Summary
First, I look at Palantir's price action this year.
Second, I examine PLTR's growth projections.
Third, I provide an overview of price-to-sales in PLTR's peer group.
Lastly, I give my thoughts on price projections out through 2025.
First, I look at Palantir's (NYSE:PLTR) price action this year. I provide some quick thoughts on what I've seen. Second, I look into PLTR's growth projections. I believe the aggression is hidden and I reveal why I feel that way. Third, I provide an overview of price-to-sales in PLTR's peer group, and what that means going forward, especially in light of revenue growth into 2025. Lastly, I revisit the topic of price but also price projections for investors.
Rollercoaster
Here's what's happened thus far in 2021.
The summary is simple. We are back where we started in January. If you bought and then closed your eyes you would have gone absolutely nowhere. And, if your eyes were wide open, you would have experienced rather significant volatility, bouncing up against $39 but also muddling through $18. It goes without saying that PLTR has moved 50% top to bottom. But, importantly, we are back where we started.
Now, here's where it gets interesting, because just putting money into the NASDAQ (QQQ) would give you superior returns with far less stomach churning volatility. I'm not concerned with owning QQQ. I'm more than happy to own PLTR because, as I'll show later, it's likely to 5x my investment from this point in time. In any case, take a look at the relative calm of QQQ.
Here I want to add another layer of paint. We started with PLTR itself, then added QQQ. What happens when we go back in time to PLTR's direct listing?
This is the picture that matters most to me. Here's what this means in simple terms, which is what works best in my mind. If you bought early, nothing really happened for a few weeks but then PLTR really took off. Therefore, early investors - like me - took the risk and have benefitted greatly despite all volatility after the directly public offering. With a long view, volatility is not a threat or a "risk" but instead, it's an opportunity to buy low.
In any case, if you started buying in 2021, then you're slightly behind versus the market but your investment certainly isn't trash. Furthermore, if you literally bought in the early part of 2021, and you held, then nothing bad has occurred. You are up. Again, volatility shakes out the weak hands. Long term, volatility is just noise - the price gets more and more smooth, year by year.
Here's the insight. Buying and holding PLTR has worked out fine, even spectacularly, unless you bought during the big spikes in January, February and March. Of course, if you traded against PLTR by shorting and buying puts during those times, you did fine. That's not my game, but I can see why it appeals to traders.
Nevertheless, here's the key: For long-term buy and hold investors, PLTR is moving along just fine. Perhaps it's not winning like crazy in terms of price, but it's not exactly losing either. Our horizon is long and strong.
There Is a Disturbance in the Force
I'm rather surprised that there hasn't been more focus on PLTR's big picture projections. Specifically, I am talking about this:
See the numbers there? Revenue of $4 billion or more in 2025.
We also know that PLTR grew Q1 2021 revenue by 49% year-over-year, generating $341 million across government and commercial segments. That's above the 45% revenue growth previously projected. That's a run rate of $800 million for 2021. And, for Q2 2021, revenue growth is expected to be 43%, which translates to $360 million.
Those numbers for 2021 are fine and dandy and useful to hear. However, what I like more is that PLTR expects 30% growth in 2021 and the next four years. Yes, there's an implication of growth slowing in H2 of 2021, I see that too. However, we can run some pretty simple calculus with these numbers.
First, we can start with the $800 million projection for 2021 check it against the 30% growth expectations. Here's how it lines up.
2021 = $800 million
2022 = $1,040 million (30% growth)
2023 = $1,350 million (30% growth)
2024 = $1,760 million (30% growth)
2025 = $2,300 million (30% growth)
In other words, when we start with $800 billion for 2021, it's pretty obvious that the 30% growth doesn't cut it. We cannot reach $4 billion by 2025 with "only" 30% growth. PLTR is perhaps sandbagging to keep expectations lower. It's hard to know for sure. It could also be that they expect faster growth in 2022 through 2025. Let's run these numbers again with 40% growth.
