In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Asit Sharma and host Mary Long look at earnings reports from companies on either end of the AI spending spree.
They also discuss:
- Whether you should fall in love with companies.
- AMD's data center business.
- Meta's "special treatment."
Then, Motley Fool analyst Karl Thiel and host Ricky Mulvey look at Dexcom, a medical device manufacturer that's fallen out of favor with Wall Street.
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 August 01, 2024.
Mary Long: Everybody wants chips, and you're listening to Motley Fool Money. I'm Mary Long, joined today by Asit Sharma. Asit, great to have you back on the show.
Asit Sharma: Mary, thanks for having me back.
Mary Long: I cannot believe that it is August 1st today. Do you want to explain to me how we got here how that happened, how the years flown by so quickly?
Asit Sharma: Well, in common parlance, Mary, we blinked, and here we are. That's all I can say. I am searching my consciousness to see what happened in the last seven months, and I'm getting nada.
Mary Long: Anything you're looking to do before the end of the year that you want Motley Fool Money listeners to hold you accountable for?
Asit Sharma: It's TMI, but floskighty, I have a dentist appointment later today, and I know we're going to come to a conclusion here. I'm pretty good about it, but, that last 5% after seven months. That last 5% is what gets me. How about yourself?
Mary Long: I should have known that you were to return this question..back on to me. Dart it. Asit you might know that I'm on an Improv team.
Asit Sharma: I do know.
Mary Long: We've got some shows, it's new to the team, so we've got some shows coming up. I guess I'll be there to do that.
Asit Sharma: Well, yours is a lot more exciting than mine.
Mary Long: Speaking of exciting, got to talk about earnings today, especially from AMD and Meta. AMD to be fair reported after the bell on Tuesday, but wanted to hit that with you because I know that you are an AMD fan boy. Results from that company were super strong and sent a bunch of semiconductor stocks up along with it so I wanted to touch on that. Before we get to those results, again, you've been an AMD fan boy for a while now. Let's rewind, maybe to last week before these results come out. Why do you love AMD?
Asit Sharma: Well, I guess we should say a couple of things up front here is I also love Nvidia. I'm putting this forward in case someone is already starting to type an angry email. I am a big fan of that company. No disclaimers, we shouldn't really fall in love with companies. Mary and I are saying this jokingly, but you can be a fan of a company as long as you retain your objectivity, or if something changes in the thesis, or the people running it, the strategy, you can fall a little bit out of love. Why I like AMD is, Mary it went through this amazing trajectory where it was a leader in chip fabrication. It had partnership with Intel, it competed with Intel, and then didn't compete so well with Intel and nearly went out of business. Dr. Lisa Su took over as CEO in 2014, and they have been on an upward path since then by focusing on innovation. Even if it takes longer, let's make the best products we can. They were caught a little flat footed at the beginning of this explosion and interest in generative AI and all this capital spending that we'll talk about today. But they're pretty quickly catching up in terms of having a competing product. I'm not talking about market share because we know that in the GPU market, Nvidia reigns supreme. But AMD just needs a little size of that. They're one of the few companies around that has the technical expertise, that innovation edge, the ambition, the capital to really compete and take a few pieces of market share from Nvidia. That's a lot harder than it looks.
Mary Long: Some highlights from this most recent quarter, overall revenue up about 9% year over year to $5.8 billion. But if you break that down into different segments, you get lots of different stories. The big winner here was the data center segment. Revenue for that up 115% year over year. Not so much winners were the gaming and embedded segments, which were down 59% and 41% respectively. Before we get into what's going on in each of these stories, Asit, for listeners who are unfamiliar with the details of the chip industry, can you help us understand what these different segments mean and what? Data center versus gaming versus client embedded is another one. What do those mean? What kinds of chips fall into those? Why do we have to have different chips for these processes at all?
Asit Sharma: Mary, are you ready for a string of acronyms?
Mary Long: Always.
