Jose Najarro
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And it's a great example, Amazon.
I'm glad you talked about it because if you had looked at Amazon 15 years ago through the traditional kind of lens of, okay, cash flows of the business, discounting them to the present, or even just trying to do a price to earnings ratio that seems reasonable, you would have missed the huge opportunity because you didn't have the focus on, okay, what's the returns that they can get on all of the kind of
projects that they're working on.
One of them, which was cloud, for example, in which they had a clear advantage at the time.
It wasn't as visible as it is today, but one could have argued it was a clear advantage.
And then everything that they're doing with logistics and improving their logistics infrastructure and all of those things, if you thought, which I'm not saying is easy to know in hindsight, everything's easy to know.
But if you thought 15 years ago,
that those reinvestments were going to be giving a return on invested capital that were really, really high, then you could have potentially said, I'm willing to pay a premium for Amazon and maybe a 35 times price-to-earns ratio.
It's still undervalued because the rate of compounding of the reinvestment is super high.
But then you could argue conversely, and that's why I love the Amazon example, because now things may be shifting.
I'm not saying that they are, it's arguable, but they may be shifting in that
before the investing that they were doing within their business, I would argue had a more clear path to compounding and reinvestment success than it has now, because now they're investing huge amounts of CapEx, which is not bad in itself if it has high returns on invested capital, right?
Which is what we're talking about.
But right now, that capex is capex that can go obsolete.
It's basically chips for data centers and AI that can go obsolete in the next three to five years.
And so they're constantly going to have to be replacing that infrastructure.
It's not like warehousing, where you invest in warehouses and you have some maintenance capex, but they're going to last you 40, 50, 60 years, the underlying infrastructure.
Here, it's data center infrastructure.
whose underlying technology changes really quickly.