2021 = $800 million
2022 = $1,120 million (40% growth)
2023 = $1,570 million (40% growth)
2024 = $2,195 million (40% growth)
2025 = $3,070 million (40% growth)
Once again, even with 40% year-over-year growth, we do not reach the $4 billion projected for 2025. Now, here's the first thing I want to point out about this oddity. My numbers might be wrong. My math might be too simple. I understand that possibility, but what this tells me is that PLTR has a different view of growth than my "straight line" projections. They are predators, but they are cautious too.
What happens if we go a little crazy and use 49%, which is what PLTR achieved in Q1 2021. That's nearly 50% growth, of course. Here's how it looks using the same approach I've been using above.
2021 = $800 million
2022 = $1,200 million (49% growth)
2023 = $1,776 million (49% growth)
2024 = $2,246 million (49% growth)
2025 = $3,943 million (49% growth)
Hopefully now it's clear why I'm so surprised that this hasn't been given more attention. While I realize I'm using "straight line" projections year-over-year, I'm kind of shocked that these assumptions and projections haven't been better analyzed until now. The numbers are obvious and simple, and coming straight from PLTR.
Again, maybe I've got something wrong here, but to achieve $4 billion in revenue in 2025, PLTR is going to have to grow by 50% every year, from 2022 through 2025. That's an empirical necessity. Therefore, either PLTR is dead wrong and cannot achieve $4 billion in revenue, or perhaps they expect growth to be 50% year-over-year, or maybe that growth will be 40%, then 50% then even higher. That is, they expect growth to accelerate.
I don't believe that PLTR would knowingly publish expectations of $4 billion in 2025 without strong conviction. That is to say, it doesn't appear to be aspirational given their relatively cautious and conservative leadership. After all, they waited 17 years to go public. Plus, with their load of government customers, it's not like they can fly by the seat of their pants. It is not in their DNA or the culture of the business from what I've seen.
Peers and Price
Here we take an interesting turn. Although I've written about PLTR many times, I haven't revealed something publicly before. Specifically, I have direct experience with a defense contractor. To be even more precise, I worked inside a defense contractor in a privileged position with access to an amazing crew of programmers, engineers and technicians. That experience gave me a direct, hands on, real world view of how government contracting works, how the government embraces technology and how the pieces and parts are all stitched together. I'll stop short at this point; I can't provide more details.
What I can tell you is that my previous work experience has helped me take a long view on PLTR. To wit, I bought PLTR early and I haven't sold a single share. Furthermore, as you might know already, I've bought PLTR LEAPS.
Additionally, I've had several people reach out to me 1-to-1 about PLTR, including their experiences and their views. During one of these exchanges, a high ranking official and I came to agree on PLTR's peer group. I'm certainly not talking about true competitors here. I'm very specifically talking about reasonable comparisons for the sake of valuation. I'm talking about the general vibe of data analytics at enterprise scale, user behavior analytics, data frameworks, and so on, and so forth. Here's the list:
Snowflake (SNOW)
Alteryx (AYX)
Datadog (DDOG)
Salesforce (CRM)
Splunk (SPLK)
It's not necessary to agree on all of these. Instead, these is merely a reasonable cluster of companies that have similar characteristics to PLTR, although I would offer that none of them would be a true direct peer. I do not see even a single company that is as rich and robust as PLTR, nevertheless, we need something of a "peer group" to move forward.
Now, with this in mind, here's how we'll proceed. Since PLTR is so newly listed, and it's relatively young on the public market, I will keep things simple. I'm very interested in earnings and profits, of course, but here I want to simply compare PLTR on the basis of sales. Therefore, I feel it's somewhat rational to compare PLTR using price-to-sales. Here's how PLTR stacks up.
Being really simple here, PLTR gets just 30-35% the P/S of SNOW. However, it gets triple that of CRM. That's quite a spread. Then again, SNOW is expecting 120% revenue growth in 2021 and 86% in 2022. Right now, on the high end, SNOW has the growth edge. I am unclear about how that growth plays out into 2023, 2024 and 2025. I suspect the law of large numbers will kick in, and growth will slow. We'll see. Meanwhile, CRM is a large yet fast growing company, clocking in with an impressive 24% year-over-year revenue gain.