Asit Sharma: I'll try to break it down a little bit. Data centers, as we all know, have become this really important part of artificial intelligence, inference, and training and also, it's the traditional place where stuff gets computed. When you and I reach into the Cloud via our keyboards, we're usually hitting a data center of some sort. Think about central processing units, CPUs, the chips that are already in computers, but now exist in servers in a datacenter, GPUs, we've all learned about if we haven't in the last few years. A bunch of other specialized chips like FPGAs, field programmable gate arrays, AI accelerators, which are combinations, typically of GPUs, adaptive system on chips. What I'm painting a picture here of is a bunch of specialized chips that work together on servers to make the magic happen when we talk to ChatGPT. Then AMD has what they call the client segment, and this is something that's easier to grasp. This is mostly the CPU's chip sets that we see in desktop computers, laptops, handheld devices. Then they have the gaming segment, and that's pretty easy to understand as well, when you're using a console gaming device, you may have some component inside that's made by AMD. These are discrete GPUs. They are also semi custom system on chip products, basically designed for companies like Sony and Microsoft to sit inside those devices. Then finally, we have the embedded segment, which sounds sinister to me, but we're not talking about embedding in anything, but other devices. These can be industrial devices. They can also be specialized servers in datacenters. This is a segment that AMD recently started competing in through its acquisition of a company called Cylinks. Just think of specialized chips that could be in any type of device, but often in industrial type machines.
Mary Long: So it's that data center segment that was really the winner this most recent quarter. That's in large part because that's where AMD gets to compete with Nvidia the most. AMD's data center segment directly competes with Nvidia's AI market. Still, and you mentioned this, that it's a big game to catch up to Nvidia. Nvidia's AI arm does $22.6 billion a quarter. AMD just made waves for making $2.8 billion a quarter. There's a lot of catch up to happen there. But so much of this language around AI is centered around an arms race. You're a literary guy, are we watching a chip version of the tortoise and the hair take place here?
Asit Sharma: Not really. I think to me, this is more slow motion running. If you think about two competitors who are in a foot race, and one is a lot nearer at the tape, just about to finish, and the other is a bit behind but catching up, obviously not going to win, but maybe passing like the third place finisher. That's more what this race is like. I don't think anyone expects and I don't expect that AMD is going to overtake Nvidia. But the numbers are fairly interesting. Now, remember, Nvidia is a native GPU company. They basically took this fledging technology and made it mainstream and then enhanced it. Every time we have some crazy innovation in tech, GPUs are front and center. This competitive GPU offering from AMD really isn't their core business. They have built their accelerators using a little bit of a different technology than Nvidia. They function really well in the space called Chiplet architecture, so they stitch different chips together. Their approach is interesting. They don't have as robust of software as Nvidia has. Nvidia developed this amazing software called Kuta, which makes their chips better, their GPUs better. But AMD has thrown open their software to the open source community. It's getting better and better. We see companies like Microsoft, we see companies that support Meta's large language model, which is Llama., s tarting to turn to AMD is a lower cost option. They've gone from $0 in this GPU accelerated market to about $4.5 billion on an annualized run rate in less than a year. That's pretty fast. If we're talking about shaving maybe 5-10 points of market share out of the next five years from Nvidia, this is where AMD starts to look really interesting to me.
Mary Long: I don't want to ignore those pretty steep declines in the gaming and embedded segments that we mentioned earlier, what's behind the downturns there?
Asit Sharma: Sure. Gaming itself is a bit of a mature industry. The whole console gaming industry has undergone a lot of consolidation. As of late, sales are slowing a bit. That naturally, especially in the post COVID world has slowed down some. Also the embedded segments tends to go in tandem with the larger economy. Where we've got a more skeptical outlook on purchasing for manufacturers, other companies that use these embedded chips. That hurts a little bit when AMD is trying to scale it up. It's a little cyclical. Now, this segment had just a tiny bit of a sequential gain, so one quarter after the next versus quarter over quarter year over year. Maybe that is troughing out. But there's something else going on here, Mary. AMD is actually not investing as much in these spaces as it was before generative AI exploded. They have trained their innovation canons on the GPU market, the accelerator market. That's part of why these two segments are falling off. There's a similar story going on actually over at Nvidia. If you have this technology, you're not going to waste too much of time and resources trying to make these slower growth segments front and center. You're going to focus on where that gravy is.
Mary Long: AMD's trading at a forward PE ratio of about 42, just a hair below Nvidia. What would you say to somebody who's looking at the stock right now and thinking, Oh, gosh, damn it, I missed out on Nvidia, but I won't miss out on this one.
Asit Sharma: It seems like the answer would be an easy like, hop on the bandwagon. But it never is in this industry. This whole industry is cyclical. It's hard to remember this, but Nvidia itself is cyclical. Going to come a time when that demand supply equation hits equilibrium, and Nvidia may sell off some. I personally think it's worth holding this company 10 years because there will be other waves that we don't yet foresee. But the same is true with AMD. The best strategy for highly specialized semiconductor companies, whether you're talking about AMD and Nvidia or a company like synopsis, which makes software to design chips or ASML, which makes the machines to build chips. I think dollar-cost averaging is a tremendous way to approach this because those PE ratios are going to move around. They're going to be overvalued. Mary, they're going to show extreme undervalue to the longer term investor, and these things, these trends can happen in a matter of weeks sometimes. Just keep buying steadily, if you like this company or others in the semiconductor industry, that's the best approach, in my opinion.
