Am I the only one who thinks the market got FB and AMZN wrong?


If we delve into the earnings reports for both companies, almost 80% of Amazon's EPS came from it's stake in Rivian as of Dec 31 (which at this point is now much lower). They would have missed earnings without Rivian, and they missed revenue estimates (during a time of 7% inflation, that's actually pretty bad). In addition, their profit margins and FCF decreased. FCF was actually negative, to the tune of $-9 billion.

Lets compare that to Facebook/meta. Facebook's advertising income grew 20% YoY, and their VR segment grew by 22%. They beat revenue estimates but missed EPS by 4%. However, they only missed EPS because of a $3.3 billion loss in their VR segment. Without that loss, they would have easily beat EPS by over 20% as well as beating on revenues. Their FCF and profit margins also increased YoY.

If we compare guidance between the two they both reported disappointing guidance of only 2-8% growth in Q2. However, Facebook is valued at ~17 PE currently while Amazon has a PE of ~59.

So two companies with equal growth rates – however FB has increasing profits and FCF while Amazon has decreasing profits and FCF.

The only thing I can think that explains this is that the market is completely discounting FB's VR investment and not expecting any profits from this segment, ever. This makes no sense because their VR segment is already making over $2.2 billion in revenues per year (with an appstore that brings in high profit margins) while their losses in VR will slowly decrease as their research & development matures.

In contrast Amazon has a good AWS business that has 40% annual growth and good margins. However this is heavily offset by a generally low-profit to unprofitable retail business. I'm a little worried about this because other companies that have a high-margin platform/software business combined with a money-losing retail/hardware business (ROKU, PTON) have also been heavily overvalued in the past and fell sharply when they posted even a slight miss in ER.

Disclaimer – I have positions in both FB and AMZN


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