Welcome back everyone. We have a very exciting episode
to get into today. So much news to talk about and
we have a market that is in decline.
Stocks are going down. The SP500 is down big today.
The NASDAQ is down big. The Dow Jones is down big.
All of them are down around 1 1/2 percent.
The Fair and Greed Index, which tracks investor sentiment has
moved firmly into the extreme fair category.
This is where we get investors really concerned about the
future selling out of stocks as the 10 year treasury moves up
and up and up, it puts weight on all other financial assets.
This is the opportunity cost, It's the discount rate when
you're running discounted cash flows.
So a lot of investors are looking at this as when this
goes up, stocks go down. But at the Joseph Carlson Show,
we're not afraid, and I'm not afraid with any company in My
Portfolio. In fact, I've done an entire
review of every single stock I own, every individual one.
And I want to give you a brief synopsis of each of those and
why I'm not afraid with this sell off now, we also have a ton
of news to get to. The billionaire investor Bill
Ackman went on to Cnbc's Delivering Alpha over the
weekend and he had a lot to share on a lot of different
subjects. I thought things that he was
saying about his selling out of Netflix and going into Google,
things he was saying about changes in the economy and
interest rates, and he also has a bet on the 10 year treasury.
All of this was interesting, but Bill Ackman, I think out of
everything he shared, the most interesting was what he said was
the dynamic changes happening overall in the economy and in
the stock market. You know, our view is really
that we're in a different world, and, you know, the world sort of
changes gradually, he says. We're in a different world now
than what we were in two years ago.
We're going to dive into what he means by that statement.
And then finally, one of the companies that I recently bought
into is Chipotle. Well, I've been saying for a
while, and this was my initial thesis, was that Chipotle is
going to be an automated company, an AI driven robotic
technology company that happens to serve burritos.
That was my investing thesis. A lot of people scoffed at this,
but now we have a new press release showing the progress
that Chipotle's making in these automated burritos.
We're going to be looking at this more in depth in this
episode. Now before we jump into My
Portfolio, just a friendly reminder, today is the third day
of the month, which means if you join the Patreon today, you'll
get access to qualtrim.com for the entire month for free.
You get a month long free trial. This is the website that allows
you to type in a ticker symbol like meta for example.
You can see all the fundamental data, you can see all the
financial statements, news articles, you can track watch
lists, you can input your portfolio.
It has a lot of capabilities and we're constantly expanding the
capabilities. If you want to trial this, you
can trial it today for the entire month for free.
There's no risk, it's cancel anytime and it's only $10 a
month. And there's a link in the pink
comment below. You can try it out.
I think you'll love it. Now just today My Portfolio is
down over 1%. It's down 1.48%, which is
another $7000. This can be a bit spooky when
you're first investing, especially if you have a large
amount of capital invested to see it fluctuate and change
around this much. Overall, the portfolio is still
in the green, so we're on a good track overall, but we have given
up a substantial amount of gains in the past one month.
My Portfolio is down at 33,000 dollars, 6.49%.
That's a decent amount of capital.
And this isn't just My Portfolio.
The overall market is going down as well.
Today it's down over 1 1/2% and it's continued to trade down
over the past month. In the past month, the S&P 500
is down 6.16%. Year to date, it's still up a
little over 10%, which is also basically in line with My
Portfolio. If I toggle year to date, I'm up
10.41%. My performance so far this year
is almost identical to the S&P 500.
Now last year in 2022, my performance of this portfolio
was around 16% in the negative, so I was down 16%.
The S&P 500 was down around 18%, so we outperformed it by 2%.
We're down slightly less, which is meaningful.
So last year, the passive income portfolio slightly outperformed
the S&P 500. This year it's matching it.
And my goal of course is not to just match it, but to beat the
S&P 500. Beating it by a 2% annualized
return means over double the money in the next 20 years.
It literally double s your return in total over a 20 year
period, which of course is a meaningful difference in your
retirement. So if I can outperform it by a
couple percentage points each year, that will accumulate to
massive amounts of money. Now when I look at the sell off
that's happening over the past month, I have no concerns with
any of my individual companies. I recently went through over the
weekend and looked at how each company of mine is doing and I
have no concerns about them. They're all doing fantastic.
I can go through from top to bottom and give you a quick
synopsis. SMP Global this year will have
the highest cash flows they've ever had, $4.3 billion.
