Buying and holding solid companies for a long time is a tried-and-tested way of making money in the stock market. This strategy not only allows investors to take advantage of secular growth opportunities but also allows them to benefit from the power of compounding.
Amazon, Apple, and Netflix are three such examples that have been big stock market winners over the past decade as they took advantage of lucrative trends such as e-commerce, cloud computing, smartphones, and video streaming. These tech giants have crushed the broader stock market's returns in the past 10 years as they went about tapping into their growth opportunities.
Tesla (TSLA -0.36%), Micron Technology (MU -1.82%), and Microsoft (MSFT -0.16%) are three such stocks that could do something similar in the coming decade and beyond. Let's see why investors may want to buy these three growth stocks and hold on to them for a long, long time.
1. Tesla
Electric vehicles (EVs) are supposed to be the future, and Tesla is one of the best bets to tap this nascent market, as evident from its second-quarter 2022 results that were released on July 20. Tesla's quarterly revenue shot up 42% year over year to $16.9 billion, while adjusted earnings jumped 57% over the prior-year period to $2.27 per share.
It is worth noting that Tesla delivered such impressive growth despite supply chain bottlenecks and COVID-related factory shutdowns in China. These headwinds reportedly erased as much as 25% of the company's car deliveries during the quarter. Still, Tesla managed to produce just over 258,000 vehicles in the second quarter, a 25% increase over the year-ago period. Total deliveries increased 27% year over year to just over 254,000 units.
So, Tesla is clocking an annual delivery run rate of more than 1 million vehicles right now. The company has set an ambitious target of increasing its annual vehicle deliveries by an average of 50% over a multi-year period. The company is already pulling the strings to achieve this goal by ramping up its production capacity. As it turns out, Tesla now has a global EV production capacity of 2 million cars a year, up from 1 million cars in the prior-year period.
All this indicates that Tesla is on its way to taking advantage of the secular growth opportunity in EVs, a market that still has a lot of room for growth. According to management consulting firm AlixPartners, EVs accounted for just 8% of global automotive sales last year. That figure is expected to jump to 33% in 2028 and 54% in 2035, indicating that Tesla could clock solid growth for well over a decade thanks to the boom in EV sales.
Analysts forecast 45% annual earnings growth at Tesla for the next five years, but don't be surprised to see the company maintain such impressive momentum beyond that as the discussion above indicates.
2. Micron Technology
Micron Technology is in a tight spot right now as the dwindling demand for memory chips and weak pricing led management to issue an alarming forecast last month. The memory specialist expects revenue of $7.2 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, along with adjusted earnings of $1.63 per share. That would be a sharp decline over the prior-year period when Micron had delivered $2.42 per share in earnings on $8.27 billion in revenue.
But for a stock that is trading at just seven times trailing earnings, Micron looks like an enticing bet for investors looking to add a long-term winner to their portfolios. That's because the demand for memory chips that Micron sells should only get better in the long run. According to a third-party estimate, the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) market could be worth $221 billion by 2030, clocking a compound annual growth rate of 9.2% through the end of the decade.
DRAM is Micron's biggest business segment, producing 73% of its revenue in the previous quarter. The company sees this segment recording annual growth in the mid to high teens through 2025. Micron points out that the DRAM market will benefit from the growing deployment of memory in several verticals such as data centers, smartphones, industrial applications, and automotive.
Even better, Micron sees healthy growth in its end-market opportunity beyond 2025 as well. The company expects its total available market to hit $330 billion in 2030, up from $161 billion in 2021. Micron is expected to generate just over $31 billion in revenue in the current fiscal year, which means that it still has significant room to grow its business in the long run.
The good part: Micron is looking to aggressively go after the memory market opportunity. It has lined up $150 billion worth of capital investments and research and development expenses over the next decade. This could help Micron push for a greater share of the memory market, where it has already been making progress of late.
In all, Micron's cheap valuation, a potential improvement in its market share, and the massive memory market opportunity it is sitting on make it an ideal bet for investors looking to buy a growth stock to hold on to for a long, long time.
3. Microsoft
Microsoft has come a long way from being just a vendor of the Windows operating software. The company is now a cloud computing giant, a video gaming behemoth, and is gaining tremendous traction in workplace productivity and collaboration.
All these end markets could drive terrific growth for Microsoft for the next 10 years and beyond. For instance, Microsoft has gained a healthy share of the cloud computing market over the years. The company's Azure cloud computing service controlled 22% of the cloud infrastructure market at the end of 2021, up from 13.7% at the end of 2017.
Microsoft's growing share of the cloud infrastructure market should pave the way for terrific long-term growth. This space is expected to generate over $1.6 trillion in revenue by 2030, as per a third-party estimate. That would be a massive increase over last year's revenue of $380 billion.
This, however, is not the only reason Microsoft is built for long-term growth. The video gaming space will be a key tailwind for Microsoft. That's because the number of video gamers is expected to jump to 4 billion by 2030 from 3 billion at present. As a result, the spending on video gaming hardware and software should head higher in the long run from last year's outlay of $176 billion.
A third-party estimate pegs the size of the global video gaming market at $583 billion in 2030. Microsoft's presence in both gaming hardware through its consoles and software through several well-known titles puts the tech giant in a nice position to tap this huge market. All these catalysts indicate why Microsoft's earnings are expected to grow at almost 16% a year for the next five years.
The company could sustain such growth for a long time, as we saw above. That's why investors looking to add a top tech stock to their portfolios may want to buy Microsoft right now and hold it for a long time due to the robust catalysts that could drive its growth. The stock is trading at 27 times trailing earnings, which is a discount to its five-year average of 37, so investors are getting a good point of entry into this potential long-term winner.
