Uber Drops Drizly; the Government Stalls an Airline Merger

In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Asit Sharma and host Dylan Lewis discuss:

• Why JetBlue's $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit Airlines hit a snag.
• Elon Musk's comp package at Tesla, and what investors should think of his desire to have 25% voting control.
• Uber's plans to shelve alcoholic-drink delivery service Drizly two years after buying it for $1.1 billion.

Dave Holeman is the CEO of Whitestone REIT, which focuses on open-air retail centers. He talks to Motley Fool host Deidre Woollard about why restaurants are the new anchor stores and how shopping habits are changing.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on January 17, 2024.

Dylan Lewis: Spirit Airlines. This is your captain speaking. Your trip to Jet Blue is going to be re routed Motley Fool money starts now. I'm Dylan Lewis and I'm joined over the airwaves by Motley fool analyst, Asit Sharma. Asit thanks for joining me.

Asit Sharma: Dylan thanks as always for having me.

Dylan Lewis: We've got a look at the new age of anchor stores in malls. But we're going to kick off today with a deal that is not happening and an acquisition that maybe doesn't look as good as it did a couple of years ago. Asit let's start with the news of Spirit Airlines and Jet Blue, shares of Spirit Airlines down 50% after a federal judge blocked Jet Blue's planned 3.8 billion dollar acquisition of the discount airline. This looks like a major win for the Justice Department who sued to block the acquisition. Are you surprised to see us hit pause on this one?

Asit Sharma: Not really. This is something, Dylan, that the Biden administration has been pushing on many fronts. The idea that competition is decreasing in some market places, like we see this in tech, with the FTC challenging Amazon. We see it here. The ruling isn't so surprising to me, I want to quote from Judge William Young's ruling, this is really great stuff. He says Spirit is a small airline, but there are those who love it to those dedicated customers of Spirit. This one's for you, that has the ring of a beer, commercial, doesn't it Dylan?

Dylan Lewis: It does.

Asit Sharma: I mean, this is this is the working person's ruling here, and that's basically what the government wants is to make sure that the consumer has a place in an airline industry, which has been consolidating for years and years and years. But of course, there are some other parts and pieces to this story.

Dylan Lewis: You mentioned the airline consolidation there, and this seemed like, from Jet Blue's perspective, an attempt to stand up with some of the larger airlines, gain some share, be a little bit more competitive in a more consolidated industry. Does this feel like a blow to some of those ambitions?

Asit Sharma: I think it does. The legacy airlines all have pretty decent hub and spoke networks. They've got a lot of transatlantic coverage, which Jet Blue doesn't have quite as much of, they're very well diversified among different types of airplanes in their fleet. This was a way, I think, for Jet Blue to get a little closer to being somewhat legacy like get some more routes and then be able to take over those planes make them more jet blue like than spirit like. Not super, super cost cutting aggressive airline but really mold it over in jet blues image. This route now is temporarily and perhaps permanently closed off. I don't know if there is an appeal to this, but having said that, jet blue should be able to do OK on its own. It just isn't going to quickly get to that near legacy status which is important to them when they think about loading their airlines and improving the load factor, that is how much of traveler traffic they have in their capacity.

Dylan Lewis: It may be a blow to them strategically, but I had to do a bit of a double take when I looked at the market cap for Spirit, given the 3.8 billion dollar planned acquisition price after the sell off on this news, Spirit is a $700 million company. I can't help but think, did regulators just save Jet Blue a lot of money? Because over the last couple of years we've seen spirit decline, even knowing this acquisition was coming.

Asit Sharma: Maybe, I mean, there's some argument to make that the routes that these two respective airlines have aren't too dissimilar. There's a way for Jet Blue to make money on the routes, but spirit has been struggling. They spread themselves a bit thin in terms of geographic coverage, and that's expensive. When you're a small budget airline, the shorter routes in smaller markets are profitable. I think for Spirit, the problem is the price of fuel, the price of labor, the cost of maintenance, I should say. Again, going back to that load factor, they have a load that's currently below that of jet blues. I think it's something like 80, 81% and when you're at that kind of capacity or that level of filling capacity only at 80, 81%, those economics become really hard even for a bigger airline, much less a small scrappy airline, which depends on people paying full price on its discounted fare. I should close this by saying management has been calling out discounting in their conference calls. Spirit which itself tries to discount, doesn't like it when the rest of the industry is in that mode. It's hard for them to make a buck.