Mary Long: Revenue from these chipmakers come from AI hungry tech companies. Meta is one of those AI hungry tech companies. They reported earnings yesterday after the bell. A few highlights from that report, overall revenue up 22% to about 39 billion, advertising revenue, a huge chunk of that. Basically all of that. Family, daily active people, which is the their term for daily active users, came out to about nearly 3.3 billion, which is up 7% year over year. Seems impressive that that can keep growing. Capital expenditures spend up 33% largely to support these AI ambitions that we've mentioned. For the quarter, Meta spent around $8.5 billion, but they intend to spend up to 40 billion for the full year. What sticks out to you Asit? Anything else that I missed?
Asit Sharma: You hit on so many nice points here, Mary. The first thing that stands out to me is this family daily active people, nomenclature. It always reminds me of shiny happy people. Why can't they just say DAU like everyone else? More seriously, the advertising revenue. You said that's a huge chunk of their top line, and it is, but it also shows how different their model is than almost any other company of their size that they compete with. That's what sticks out to me is once again, they're able to grow that Pi by double digits, and it's extremely profitable. Their margins are almost the same. Their operating margins are almost the same as Microsoft's just a little bit below. But Microsoft has to do so many things to make that margin from software sales to the Cloud, to their gaming segment. Here we have Meta, which just offers this family of apps, and they make so much profit just from advertising. It's a good business, and I think this may have something to do with an answer to a question that you posed to me before we started taping.
Mary Long: That question was just like the story of the past few weeks, as tech earnings have been rolling in, has been about AI spend. The market reaction to a lot of AI spend from Alphabet from Microsoft has been to send their stocks lower. Well, Meta had the opposite response, and they're spending a ton of money on capital expenditures that are related to AI as well. My question for you, basically, was, why does Meta get the special treatment?
Asit Sharma: I think investors, Number 1, are used to seeing Mark Zuckerberg take some high end matches and just walk from pile to pile of money and just set it alight.
Mary Long: Cough cough reality labs.
Asit Sharma: Totally, we've seen this company burn so much cash on reality labs and the metaverse. But, what's the net result? I'm looking at the cash flow statement for this quarter, $19 billion in operating cash flow. With all that spend on AI and the infrastructure behind it for Meta, only $8.2 billion in spend on that. That left a lot of money to repurchase shares to pay a nice dividend to investors.
Asit Sharma: This business is just highly cash-generative, and investors, I think are starting to say; look, at some point, [inaudible] is going to get some yield out of all the money they've thrown at the metaverse and now AI. You can already see it in some of the uptakes on their expressions of large language models. There's a way that you can look at this investment as being slightly different than Microsoft, which is they have to grow their market share in the Cloud. Azure has to compete with Amazon web services. They need to get a yield on all of that that they're spending. Zuck hasn't had any kind of yield on tens of billions of dollars, and they're still making money, so I think that's the difference in the reactions this week.
Mary Long: I want to get your take on this because I've heard Zuck say this a few times recently, that Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year. Again, I've heard that a couple of times, and my first reaction is always, that can't be right. But tell me, please, am I living under a Chat GPT size rock?
Asit Sharma: I'm sort of under that rock with you, Mary, but I will give you the argument why he probably is correct. There are two things going on here, one is, Meta has its own AI assistant that it's now putting at the top of its family of apps. If you happen to use WhatsApp, which I do, because I've got family all over the world, you'll notice a little box at the top, Meta AI, basically, that's an AI chatbot that runs on Meta's Llama large language model. There are hundreds of millions of people who are using that. They called out India in the conference call for this quarter's earnings as people rapidly adopting that chatbot assistant because Indians are big users of WhatsApp. The other thing which isn't as visible is Llama, and Llama 3.1 now, I guess, is going to be the latest version. All the Llama models are open source; so basically, you're probably using Meta's chatbots in many different places and don't realize it because developers have taken that open-source model, they've built their own chatbot, offered you up a portal to AI, but you don't see the branding on it. I think probably if we looked more deeply into this, we could see that Zuckerberg may be correct in saying this; they're pretty competitive in this space, they may not have all the branding yet, but some of that infrastructure investment is paying off in their development of the open source model, Llama, and all the expressions that they're starting to derive from it.