I believe that SNOW's high growth rate will fall, as I hinted at above. Perhaps down into the 50-60% range over the next few years. We'll see. And, I believe that CRM will likely maintain a 22-25% growth rate. However, per PLTR's projections of $4 billion, I see growth above 30%. In fact, I see compound annual growth at 45-50%.
In a funny way, all that doesn't even matter much. That's because the story I see is that PLTR doesn't need to massively grow beyond what we're already seeing. If we merely assume that PLTR can basically hang on to the growth it's getting right now - without any slowdown or acceleration - we can do some fun back-of-the-napkin math. The P/S ratios give us an indication that PLTR is trading at a price that is about right given its peers, at this point in time. I'm not interested in SNOW vs. PLTR, or CRM vs. PLTR. I'm merely pointing out that PLTR's P/S is relatively rational given its growth. We can pivot a bit now.
Here's another picture in my mind. If you take CRM and AYX, for example, both of which have a longer history than SNOW or PLTR, you can see that growing revenues translates to strongly growing stock prices. Furthermore, and more importantly, price growth roughly stays around revenue growth. Clearly, it's not perfect, but it sure looks highly correlated to me; 400% growth in AYX, and 150% growth in CRM. Timing matters here, of course, but the general trends here are telling.
This makes me feel comfortable making some broad generalizations. I'm going to give year-by-year price ranges for PLTR given 30-50% growth rates. This is supported by what I've seen in PLTR's peer group, whereby P/S makes sense given growth rates, and the revenue growth vs. share price growth seems to mirror each other fairly well. I'm not trying to be exactly right here. I'm looking for potentiality, given publicly available information.
Today = $24
2022 = $31 (30% growth)
2023 = $41 (30% growth)
2024 = $52 (30% growth)
2025 = $69 (30% growth)
Now, let's juice the growth to 40%.
Today = $24
2022 = $34 (40% growth)
2023 = $47 (40% growth)
2024 = $66 (40% growth)
2025 = $92 (40% growth)
I still don't think that's accurate per my discussion up above. To achieve $4 billion in revenue, PLTR needs to hit about 50% growth every year. I'm going "straight line" again, with no assumptions about increasing or decreasing growth along the way. Again, I'm keeping this simple and easy. Here's how the price looks at that level of growth:
Today = $24
2022 = $36 (50% growth)
2023 = $54 (50% growth)
2024 = $81 (50% growth)
2025 = $122 (50% growth)
Perspective Is Everything
Clearly, it's possible to be happy or sad about PLTR's price depending on when you bought. It would be understandable to be frustrated with PLTR if you bought around in the $35-45 range. On the other hand, if you bought down around $10-15, then you're probably feeling just fine. This isn't just how it works with PLTR, of course. Nevertheless, it's a healthy reminder.
In the past, I've said I believe that PLTR will hit $75 by 2023. Even my relatively aggressive numbers above with 50% growth do not hit $75 in 2023, and in fact, I'm seeing $54 in 2023. However, here's the critical point. I still believe that PLTR is likely to hit $70-75 in 2023. I don't expect it to hold that price for long, but I do think because it's a growth company, and because news and contacts are "lumpy" that we'll see spikes into the $70-75 range. Yet, since I don't trade, I'm fine sticking with my $50-55 normalized target. After all, I'm still doubling my money from this point. And, it'll actually be about 5x my original investment in 2023, and 8-10x by 2025. I'm looking ahead about 3-4 years, and I'm seeing a 10-bagger for myself, given my cost basis. For most investors, PLTR appears to be an easy hold, and in fact, I think at $22-25, PLTR is a rational buy right now. I'd be far less interested in buying if the price spiked to $35 or above, unless I was trading short term options.
And finally, what I'm seeing indicates that PLTR is sandbagging on growth, otherwise, its $4 billion in 2023 would have been revised downward. Therefore, given that large revenue target, I think it's safe to assume that PLTR actually must expect 45-50% growth, not the lower projection of 30%+ revenue growth as they have indicated in the Q4 2020 and Q1 2021 Earnings Call presentations. In short, I place my bets on more growth, not less. If that's true, the price will easily hold. Or, more likely, the price move upward more aggressively over the coming years.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/...ir-sandbagging-growth-projections |
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