And the company's ecstatic about the prospects of AI and the
growing dependence on market data, something that they serve
to their customers. This company's in the best shape
they've ever been. Master Card's network continues
to expand across the globe while raising prices and while adding
value add services. They have many things outside of
their card network that they continue to build and Master
Card is gaining market share against Visa every single year
In Europe. They're doing a fantastic job in
growing their market share and the company continues to grow at
double digits. VG continues to collect 100% of
rents while growing their portfolio while growing a FFO
per share while getting their debt in better shape.
Every single definable metric of this company's moving in the
right direction, yet the stock price has moved down sizably.
Microsoft is busy growing their subscription revenue while
intertwining AI into every single thing they develop.
The company's in the best shape they've ever been in.
Costco's the only company My Portfolio that's actually gained
over the past month. Let's go ahead and filter this
by the past one month. This company's up 4% over the
past month while the markets down 6%.
Costco recently posted their earnings, they beat on the top
and bottom line, and they proved once again why they're a growing
cash flow machine. Apple was mocked for coming out
with a phone that was very similar to previous year's
versions, but Apple's doing what Apple does best.
They come out with good devices, and although there's no
spectacular change in this year's version to previous
years, this nice iterative improvement is enough to keep
their very loyal customer base happy.
I continue to believe that Apple has one of the biggest moats in
the market. Intuit, to most investors, is
one of the most boring and mundane companies in the market.
I see it differently. Intuit is quietly performing a
full frontal software assault, developing finance software in
five different verticals, competing fiercely with smaller
firms and integrating AI into all of their products into it
will also have record high cash flows this year.
Texas Roadhouse is running the same old business they've always
had except they're taking market share from Darden Restaurant,
Chili's and Cracker Barrel. They have a better recipe, they
have better value proposition, they have a better environment
in the restaurant and they have better management.
So as they continue to out execute their competitors, they
continue to grow to all time highs.
Chipotle continues to open up new restaurants every single day
without skipping a beat. And they're continuing to
increase margins by integrating robotics into their business.
Finally, we have Canadian Pacific and Union Pacific, the 2
railroad freight companies. Both of these companies are
improving efficiencies and cash flows.
Now that's what I see when I look at each of my companies on
an individual basis, even though the market might play games with
your head. And when we filter by the one
month, it's down almost 7%, almost every single company
aside from Costco's in the red over the past month.
This can be difficult and it can pressure you into believing
things you shouldn't. When I carefully inspect the
fundamentals of every single company, I come to the same
conclusion. These are great businesses that
are not struggling, that are in fact moving in a very positive
direction. They're growing their earnings
per share, their free cash flow per share and their market
share. These are companies that have
incredible leaders that want the companies to grow, and each of
these companies have a relatively strong brand value or
very dominant market position. In no case could I find a
company in My Portfolio that I was genuinely worried about.
There's none that I'm really concerned about the longterm
future. So when I look at this, even
though they're trading down temporarily over the past month,
I have no concerns over their longterm trajectory right now.
Now, if you're in a situation where you have a portfolio and a
number of your companies are moving in the wrong direction,
fundamentally speaking, their earnings per share declining,
their cash flows are going down, the leadership's a mess.
That's a different case and a different scenario.
That's not what I'm dealing with right here.
And in most cases, when I hold companies and their
fundamentals, the actual company goes in the wrong direction.
I typically sell those and move on to better companies.
I try to have an Allstar team where every single player, every
player on the team is an Allstar, all contributing as
best they can. There is no room for B Terr
players. There is no room for the D
league. I have 11 companies on this team
and there's no tolerance for companies with poor
fundamentals. So as soon as a company starts
moving in the wrong direction, fundamentally speaking, and I
don't have any reason to believe it will improve, that's a
company that I'm going to sell and buy a new one.
But as of now, I have no intention of selling any of
these companies. I believe they're Allstar
players. Now moving on, let's jump into
this interview with Bill Ackman. He went on to Cnbc's Delivering
Alpha. He had a long format to
interview. And I want to highlight just a
couple portions of this that I think are the most meaningful.
First of all is Bill Ackman's view on the overall macro.
And if you're not familiar with Bill Ackman, I think he's a
great investor. He's actually beat the market
for two decades, which is something a lot of hedge fund
managers can't claim. And he doesn't only do really
good fundamental analysis on different companies.
So he does deep dives on companies like Lowe's or Netflix
or Google. He comes out with great research
on these companies, which I always love reading from him and
his team. But he's also a macro guy.
He's a lot more of a macro guy than I am.
And by that I mean he will place bets on the overall market going
down or up. He'll place short bets.
He'll short different instruments as part of a hedge.
