Tech Results Top Earnings Estimates

Apple, actually one of your biggest holdings, you have been cutting that a little bit across some of your funds. Warren Buffett doing the same thing. How have you interpreted, for example, a company such as Apple’s results and ultimately the growth trajectory of a business like that? Look, Apple is a consumer utility and one of the things about Apple has been that they have been slower in adopting this AI cycle. Now the hope is that at some point they will catch up and they will be a fast follower, which we strongly believe that they will. But in the in the near term, there are other companies that are more immediately investing in and procuring AI of type revenues that is propelling growth. OK, let’s talk through some of those names. I mean we’ve heard from Alphabet, from Amazon, from Meta, all of them, the CapEx spend their making, are they building the reward in return for that investment From your perspective, absolutely it’s it’s the number one thing that we have been looking at through this earnings season has been CapEx and how these companies are spending their CapEx. We wholeheartedly expected them to have a big CapEx number through 2024 and they’re even talking about 2025. And this to us is the leading indicator of what’s to come in AI because they wouldn’t be building this CapEx unless they saw the demand trends. I would remind you that during earnings season, both Microsoft and Amazon talked about how they were limited on capacity of GPUs. So this again, I mean people keep asking like where is the, where is the application someone is using those GPUs, They’re all used up already, the hundreds of millions that have always been already been spent. And of course where benefits from the desire for GPUs, it’s got to be NVIDIA, right? I mean is that the number one play for you? Have you been looking at well, AMD or indeed looking at the design element with ARM? Yes, I think a lot of boat boats are going to rise over the next decade and a lot of boats are rising now. So it it will it be a winner take all market, it’s not going to be a winner take all market. There will be many different winners. NVIDIA is going to be the winner take most however, and we are, we are really excited about what NVIDIA is doing in terms of not only software development, but how they’re changing the network in order to make data centers more more efficient. So they’re reaching out beyond just chips into the enterprise networking and and software as well. So that sets up a really great note for them and makes us very bullish on NVIDIA. I mean it’s one of your number one holdings across some of your largest funds. I note that you’ve also been starting new funds and ETF in particular trying to execute on this AI theme. Can you talk us through some of the names that perhaps might not automatically consider the AI play that you’ve been adding to? Yeah. So you know there’s two companies in the industrial space, Verdiv and Qantas services, both of which are you know, they used to be relatively slow growth companies, but are now levered to the AI play. Vertiv makes cooling systems for data centers and Quanta, I actually I joke that these are ditch diggers or they’re pole climbers because they effectively distribute or or make the transmission for electricity. Both. Both of these things are going to be have to have radically changing competitive dynamics in that for example for for Quanta we don’t have enough electricity. So we expect to see utility CapEx start to rise incrementally over the next five to seven years, all of which will serve as the people that implement the the transmission lines for Vertiv. You have a very changing, changing dynamic on the cooling aspect of of the data centre and Vertiv ends up being the net winner. And that’s really interesting because we’re hearing again and again that this is a worry, for example of, you know, Sam Altman been going round the Middle East in particular, worrying that the key anxiety, the key bottlenecks here are energy and indeed access to GPU. That’s why there’s been so much reporting of the fact that he’s trying to build up other chip makers. Uncle, have you been thinking about ultimately that actually being the key bottleneck? Do you agree that energy is going to be the real issue here, limiting factor, I think that technology is pretty amazing in that as you look forward. I mean as we stand today is, is energy going to be a bottleneck? It is. However, as you move forward 2-3 and four years, the energy efficiency efforts that are occurring not only at the chip level but at the data center level are quite significant and we think that you know the technology on cooling and electricity will keep up and not hamper the growth of the industry. So for example, the if you look at the performance per Watt of the B100, which is Nvidia’s newest chip, it’s actually significantly more efficient than the older generations. And so as you move through time, I I do believe that the on a performance per Watt basis you end up getting more efficiency that is than is currently baked in by the market. Where is the market getting too exuberant? Do you believe any view that the hype has made market capitalizations unsustainable in certain names? I don’t think the market is exuberant right now and and you know everyone always asks like are we in a bubble, are we in an AI bubble And I would say it’s much too early. This is very much like you know it’s revolutionary in terms of of what is about to happen. So you know, I was just looking at the valuations across across the MAG 7:00 this morning, you look at meta, Meta currently trades at a 10% discount to the market on our 2025 earnings actually might be a 15% discount now that it’s pulled back so much that to me for a company that is going to change the way that we interact as consumers with AI and how businesses interact with consumers is not an egregious multiple. You know you can go down the list with Amazon. Amazon doesn’t trade at that egregious and multiple to the market especially as they’re showing leverage. You know, you look at Microsoft, Microsoft again, if you look at 2026 numbers, it trades at a 5% free cash flow yield. So to me, these aren’t really set up as bubble esque type valuations and we’re not terribly exuberant, especially after this pullback.