Dylan Lewis: All right Asit. Our second story of today is one on a familiar theme. Not a week goes by that we aren't talking about Elon Musk because he is in the news so much. This week it is because of his comp structure. Musk posted on X saying, I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI and robotics without having around 25% voting control, enough to be influential, but not so much that I can't be overturned. You follow Tesla quite a bit, asset. I'm curious, how did you feel seeing that news?

Asit Sharma: Well, this is a lot of fun, Dylan. The first thought that came to my mind was that Elon Musk is jealous of Mark Zuckerberg who has that dual class voting structure at Met and is able to do exactly what he wants. Musk used to have close to 25% of shares, but of course he had to sell some shares to buy that phenomenally lucrative investment. We all know is Twitter. Now X, just kidding. For those of you who don't follow Tesla very closely, that has not been a profitable investment. But what Elon Musk is doing here is trying to push the Board in public opinion in favor of him having more control over Tesla, which I think is sort of a nothing burger. If I were the Board, I would be saying, so what elon, all of the tech that you're talking about, the AI tech is based on the supercomputer you built here at Tesla. It's based on all the silicon you bought to run all of our supercomputer models so if you go elsewhere, you'll have to start from scratch and I don't think that Elon Musk is quite as an attractive capital razor in today's market. Which is a tough market to ask for money versus the Elon Musk of say, five years ago. When he was much more focused on the business of Tesla and less inclined to wake up one morning and espouse his very interesting views to the world.

Dylan Lewis: I think as it stands, Musk owns roughly 13% of Tesla and I think voting control moves with that in proportion. I don't think they have any super voting shares or anything like that in place. What's interesting is, you're saying you can call that bluff a little bit if you want to board. He has several other companies [laughs] and doesn't seem too afraid to start things up when he is passionate about something and really wants creative control and the upside that comes from that work.

Asit Sharma: I agree with that and I've said in the past that there's probably some mathematical limit on the number of companies that Elon Musk can productively participate in as a leader or an owner. Maybe he hit that with X, although I think that's arguable. X is such an emotional drain for him as well as a bad business investment. I think the complaints about his being spread among different companies were much less loud a few years ago. Today what we see is a business leader who I think is not quite as prominent as he wants to be. I think that the whole explosion of generative AI caught him by surprise. Part of this is, again, as it always is with Elon, perhaps an ego thing, he wants to be associated with future technologies. He wants to be seen as someone as central to the development of AI as Sam Altman. Before ChatGPT burst onto the scene, Elon Musk was often thought of as one of the people who was pushing AI with the Dojo Supercomputer over at Tesla. Some of this, again I think comes back to some personality traits which make him one time both an amazing and innovative and fearless business leader and also someone who you just as a shareholder feels so [laughs] uncomfortable with day in, day out.

Dylan Lewis: It's part of the package [laughs]. Our final story in the news round up today, Uber announced it is closing Drizzly, the alcohol delivery service it purchased back in 2021 for $1.1 billion. I saw this news and I had to reflect a little bit on all the different reasons a company may choose to acquire something and then sunset it. Sometimes it is because the acquisition just is not working out as it was originally planned and the value is not there, it is throwing bad money after good money. Sometimes it's because they acquired it knowing they were going to sunset that thing and it was more of an IP or an Aquahyper type play. What is your read on the Uber move here?

Asit Sharma: I think it's a Schnapps Day. Bear with me [laughs].

Dylan Lewis: Did you like it to define that?