And he does this type of macro strategy that I don't
participate in. But even though I don't
participate directly in macro strategies, I like observing his
thoughts from the sideline and a way to gauge where I think the
economy might go or what type of bets he's making.
And he talks about one of these macro bets here.
Here's how he views both the federal funds rate and
inflation. You know, again, my view is
inflation, or the kind of the house view is inflation is going
to be persistently higher. Oh, you are the house.
But I guess I control the door on the way in.
His first macro view is that inflation is going to be
persistently higher than what our recent memory is.
If you're around my age, in your late 20s or early 30s, your view
of inflation is that it's always seemingly low.
In fact, the Fed had a difficult time getting inflation up to 2%.
They're always concerned about getting it up to 2%.
Now they want to get inflation down to 2%.
And Bill Ackman believes it's going to be difficult to get
inflation back down to 2%. It's going to be persistently
higher at 4% or 5%. Now, this is Bill Ackman's view,
and there's one notable person that disagrees with him on this
view. That is the CEO of Costco.
Costco just had their earnings report a few days ago and even
though Costco's earnings report's not the most exciting,
I still read through the report and I read through the earnings
call transcript. And one part that caught my
attention was Costco's view on inflation.
Costco doesn't believe inflation is going up, they believe it's
going down, they said quote. Lastly, a couple of comments
regarding inflation. Most recently in Q3 of 2023, we
had estimated that our year over year inflation was in the three
to 4% range. Our estimate for Q4 inflation is
in the 1 to 2% range and it's actually trended downward during
the quarter. So hopefully these inflation
trends will continue. We'll have to see Costco saying
that their inflation estimate for Q4 of this year is 1 to 2%.
Now that really caught my attention here.
We're hearing that inflation is going to be persistently higher
by Bill Ackman, but Costco's saying it's going to be below
2%. So there is some disagreement on
this topic. Bill Ackman's view that
inflation is going to be persistently higher, leading to
higher interest rates, higher Fed funds rate, higher ten year
Treasury or Costco's view that inflation's headed downwards.
But now Bill Ackman moves on to explain that we're in an
entirely different environment, and investors might still be
anchored to an environment that no longer exists.
You know our our view is really that we're in a different world
and you know the world sort of changes gradually and and you
have a generation of people are used to rates you know for
sounding like a high interest rate and and it's you know on a
historical basis it's extremely low rate of interest.
So I I would not be shocked to see you know 30 year rates well
you know well into the you know through the five barrier and you
could see 10 the 10 year approach approach 5.
Jamie, that can happen in the very short term like like
literally weeks, huge move in the last number of weeks.
And I think a lot of that is investors kind of rethinking.
You know what's interesting about the 30 year treasury is
people reflexively buy it whenever they, you know, because
they've made money doing it in advance of a recession.
But it's really not an instrument you should use to
speculate on the short term economy.
It's it's a fixed price contract with the US government for 30
years. And reflects really structural
forces and I think the structural forces have changed.
Bill Ackman's view is that the 10 year treasury will continue
to go up. He is short the 10 year
treasury. So he's putting money behind his
words which I appreciate. This isn't just a call from the
sidelines. He actually has a bet that the
10 year treasury yield will continue to increase and so far
Bill Ackman is feeling pretty smart right now.
He looks pretty smart right now. The 10 year treasury is
increasing almost every single day.
He said that it could go up substantially in the coming
weeks and it has gone up substantially in the past month
where he's been short the 10 year treasury.
So this has been a macro call from Bill Ackman and one of many
that's been successful over the past three years.
Bill Ackman has nailed the macro calls.
He's really been successful in them and this 10 year Treasury
bet that he continues to hold continues to play out.
And his arguments for the 10 year treasury moving up is a
solid argument. It's not just the fact that
inflation is difficult to get under control that's one
influence over the 10 year treasury.
But he also says that China's selling our debt.
If foreign countries like China that used to be massive buyers
of our debt are now selling, that's another downward pressure
on the 10 year treasury, causing the yield to go up.
But while Bill Ackman is shorting the 10 year Treasury,
he's also long a number of stocks, including ones like
Google, ones like Universal Music Group, ones like Burger
King with quality restaurant brands, the majority of his
portfolios, and long positions on stocks.
And he explains how this makes sense.
Now, how could you have a positive view of stocks?
If you think that that's the outcome for bonds.
Yields because if you own high quality, key is owning
businesses that have pricing power.
Businesses that can do well in a world of, and by the way, many
businesses can do well in a world of 3% inflation.
