Tag: Competitive advantage

Few takeaways from study of wide moat companies

Wide Moat companies(1)

I started with wide moat ratings of morningstar and selected 10 companies randomly as below

Asian Paints Bajaj Auto Colgate India Dabur Cummins HUL Infosys ITC Nestle Lupin

Then I collected 10 year data on above companies from 2005 to 2014, collecting 10 year data will ensure that you can avoid sampling errors although I want to clearly point that selecting 10 companies and trying to interpret patterns in itself will have sampling errors

If you have gone through our previous posts on competitive analysis , ROE dissection or Earnings framework you know I like to understand a concept through key metrics and examples , I have selected 3 important metrics and plotted on how have they performed for 10 companies in last 10 years

Lets take them one by one

Understand this first  you get rated as improved if a particular company is able to beat its own average over last 10 years in year 2014. So if year 2014 was extremely bad/good year for the company than data interpretation below could be erroneous

Gross Margin – My reason to select – this indicates pricing power

Wide-1

8 out 10 companies were able to improve their gross margins

Cash … Read the rest

Symphony – Understanding Competitive advantages

Previously I have written about how to identify stock investments

Like Peter Lynch here

Using Pause and Play here

By following smart money here

One of the pointers in Ten point investment map is to identify whether company has sustainable competitive advantages. Many of the investors have this question on how to define/find competitive advantage of company. We will try to ascertain competitive strength of  Symphony Ltd one of our top picks in Model Portfolio.  I am borrowing heavily from Warren Buffet’s letters to his shareholders.

1.  Will Company be in business for next 10 years ? Is there a big market to address – Symphony limited makes air coolers, also known as evaporative cooler, swamp cooler, desert cooler and wet air cooler, works on the evaporation technique; it uses the hot air in the room and water to generate cool air.  This is what I picked from there 2012-13 Annual report

In India,about 132 million households live in hot dry climatic regions (about 54% of the total) and about 11 million households live in moderate climatic regions. This represents an aggregate 143 million households (58% of total) of potential customers.

So we can safely assume that there is a … Read the rest