Asit Sharma: Yeah. This is a term that I just was taught a few weeks ago when my family was together during the Christmas holiday and one of my kids explained to me, when you get together with friends and you drink a cheap bottle of wine, the bottle of Schnapps, and then you come up with this crazy idea, in Germany that's called a Schnapps Day. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, I'm sure I'm mangling it. But I think this was that thing for Uber. It sounded great at the time during the pandemic when we were all stuck at home. Hey, let's buy this delivery company, which has got a ton of customers, because this is probably one of the great ways to buy alcohol in the future. I mean, we can see it during the pandemic, people want some booze, so what better thing to tack onto our service than this? I think as the world has changed back again, there isn't such a need for people to have alcohol delivered directly to their store. But going back to the thrust of your question, I think this was probably a decent tack on type of investment for Uber. They saw they could get some margin out of it if they had enough coverage, which it seems to be in a surprising number of states. I think maybe 30-40 states is the coverage of Drizzly. As to why they would sunset it now, it looks different in the ford mirror than it does in the rear view mirror. When we think of Uber today, we find a company that has reached scale. A few years ago, they were losing money, still trying to get to that critical mass. Now today they're generating positive cash flow, so this $1.1 billion price tag. In the context of what Uber generates today, just in cash flow, makes the numbers seem like very reasonable if they want to sunset it. I'm looking at some estimates for free cash flow. Next year, $3.2 billion or sorry, that's 2023 estimated free cash flow, 2024 estimated free cash flow. This year, 2024 year, $5.2 billion in free cash flow, Dylan. When you start generating those numbers, it makes it a lot easier to say, we rolled the dice on this one a little bit, but let's shut that out because it doesn't have the margin or the revenue potential of all this other business we're doing. I think it makes perfect sense today. I'm not sure that we'll ever have that demand for who is delivered to our house unless we have another pandemic, God forbid.

Dylan Lewis: Maybe something that fits in better to the offering of an Uber app as a piece rather than a stand-alone service that they're going to offer?

Asit Sharma: Yeah, I think that they are much more inclined now just to build internally the parts and pieces of the app to be that everything type of delivery service, getting more in the mode of a door dash with their drivers. I don't see them making another acquisition of that magnitude, but they could.

Dylan Lewis: Never a Schnapps Day having you on the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Asit Sharma: Thank you, Dylan. This is a lot of fun.

Dylan Lewis: Coming up, massive department stores like Macy's and JC Penny used to anchor shopping centers. Now restaurants are increasingly playing that role. Dave Holman is the CEO of Whitestone REIT, which focuses on open air retail centers, Motley Fool Money's Deidre Woollard caught up with Holman to find out how shopping habits are changing and what differentiates his company.

Diedre Woollard: Well, traditionally, a lot of the open air retail centers, they're anchored with a large footprint property, usually like a grocery store or something else with a big footprint. You have a lot of centers that are anchored by restaurants if you have grocery stores too, but how do you think about those as anchors?

Dave Holman: The shopping center today is very different than it was 10 years ago. Traditionally, retail centers were developed, the developer needed a large tenant to really be able to be able to obtain financing. That large tenant was typically a grocery store, maybe a department store. The property owner, typically didn't make a lot of money on those spaces as they came with low rent, longer leases and minimal increases in those leases. What we've seen is consumer habits have changed. Lenders now recognize that a well curated mix of tenants that causes more traffic in a center is as valuable as a large anchor. One of the things you've seen, I think I saw a recent survey that said Americans now spend about 30% more on restaurants than groceries. You've continued to see a shift to people looking to pick up, take out to eat in restaurants. I think that groceries restaurants are probably the biggest competitor to grocers and we believe that, well located local strong operating grocers can provide great traffic to a center. When I think about anchors, I think about what's going to drive you to a center, what's going to drive you for repeated visits, what's going to cause you to go there and spend time with other tenants? As we think about putting together a tenant mix, we think about anchors, but we also think about complimentary tenants, tenants that help each other and drive traffic for each other. Then likewise, if we've got a tenant that's maybe drafting off of the other tenants, we look to upgrade that tenants. I think I said earlier, what we do, the need we try to meet, is we try to serve the needs of the surrounding community. If we're not doing that, well, we're not doing what we should.

Diedre Woollard: Well, it's interesting because you've got some centers that have specialty markets that are complimentary to each other, which speaks to that trend. It's this trend that I've noticed in general is, there's so much more take out, like you mentioned, there's so much more people want to get different types of meals. Maybe you have two or three family members who don't want to eat the same thing tonight. Is that something that you're seeing more of that, the takeaway, rather than the traditional once a week grocery visit?