The key is it's hard to manage a business in a world where
inflation is volatile or or inflation is 8% or, you know,
the kind of crazy numbers. But many, many businesses can do
very well in a world of 3% inflation.
And the kind of companies we own, they're very much like
royalties, you know, So we own Universal Music, which is a
royalty on listening to music. If there's playing music playing
out there, Universal is getting a fraction of a penny for every
song. You know that's being streamed.
Google, Google's a royalty if you will, on people advertising,
you know on the web, right, or or on YouTube.
Restaurant Brands is a royalty on people eating at Burger King
or any of their various concepts.
Hilton is a a continuing, you know, royalty on people staying
in hotels and and and eating and drinking and going to events.
The beauty of these kinds of businesses is.
You know actually inflation is ultimately their friend, right,
as long as they can keep their costs, as long as their costs
don't inflate as quickly as their as the revenues and I
think the nature of those. So, so I feel comfortable owning
those kinds of businesses even if inflation remains high.
And it's interesting that even though stock prices have traded
down over the past month, even though he has a view that the 10
year treasury is going up and inflation will remain high, even
with all of these traditionally extremely negative views on
stocks, he is not concerned whatsoever about his individual
holdings because he understands the type of companies he owns
and he calls them companies where inflation is their friend.
Another way of saying that is that they're a hedge against
inflation. These companies don't have a
problem when inflation is high. Consider the fact that inflation
means the prices of goods and products go up overtime.
Costco sells those goods or products.
Costco simply passes along those inflationary prices onto their
customer and continue to shave off a little bit on the top with
their membership fee. Inflation will not impact
Costco's business in any meaningful way, and that's the
same with each type of company. Blackman describes them as
royalties on different markets, meaning that if those markets
become more expensive, the royalty fee will go up.
And P Global has a royalty fee over data feeds and rating debt.
As those markets grow, they grow.
As a consequence, MasterCard is one of the most literal hedges
against inflation because inflation means higher priced
goods and services and MasterCard charges a percentage
fee. If inflation raised up to 10%,
MasterCard would earn an incremental 10% revenue.
Intuit is also a royalty fee on small businesses and tax
preparation and personal finance.
So I again agree with Bill Ackman here.
He focuses on the type of businesses he owns, ones that
can inflate the price of their products faster than they can
inflate their input costs. Those are businesses that
naturally do well with inflation.
They're friends with inflation. The type of businesses to avoid
are ones that have high variable input costs, and their products
and services that they have are very fixed.
Those ones are much more difficult to deal with in these
type of environments, and typically they'll underperform.
Owning those kinds of businesses even if inflation remains high
and and also again historically if you think about you know what
is the value of business, the present value of the cash you
can take out of it over its life discounted back an appropriate
interest rate. We were not discounting
businesses back using 2% as an appropriate of interest.
So we've historically, you know our discount rate we've used you
know just rough measure is more like 10%, nine percent, you know
numbers which. Discount the uncertainty
inherent of investing in equities.
What he describes there is a margin of safety.
I view margin of safety in two ways.
There's the business model where you have to have a business
model that's resilient, that can go through different
environments. And then there's a margin of
safety also with the price you pay for the asset you're buying.
In both of those cases, you have to have a margin of safety.
Now next we move on to the subject of Bill Ackman selling
out of Netflix and buying Google.
Now. In terms of disclaimers here, I
own both a large position in Google and a large position in
Netflix. I think both of these companies
are incredibly powerful companies that have great
business models that have very bright futures.
Bill Ackman had bought into Netflix on a big dip.
It had already sold off a lot and the problem was they were
losing subscribers for a couple quarters.
So I'll put a timeline of events here.
He bought into the company around $360.00 per share.
And this was early 2022 after the first report where Netflix
really dropped. And then he held the company for
three months. Netflix had that second earnings
report, which was another disappointing one.
They lost even more subscribers, the stock dropped another 20%
and then Ackman immediately sold out of his holding.
That's the timeline now. A lot of investors overhyped how
bad this earnings report, and I believe Bill Ackman does the
same thing here. These substantial declines in
stock price were the result of a combined loss of 1.5 million
subscribers 1.5. Now to put this in perspective
because the numbers get a little bit hazy here and a lot of
people again exaggerate the failure of Netflix here.
This massive sell off of 70% decline combined was the result
of 1.5 million subscribers, which if you look at that in
comparison to their overall subscriber base at the time of
the sell off was only .6% of their total subscribers.
So this entire massive 70% sell off in Netflix was because of
losing a little over half a percent of their customer base
in two quarters. That was it.
