debt and maintenance CAPEx as dividend (or share repurchase). Of course, another reason is that businesses at this scale simply are not able to find that many opportunities to reinvest their earnings. But after all, 4.4% PGR already makes it a long term compounder with 10% income reinvested!</p>\n<p>Now we have both pieces of the puzzle in place to estimate the long-term return. At its current price levels, the OEY is estimated to be ~6.6% for PFE (~15x price to FCF), and the PGR is about 4.4%. So the total return in the long term at current valuation would be a double digit around 11% as shown in the chart below. Also as seen, even when ROCE fluctuates somewhat, the fluctuations wouldn't change the long-term return dramatically.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/bc98d9c0dd33069c7237e253e96f624b\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"416\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Source: Author and Seeking Alpha.</p>\n<p>And for those of us who would like to wait for a better entry price, the next chart shows how much the long-term return potential would change as a function of the entry price. As can be seen, the long-term return potential doesn't change that much within a pretty wide range of entry price, as shown in the green box. This probably confirms something that you've already heard before - if you hold something for the long term, the entry price does not matter that much.</p>\n<p>However, many investors seem to interpret this one-sided and I'd like to do a bit of hairsplitting here. The above statement refers to the long-term RATE of return, not the absolute DOLLAR AMOUNT of return. When your entry price is decreased by 10%, yes, it is correct that this wouldn't impact your long-term rate of return by a lot as seen. But a 10% lower entry price would give you at least 10% more return in absolute dollar amount - because you get to buy 10% more shares with the same dollar amount you have, plus the whatever extra return brought about by the higher RATE of return.</p>\n<p>And as a final note before ending this section, this might be the most valuable insight that I've learned by studying Warren Buffett's investment philosophy. The insight really is that I do not need a business with double-digit growth to generate double-digit returns. A reliable business that can offer a stable growth at a boring rate of a few percent (like ~4% in the examples of PFE) can already provide double-digit returns with good certainty as long as A) they are purchased at a reasonable valuation, and B) they have ROCE sufficiently high so that the growth can be driven by reinvesting a small fraction of the income. In the long run, assuming a growth rate more than a few percent probably is a dangerous assumption to start with anyway.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/cca693c6f94c74a4aebd1de7b8392612\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"422\"></p>\n<p>Source: Author and Seeking Alpha</p>\n<p><b>Conclusion and final thoughts</b></p>\n<p>The healthcare sector is a great place for value investors and enjoys long-term secular headwinds. Major players like Pfizer, due to their established lead and scale, are especially well-poised to capitalize on such secular trend. At its current price levels (~$39), an investment in PFE represents a wide moat business for sale at a fair price. The short-term risk is very manageable given the current entry valuation, the success with their COVID vaccine, and the support from the dividend yield. In the long term, the business features all the hallmarks of a long-term compounder - high profitability, high return on capital employed, and healthy perpetual growth prospects. An investment at the current price provides excellent potential for double-digit return in the long term.</p>\n<p>I am not buying only because my portfolio already holds enough healthcare stocks, which have similar return/risk profiles as I see. I just cannot have all of them and have to choose.</p>\n<p>Thanks for reading! And look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments.</p>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Pfizer: A Wide Moat Business At A Fair Price</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nPfizer: A Wide Moat Business At A Fair Price\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-06-24 16:36 GMT+8 <a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436314-pfizer-wide-moat-business-fair-price><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nAt its current price levels (~$39), an investment in Pfizer represents a wide moat business for sale at a fair price.