Dave Holman: Absolutely. I think there's been a generational movement really away from eating on plates and moving toward consuming out of cups and bowls. You think about Kava and Starbucks and other phenomenons out there, but we've seen other restaurant concepts like Flower Child and the hotpot phenomenon. But consumers today look for convenience and they look for people that provide good healthy food in a convenient way. It comes down to knowing your customers needs and voids, one of the things we do, and we look for tenants that really understand their customers and then we, through our research, try to help them. It's important to understand who's in the surrounding community. Is it families with young children? Is it older retired folks? Then what are the tenants you put in the center? Are they meeting the needs? We have seen a lot of specialized food concepts coming up. It's fun. We're in markets that are also very diverse and that we have different mixes of folks. I know in Houston, we have a couple concepts. We have a Vishala grocery store and restaurant that provides specialty Indian foods and it does very well. Then similarly, we have an African market that has a kitchen and meets the needs of a surrounding community. We love to find folks that really specialize and do things a little differently than the others. You'll find probably less of the national brands. In Whitestone Centers, we look for unique local operators that are well experienced and well capitalized.o

Diedre Woollard: Interesting and you're also doing something that I noticed is, that you've got smaller tenants overall. You mentioned in your last earnings report you had a sweet spot of around 1,500-3,000 square feet. Is that restaurants? What other types of tenants are you looking for in those spaces?

Dave Holman: One of the things that differentiates Whitestone probably from some of the others in our space is the percent of our leasable square footage that's in that smaller space range. We have about five million square feet that we lease to businesses, and probably 70% of that is in those smaller spaces. Many of our peers, that ratio would be about 70% in the bigger spaces and 30% in the small spaces. We really specialize in the smaller spaces. We're continuing to see a shift. I think I saw the average store size in the US, is the smallest it's been in the last 17 years. That really reflects the profound changes in the way Americans now shop. Almost every retailer you see is looking for ways to operate in a smaller footprint looking for ways to be more efficient. The small spaces we've found have tremendous demand and we're seeing it in a lot of different areas. I think you continue to see food being a big category with different types of restaurants and food services. Health and wellness is an expanding category. I think medical uses that traditionally were in office towers, dentists, chiropractors, and others you see in retail centers. Fitness is a huge category between like the flex stretching people, you see Cycle Bar, Orange Theory, we really see a multitude of uses in the small spaces. They're also very flexible. We're able to move a new tenant in very quickly, require minimal capital on the landlord's part, and just see a tremendous amount of demand for those spaces. As you can imagine, that compares to a larger, big box, traditional grocery or department store where there are less and less of those users and the ability to release that space takes much longer.

Diedre Woollard: The move to Medtail is one that I find particularly fascinating. I also noticed that you're doing shorter leases, so 3-5 years, and this is not traditionally what we see. We usually see larger spaces and longer leases. How is the shorter term lease more advantageous for you?

Dave Holman: At the most basic level, it's really important for us to be in sync with the businesses that operate in our centers. We want them to have skin in the game and we want to have skin in the game. We want to help them succeed, and then when they succeed, we'd like to participate in that success. It doesn't do us any good to have long leases with tenants that really aren't meeting or serving the surrounding community. Years ago, we adopted the shorter leases. I think typically 3-5 years. As I said, it allows us to share in the growth of tenants, which is great in good times. Some of our peers have longer leases and maybe a little bit shorter debt maturity. One of the things we try to do is match up our cost of capital with our tenant stream. Then probably the less obvious benefit is it's important for us just to consistently evaluate our offerings. We have to know what consumers are looking for. It's a bit like gardening to me. Occasionally, you need to go pull some weeds and make sure what remains is exactly what you want it to be. I'd hate to sign a 20 year lease with Radio shack or Toys or Us, and be figuring out what to do with those at the end of 20 years. The shorter lease concept for us is very important. We're confident in the quality of our real estate and we want to be shoulder to shoulder with the businesses that operate there.

Dylan Lewis: As always, people on the program may own stocks, mention, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy anything based solely on what you hear. I'm Dylan Lewis. Thank you for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.