So Ackman looked at this is a very negative thing.
He was very concerned about the company.
I held Netflix at the same time period and when I was looking at
the data and the fact that they are only losing a tiny amount of
subscribers overall and less than 1% of their total
subscriber base, I didn't consider it to be as big of a
problem. I thought this was a temporary
pull forward and demand for Netflix because they just got
out of COVID and gained 20 million subscribers in a single
quarter. So it made sense that they'd
lose a little bit of subscribers in the coming years and .6% out
of 220 million is not enough for me to get concerned about.
But Bill Ackman became very concerned at this time period
along with the rest of the market.
It was almost like there is no price too low for Netflix.
He sold out of the company near rock bottom, losing $300 million
in a three month period and Harris's explanation of why he
sold. Once they announced basically a
different strategy, it became a much more disparate outcome.
We still thought they would be successful, wrote a little
letter to our investors. Look, we think Netflix is going
to be a great investment overtime.
But in terms of do we want it to be one of eight things we own or
one of 10 things we own, No, because the it's kind of the the
range of outcomes as a result of the sort of change in strategy
going to an advertising model etcetera and predicting the
probability that of the success of that was a different kind of
hurdle for us to climb. So it's sort of the facts change
in a meaningful way became a different kind of investment.
We have whatever 1670% of our capital and.
And Google, you know these are businesses we feel very
comfortable. We can sleep at night and have a
very high confidence level what they look like over a long
period of time. The business doesn't meet those
threshold characteristics or something about the business
changes where we, you know, misunderstood the predictability
of business. We're happy to sell and find
something else to do and basically we took the Netflix,
you know, losses, but the capital if you will.
And we invested in Google, and it was a good decision.
I think Bill Ackman's a very smart guy, and he's also very
good at explaining mistakes in a way where it seems like he never
made a mistake in reality here. The way that I see this, and
this is, of course with a great deal of respect for Bill Ackman.
I think he's a fantastic investor.
But I consider this a simple mistake.
Let's go ahead and review just one of his arguments here.
He says that Netflix became more unpredictable as a company
because they were introducing their advertising model.
I don't buy this excuse at all and I think this is a little bit
of a a reverse explanation, A rationalization for selling out
of Netflix at a low. In reality, adding on an ad tier
to an existing streaming business is highly predictable
and this move has been proven out by every competitor, both
Paramount, Warner Brothers, Discovery and Disney.
All of them have proven that this model successful.
So I don't see any reason that Netflix could not implement this
model successfully as well. I don't believe that it
increases the riskiness of the business at all, and I don't
believe that Bill Ackman even believes it does.
I think he's sold out of the company because of the big fares
of them continuing to lose subscribers, and now he's trying
to explain that it's really Netflix's decisions and changing
business models. And another thing I'll mention
here, he sold out of Netflix, apparently because Netflix had
changes in their business model. But then he bought Google, which
is arguably having far more fundamental changes in their
core business than Netflix. Google's dealing with huge
changes in their core search engine with the implementation
of Chatchi, BT and AI, which has a lot of variables that could
change the core business of Google in a far more meaningful
way than an ad tear will change the business fundamentals of
Netflix. So I don't buy this decision at
all. I think Blackmon simply got
concerned because Netflix stock was in freefall, They were
losing drivers and he decided to cut his losses and move on to a
bigger blue chip company that's more optically safe, which is
Google. The argument that it was a
change in business fundamentals I think is a bit of nice
explanation along the way. You can even try to argue that
Google was at a better valuation.
But again, if we go back to the time where Bill Ackman sold
Netflix at $215 per share, Netflix was at a 17 Ford P/E
ratio that was an astoundingly cheap valuation for that
company. Netflix, at the time that Bill
Ackman sold, traded at a far cheaper valuation than Google.
So even the valuation argument doesn't add up.
Now he goes on to say that it wasn't a mistake.
It was a good move. He didn't make any mistake here,
and I also would take a little bit of disagreement with that.
You can judge the outcome of decisions by the simple data by
the facts of the decision. Netflix was a company he
recently bought into at a much higher valuation because he
viewed the company's future favorably.
The company traded down dramatically, the valuation
improved dramatically, and he sold at a tremendous loss.
And then subsequently selling at almost the bottom of Netflix.
The company's up 76% from the time he sold, outperforming
every company in his portfolio, every single one in Pershing
Square Capital, including his new buy into Google.