\nThe moat is rooted in technological lead, scale, intellectual property, ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436314-pfizer-wide-moat-business-fair-price\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"PFE":"辉瑞"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436314-pfizer-wide-moat-business-fair-price","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"1137537223","content_text":"Summary\n\nAt its current price levels (~$39), an investment in Pfizer represents a wide moat business for sale at a fair price.\nThe moat is rooted in technological lead, scale, intellectual property, and a strong pipeline.\nAs a result, the business enjoys high profitability, return on capital employed, and heathy perpetual growth prospects – the hallmarks of a long-term compounder.\nInvestment at the current price provides excellent potential for double-digit return in the long term.\n\nThesis and Background\nThe healthcare sector is a great place for value investors, ranging from legends like Warren Buffett to ordinary investors like myself for many good reasons. It caters to fundamental human needs that are not going to change or go away anytime soon. All signs show that the need will only intensify with population growth, longer life expectancy, more interconnected world, et al. The major players like Pfizer Inc (PFE), due to their established lead and scale, are especially well poised to capitalize on such secular trend.\nAt its current price levels (~$39), an investment in PFE represents a wide moat business for sale at a fair price. The short-term risk is very manageable given the current entry valuation, the success with their COVID vaccine, and the support from the dividend yield. In the long term, thanks to their profitability and return on capital employed, investment at the current price provides excellent potential for double digit return.\nBefore going into any further details, it would help to briefly summarize my investment philosophy to provide a context. I am a long-term, conservative, and value-oriented investor. I hold a rather concentrated portfolio with about a dozen stocks. I rarely buy and very rarely sell. So you will see me writing about a handful of holdings multiple times from different angles. If you like reading in-depth and multifaceted coverage on the same holdings, I am your guy.\nMy goal for my stock holdings is to generateDouble-Digit return during aDecade, and that is why I nickname my portfolio the DDD portfolio. Currently my portfolio holds the following 9 stocks. Using the date Ifirst publishedthe DDD portfolio on 5/31/2021 as the inception date, its performance on a weekly basis is summarized in the following two charts. It has been a really short time compared to my horizon, but so far so good fortunately.\n\nSource: Author\n\nSource: Author\nThe businesses and the moat\nPfizer Inc. is a research-based, global biopharmaceutical leader engaged in the discovery, development, manufacture, and distribution of healthcare products. It offers medicines and vaccines in various therapeutic areas, encompassing internal medicine, oncology, vaccines, immunology, rare disease, et al.\nFor pharmaceutical companies at this scale, it is all about A) bringing blockbuster drugs (with market value exceeding $1B per year) to market, and B) having a healthy pipeline of potential blockbusters. And PFE is doing a terrific job on both fronts as you can see from the following two charts.\nAs seen from the first chart, PFE boasts a collection of blockbuster drugs including Vyndaqel ($1.2B sales in 2020), Prevnar ($5.8B sales), Xeljanz ($2.4B), et al. And in 2021, PFE just added another blockbuster into its production line: the Covid vaccine. PFE was the first to gain FDA approval for its COVID-19 vaccine, and the vaccine is already PFE's top-selling drug as of 2021 Q1. The vaccine brought in $3.4B of sales during 2021 Q1! These blockbuster drugs are about 5 years on average away from patent expiration.\nThis where the pipeline comes in. As seen in the second chart, PFE also maintains a healthy pipeline to prepare for the future. This large pipeline consists of ~100 total drugs. The lifecycle for a drug development (from the lab to the market) could take more than a decade. And therefore, the drugs in the later stage of the development, i.e., Phase 3 or later, are more important. And as can be seen, PFE has a total of 33 of them currently. Not all of them will be a blockbuster. And here is how the scale of PFE matters. Thanks to its scale, it does not need all of them to be blockbusters. It can afford the inevitable misses.\n\nSource:Pfizer 2020 annual report\n\nSource: Pfizer 2020 annual report\nProfitability and Financial Strength\nThanks to its technological lead and scale, PFE enjoys superior profitability and financial strengths both relative to other peers in the same sector and also to the overall market, as illustrated by the following chart. The profitability is simply superb on every metric - both in absolute terms and in relative terms when compared to its peers.