Mary Long: Also, always a pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much for hanging out with me on this lovely Thursday morning.
Asit Sharma: I appreciate it, Mary, see soon.
Ricky Mulvey: Ricky Mulvey with Motley Fool Money here to tell you about the Range Rover Sport, the vehicle that leads by example, visceral, dramatic, and uncompromising. The Range Rover Sport offers powerful on-road performance and commanding all-terrain capability. Once you hit the accelerator, you'll feel this vehicle's exhilaration. The Range Rover Sport combines dynamic sporting personality with the peerless refinement that you expect from Range Rover. This vehicle has a pretty incredible optional feature, massage seating. You can enjoy a dynamic drive in total comfort in a 22-way adjustable and ventilated front seat with massage function. It heats up in the colder months, too. You're not just going where you need to go, you're working out some knots along the way. Look, the third-generation Range Rover Sport is the most desirable, advanced, and dynamically capable yet. I drove one, it was a great experience, and that's why I'd like to invite you to visit landroverusa.com to learn more about the Range Rover Sport.
Mary Long: Up next, Motley Fool analyst Karl Thiel joins Ricky Mulvey, to take a look at Dexcom, a medical device manufacturer that fell about 40% on its latest earnings report. They discuss why Wall Street soured on the company, and if the stock is still worth investors attention.
Asit Sharma: Karl, Dexcom seems like a relatively straightforward company. It makes continuous glucose monitors, it's a device primarily used by people with type one diabetes to check their blood sugar without pricking their finger. But for investors right now, it is a story because the stock is down 40% after its latest earnings call. Before we get to what happened in this latest earnings call, what is/was the bull thesis for Dexcom?
Karl Thiel: The bull thesis is that Dexcom has been a pioneer in these continuous glucose monitors. They're certainly not the only player, but they were early to the market, they're dedicated to the market, and it's really about making a product that patients love that have had some advantages, and we can talk about that more, whether that still pertains, but has had some advantages over competitive products. Mostly just about the size of the market. You can argue that almost everybody with type one diabetes should be using one of these products, but nowhere near that number are, so there's a huge penetration story there. You can argue that a large number of people with Type 2 diabetes should be using these products, and some do, there is a market there, but penetration there is even lower, and that's a massive opportunity. This is a company that has executed well for most of the time that we've been following it. Has given us a lot of faith in this company and the management team, and has managed to do well in opening up a nascent market.
Asit Sharma: The growth story changed this quarter, and it has to do a lot with the revenue guidance, which last quarter for Dexcom was rosy; they're expecting a growth rate of about 20% for their top-line revenue. This quarter, they said, that's going to be cut about in half to about 11-13%. CEO Kevin Sayer, getting ahead of it, naming three headwinds for the analysts; one was that the company realigned its sales team, and they weren't performing as well as they expected. Number 2 was greater rebate eligibility for their device, which I have questions about. Then number 3 was that they had less sales to healthcare institutions, which is their durable medical equipment channel. What are these problems? It seems odd to just say, "Hey, we shifted our sales team, and now we're cutting our sales guidance in half."
Karl Thiel: Yeah. There's kind of a lot to impact there. I think first of all, the biggest problem is that it was just such a reversal. This is a company that raised the bottom end of its guidance in Q1 before turning around and doing this in Q2. This is a company that was raising its long-term sort of 2025 outlook significantly in the middle of last year, and again, now this is happening, it's just such a sudden shift that you have to wonder what's going on. They put it down to these three factors. The rebates one is, I think the easiest to deal with and kind of the least concerning one. To me, which is that, when you get new patients going to the G7 device instead of the older G6 device, they get a rebate. The company is quite sensitive to that on a revenue level, so more rebates means less revenue for them. They had expected it to be sort of a two X over what they had seen with the G6, it's more like a three X. There's maybe even a double whammy effect there that we can talk about just because a lot of this is happening through the pharmacy channel, they put that down. If you call what they did to their revenues guidance, you call it about $300 million reduction in revenue guidance for 2024, about 75 million of that they said was the rebates, and they expect that to abate in Q3 or Q4. That's kind of the least concerning one because it doesn't involve people getting onto the product. The second one was the sales force realignment, and that was the one that I think analysts were skeptical about on the call. I don't know what they did there that would be so difficult, but I think it sort of relates into the another factor that you mentioned, which is the sales channel. If you are a user of these products, you probably get your product one of two ways; you either get it through a durable medical equipment supplier, which is some sort of specialty supplier of diabetes products, and they probably send it straight to your house, or you get it through a pharmacy. What they're saying is, basically, it's usually cheaper for patients to get stuff through the pharmacy channel because there are kind of lower deductibles associated with that, usually. They're saying basically they're doing pretty well in the pharmacy channel, but they're really suffering in this DME channel, and as patients move to the pharmacy channel, they're kind of seeing some margin impact from that. The part that's confusing about it is they just kind of said, we've seen some breakdown in our relationships with the DME channel, the quote was, "We need to refocus on those relationships." I don't know what exactly they mean by that. How did that go so sour so quickly? This is what I suspect is the real problem because they mentioned the third factor they mentioned, it was just sort of like, the patient missed, like we just didn't start as many patients as we hoped to. The thing that worries me, and to me, the biggest factor in all of this is how much competitive factors are playing into this. How much are they finding that sales are hurting through the DME channels because other people are just taking up the slack, and that's something we can get into a little bit more because that's the thing that I think is going to have the longest impact on the company.