Even during his lowest points into Google, it's only up 43% by
comparison. So to judge this as a good move
and not being a mistake, I think is looking very favorably on
Bill Ackman. I say this with great respect to
Bill Ackman. I think he's a fantastic
investor, but even fantastic investors make mistakes from
time to time. They make mistakes in their
portfolio holdings and their fundamental analysis.
Or they might accidentally sell on a low because things get
really murky and a little bit less clear with the holding.
And I think this is a case of Bill Ackman making a simple
mistake. Does making a mistake mean he's
not a good investor? Of course not.
Again, every great investor makes mistakes all the time.
I've made mistakes in My Portfolio, so making mistakes in
a holding is not a bad thing. It happens from time to time.
But overall, when I go back and look at this debate in
hindsight, him selling out of Netflix to buy Google and
whether or not that was the right decision or the wrong
decision, the truth is that both of the companies did fantastic
from that point in time. Netflix has had a 75% return,
Google has had a 47% return. Both of them are high quality
companies and the thing that Bill Ackman emphasizes here is
despite the fact that he moved from Netflix to Google, he
believes that both companies will do fantastic over time.
And this is the emphasis on the screening process.
He has an intense, rigorous screening process for every
company that initially makes it into his portfolio.
If you have a good screening process and you identify good
quality companies, odds are they're going to do well over
time. Now moving on, we get to 1
company that's new in My Portfolio, which is Chipotle.
I really like this company and I like the stock.
The company's led by a really enthusiastic CEO that really
wants to make the best food for a large quantity of people.
Chipotle with their Mexican Grill sells food that I think is
attractive to lots of people from lots of different cultures.
I think it will have international success.
I really like the fundamentals of the company.
It has fast growing revenue and EBITDA.
It's a free cash flow monster with substantially growing free
cash flows and earnings per share.
The company doesn't pay a dividend, but it does buybacks.
So it's using its free cash flow to buy back shares.
And I believe it will be a dividend payer in the future
because of its enormous amounts of free cash flow.
They also run a very unleveraged balance sheet where the only
obligations they have are a small amount of capital leases
for renting their restaurants and it has largely organic
growth. They continue to open up new
restaurants every day and they continue to improve their cost
structure. One of the biggest concerns
about a company like this is the cost structure and the unit
economics, specifically with the employees of the company.
When you have to train staff, you have to hire new employees.
You have to always be worried about employee turnover.
Every year you're hiring new additional employees.
You're saying goodbye to other ones that have moved on to
bigger and better things. You're training new employees.
Some of them are hardworking individuals that do a really
good job. Some of them, not so much.
The difference in employee means differences in quality of food
preparation and consistency for the customer.
Well, Chipotle recently announced that they have a new
machine that's going to help with consistency, specifically
on the make line for burritos and Taco bowls.
The new machine that they're announcing is called Hyphen, and
it's in testing right now. This thing works by creating
bowls and salads in an automated system that moves the entrees
through the bottom make line, where the ingredients for the
order are dispensed automatically in tandem.
A Chipotle team member can leverage the top make line and
create burritos, tacos, quesadillas and kids' meals for
the same digital order. Simply, someone puts in an order
on Chipotle App or chipotle.com or thirdparty platforms like
DoorDash. If the order includes a bowler
salad, those entrees would be routed to Hyphen's automated
system. The bowls traverse along that
bottom make line, they position themselves under the specific
ingredient containers, and the intelligent dispenser
dynamically portions each ingredient into the bowl.
This way you get a completely consistent proportion every
single time. And there you have the order
completed, ready to be placed in their designated pickup area.
Now, right now, I want to emphasize that without any of
this stuff, without a digital make line or any of these
robotics, Chipotle already has fantastic unit economics.
Their payback period is insanely fast.
They have investment unit economics similar to Starbucks.
That's right. Now with the investments into
robotics, they have the potential to improve this
significantly. Consider the fact that around
50% of Chipotle sales are digital.
Of that, 65% of the Chipotle digital sales are orders for the
burrito or salads. So this is around 25 to 30% of
all orders. That's what the digital make
line could make and proving the efficiency of 30% of your
overall revenue is massive. This would not be a small little
incremental improvement. This would be a massive
improvement to their overall efficiency.
Chipotle already has the market share within the US.
They have smaller competitors like Kaaba that are way behind
them. But I think with their
substantial market share, their brand name, their digital market
share, the potential for them to become these highly efficient
boxes that you go into and get a perfectly made burrito every
time is going to be something that happens in the future.
So in terms of my investment into it, I see this as one more
reason that I'm going to hold this company.
So that's all the news for today.
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