\nThe business is also in a very strong financial position, as exemplified by the next chart. Its interest coverage (operation income divided by interest expense) is more than 16x. In other words, it only takes about 6% of its operation income to cover its interest expenses. In contrast, the interest coverage for the overall market represented by S&P 500 is about 6x. Also as shown by the orange line in the chart, thanks to its strong profitability (and terrific return on capital to be detailed later), the business can also afford to pay off pretty much all the remaining income as dividend after covering its debt and maintenance CAPEx.\n\nSource: Seeking Alpha.\n\nSource: Author based on data from Seeking Alpha\nThe valuation\nAs can be seen from the following numbers in the table, at its current price levels, PEF is about fairly valued or slightly discounted depending on which valuation metric you use based on its historical valuations. In terms of absolute valuation, its current valuations (price/cash flow ratio around 14.5x) is also very reasonable for a wide moat business leader. Many consumer staple businesses (like food and drinks business) are valued above 20x cash flow because they cater to an eternal human need. Yet in my view, PFE caters to an equally eternal human need with a wider moat.\nAs such, the short-term risk is very manageable given the current entry valuation, especially considering the upcoming boost from their COVID vaccine. And also, the above average dividend yield would help to support the return should any short term turmoil occur.\nSource: author and Seeking Alpha\nLong-term return and perpetual growth rate\nIf you, like this author, are a long-term investor who subscribes to the concepts of owner's earning, perpetual growth rate, and equity bond, then the long-term return is simpler. It is \"simply\" the summation of the owner's earning yield (\"OEY\") and the perpetual growth rate (\"PGR\"), i.e.,\nLonger-Term ROI = OEY + PGR\nBecause in the long term, all fluctuations in valuation are averaged out (all luck at the end even out). And it doesn't really matter how the business uses the earnings (pay out as dividend, retained in the bank account, or repurchase stocks). As long as used sensibly (as PFE has done in the past), it will be reflected as a return to the business owner.\nOEY is the owner's earnings divided by the entry price. All the complications are in the estimation of the owner's earnings - the real economic earnings of the business, not the nominal accounting earnings. Here as a crude and conservative estimate, I will just use the free cash flow (\"FCF\") as the owner's earnings. It is conservative in the sense that rigorously speaking, the owner's earnings should be free cash flow plus the portion of CAPEx that is used to fuel the growth (i.e., the growth CAPEx). At its current price levels, the OEY is ~6.6% for PFE (~15x price to FCF).\nThe next and more important item is the PGR. To understand and estimate it, we will need to first estimate the return on capital employed (\"ROCE\"). Note that ROCE is different from the return on equity (and more fundamental and important in my view). ROCE considers the return of capital ACTUALLY employed, and therefore provides insight into how much additional capital a business needs to invest in order to earn a given extra amount of income - a key to estimate the PGR. For businesses like PFE, I consider the following items capital actually employed:\n1. Working capital, including payables, receivables, inventory. These are the capitals required for the daily operation of their businesses.\n2. Gross Property, Plant, and Equipment. These are the capitals required to actually conduct business and manufacture their products.\n3. There are the following two possible routes here:\n3.1. The first route is to include research and development expenses as a capital investment. As mentioned above, the R&D is the lifeblood for a sustainable pharmaceutical business and is not really an optional expense.\n3.2. The second route is to amortize its intangible book value, mainly consisting of intellectual property and patents. This essentially treats the intellectual properties as capital with a finite lifetime, which I will assume to be five years, the average number of years away from its current blockbuster drugs' patent expiration.\nBased on the above considerations, the ROCE of PFE over the past decade are shown below. As seen, both approaches provided similar results, a good sign of the assumptions. PFE was able to maintain a remarkably high and stable ROCE over the long term: on average 44% for the past decade. To put things in perspective, as detailed in myprevious articlesfor Lockheed Martin (LMT) and General Dynamics (GD), ROCEs for these defense business leaders, who almost enjoy a monopoly moat, are \"only\" in the range of 20% to 30%.