Asit Sharma: Let's get into it because I think some of those are dark Clouds that can be seen through, but if you're buying stock in Dexcom, it's a bet on their device, which is the G7. Are there real competitors to these products now that are hurting this company's growth story?
Karl Thiel: Yeah, there are.
Asit Sharma: Next question.
Karl Thiel: There's kind of three big players, there's some others, but there are three big players, and the other two are very large companies; so it's Medtronic and Abbott, and they're in very different positions. The real sort of main competitor to Dexcom is Abbott, which has a product line called the FreeStyle Libre, that is relatively similar in its specs, you could argue it's actually a little better. It's also often a little cheaper for patients, and probably part of that is because Abbott can afford to price it a little bit less because of their size. Then Medtronic is a huge player. There's kind of two factors going on here; one is that more and more, what you want to do with these continuous glucose monitors is you want to pair them with an insulin pump. You don't want to just get the information that the CGM provides, you want to use it in order to inform, as automatically as possible with as little input from the user as possible how to supply insulin. Up until the beginning of this year, Abbott's product didn't integrate with the most popular insulin pumps. Now it does integrate with a very popular one from Tandem, I think on track to bring integration with the Omnipod from Insulet pretty soon. My question is, how much of this is about people suddenly seeing, like, well, now I can finally use this Abbott product, the FreeStyle Libre the way I want to, and it's gaining market share that way? Medtronic has almost the opposite thing. Medtronic had a major product manufacturing problems in some of their diabetes lines back at the end of 2021, have seen sales tanked. I don't want to say that there's nowhere for them to go but up, but in a way, it's like they've invested massively in this, they are trying to improve this, so they might be making some inroads there, particularly internationally where they have done particularly well and where Dexcom was particularly weak in this past quarter.
Asit Sharma: On X, there's a user on there at Marcelo Lima, pointed out that Dexcom historically traded at an earnings multiple anywhere from the 60s to the 240s, this was a growth stock, now it's at about 40, that's the lowest that I've seen when I looked at the company on YCAharts. The stock has pretty much given up all of its gains from the pandemic. We've talked about the risks, we've talked about the competitors, but now for this company, Dexcom, is it worth putting on investors radar?
Karl Thiel: I think it's definitely worth putting on a watch list because, yeah, we've talked about a bunch of negatives. I would say, the larger story that they have a product with sort of leading mind share among users that has really good specs, and still there's no question that the market's growing, that's one of the disturbing things, I guess, was that Abbott just had a great quarter for their freestyle line, so the market's still growing. In that sense, they can sort of get control of all this, I still think they have a great opportunity. The question is, do they deserve to be priced at that kind of multiple that you were talking about? I don't think so unless we can see that that kind of growth is returning again.
Asit Sharma: Then as we close out, any other medical device companies catching your attention, maybe a stock or even a technology that you're finding interesting right now?
Karl Thiel: Boy, Intuitive Surgical sticks out, they're sort of the Dexcom. If Dexcom didn't have competitors and had never made a misstep, that's kind of where Intuitive Surgical is at right now, including the extremely high price. Intuitive Surgical is priced for perfection, it's just that they seem to continually deliver perfection. Then almost on the opposite end of the spectrum, I still continue to be interested in NovoCure, which is a company that is absolutely beaten to heck right now, but continues to put out interesting data, has a lot of interesting opportunities coming up in the relatively near future and is not priced terribly high.
Asit Sharma: Appreciate you putting some companies for us to check out. Carl Teal, thank you for your time here inside. Appreciate you being here.
Karl Thiel: Thank you.
Mary Long: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against buyer sell stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Mary Long, thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.