\n\nSource: Author and Seeking Alpha\nWith a 44% ROCE, it means that even if PFE only reinvests 1/10 of its earnings to expand the capital employed, it could maintain a 4.4% PGR (PGR = ROCE * fraction of earnings reinvested = 10% * 44% = 4.4%). And 10% reinvestment rate is indeed the situation here for PFE based on my analyses. As aforementioned, this is a reason that PFE can afford to pay off pretty much all the remaining income as dividend after covering its debt and maintenance CAPEx as dividend (or share repurchase). Of course, another reason is that businesses at this scale simply are not able to find that many opportunities to reinvest their earnings. But after all, 4.4% PGR already makes it a long term compounder with 10% income reinvested!\nNow we have both pieces of the puzzle in place to estimate the long-term return. At its current price levels, the OEY is estimated to be ~6.6% for PFE (~15x price to FCF), and the PGR is about 4.4%. So the total return in the long term at current valuation would be a double digit around 11% as shown in the chart below. Also as seen, even when ROCE fluctuates somewhat, the fluctuations wouldn't change the long-term return dramatically.\n\nSource: Author and Seeking Alpha.\nAnd for those of us who would like to wait for a better entry price, the next chart shows how much the long-term return potential would change as a function of the entry price. As can be seen, the long-term return potential doesn't change that much within a pretty wide range of entry price, as shown in the green box. This probably confirms something that you've already heard before - if you hold something for the long term, the entry price does not matter that much.\nHowever, many investors seem to interpret this one-sided and I'd like to do a bit of hairsplitting here. The above statement refers to the long-term RATE of return, not the absolute DOLLAR AMOUNT of return. When your entry price is decreased by 10%, yes, it is correct that this wouldn't impact your long-term rate of return by a lot as seen. But a 10% lower entry price would give you at least 10% more return in absolute dollar amount - because you get to buy 10% more shares with the same dollar amount you have, plus the whatever extra return brought about by the higher RATE of return.\nAnd as a final note before ending this section, this might be the most valuable insight that I've learned by studying Warren Buffett's investment philosophy. The insight really is that I do not need a business with double-digit growth to generate double-digit returns. A reliable business that can offer a stable growth at a boring rate of a few percent (like ~4% in the examples of PFE) can already provide double-digit returns with good certainty as long as A) they are purchased at a reasonable valuation, and B) they have ROCE sufficiently high so that the growth can be driven by reinvesting a small fraction of the income. In the long run, assuming a growth rate more than a few percent probably is a dangerous assumption to start with anyway.\n\nSource: Author and Seeking Alpha\nConclusion and final thoughts\nThe healthcare sector is a great place for value investors and enjoys long-term secular headwinds. Major players like Pfizer, due to their established lead and scale, are especially well-poised to capitalize on such secular trend. At its current price levels (~$39), an investment in PFE represents a wide moat business for sale at a fair price. The short-term risk is very manageable given the current entry valuation, the success with their COVID vaccine, and the support from the dividend yield. In the long term, the business features all the hallmarks of a long-term compounder - high profitability, high return on capital employed, and healthy perpetual growth prospects. An investment at the current price provides excellent potential for double-digit return in the long term.\nI am not buying only because my portfolio already holds enough healthcare stocks, which have similar return/risk profiles as I see. I just cannot have all of them and have to choose.\nThanks for reading! And look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":403,"commentLimit":10,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"symbols":[],"verified":2,"subType":0,"readableState":1,"langContent":"EN","currentLanguage":"EN","warmUpFlag":false,"orderFlag":false,"shareable":true,"causeOfNotShareable":"","featuresForAnalytics":[],"commentAndTweetFlag":false,"andRepostAutoSelectedFlag":false,"upFlag":false,"length":5,"xxTargetLangEnum":"ORIG"},"commentList":[],"isCommentEnd":true,"isTiger":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"url":"/m/post/128495644"}
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