In 2007 there was viral video suggesting that Facebook is overvalued at $15bln comparing to Ford:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I
Lets see how the story will unfold.
Lets see how the story will unfold.
You left it unstated that Facebook is now worth $283bln more than Ford. So, yes, the video looks silly for crying wolf back in 2007.
But I'm at a loss to draw the correct conclusion from this. Is it rational that Facebook is now worth 6x as much as Ford?
CREATING THE PRODUCT: Facebook's engineers provide the framework, but each day's content is created free of charge by 1.5 billion active users. That's great for profit margins! At Ford, cars don't get built unless the company buys steel, glass, tires, etc. and pays workers to put it all together. That really squeezes margins.
GENERATING DEMAND: Facebook's users share content and invite their friends to join, at no cost. Media companies beg to play in Facebook's ecosystem. By contrast, Ford needs to spend billions on advertising to get people excited about cars.
OBLIGATIONS TO CUSTOMERS: Facebook has a modest-sized fraud and security team that keeps everything tidy. They do heroic work, but there aren't 50,000 of them. At Ford, the requirements for inspections, safety tests, recalls, legal settlements when vehicles go bad, etc. are vastly larger.
OBSOLESCENCE: Ford has $58 billion invested in plant and equipment. Every day, those factories get a little closer to being obsolete. Ford must constantly either raise cash or reinvest profits to keep its factories competitive. That means less free cash for shareholders. By contrast, Facebook has just $8 billion invested in server farms, beautiful headquarters, etc. Its asset-maintenance burden is vastly less -- and should stay that way forever.
MAKING MONEY: Ford's net income zigzags all over the place, jolted by lots of market/economic issues. Net income was down last year; historically it's ranged from $11 billion to sizable losses. Facebook's net income totaled $3.7 billion last year and is climbing at a very snappy rate. 35% a year? Doubling? Still hard to tell, but it keeps going up.
Put all those factors together, and Facebook is a growth stock with a pretty straightforward path to making its business hum. Ford is a cyclical stock that may have already posted its peak profits. Ford may be a bedrock part of the U.S. economy, but that doesn't always get you a lot of love in the stock market, for reasons above. Yeah, Ford has $150 billion in revenue a year and Facebook had just $18 billion. But markets value companies on their growth prospects. I've got no trouble believing that Facebook's overall opportunity to make money is 6x better than Ford's.
To me, Google and FB's PE ratios are sensible, taking into account current profits, continuing growth in the short and medium term, and uncertainty in the long run.
It is only this year that internet advertising is projected to match TV advertising spend. TV advertising has been around ~50 years, and before that we have another ~100 years of print advertising to learn from.
From those historic precedents we can see that advertising is a huge, huge market. It is true that something could surpass internet advertising as the best way to spend that money, but I don't see any viable candidates (I'm including mobile & VR ads in "internet").
AdBlockers - of course - accelerate the trend of the money in the "internet" category going to players like FB where they control the delivery mechanism (ie, deliver ads in a mobile app, where an ad blocker can't reach it on most platforms).
ExxonMobil is just oil. WalMart is just department stores. Visa is just credit cards. All those companies have top-20 valuations. It's possible to come up with a doomsday scenario for any industry ... but by and large, once they get really big, they tend to persist in some form.
As such, Facebook takes all the profit from social media advertising, and can set its own prices and dictate terms to its customers. Ford can afford to do no such thing.
If Ford were the only auto maker in the world, it would be a far more lucrative investment.
Businesses that rely on and grow from network effects, die from them too at an even faster rate. A scandal or rival product could take FB to zero. Some would say that history tells us it is FB's inevitable outcome. I know some believe that it can't happen and the FB is "the last social network" but that sounds a little bit like bubble participants claiming "this time its different".
The warning signs of FB rising were apparent for years, but the News Corp managed MySpace did nothing to curb its rise.
Your "Creating the Product" and "Generating Demand" elements synergise off one another. Facebook has considerable network effects, and those network effects stimulate content, but break the chain, or boil-off customers (see "The Evaporative Cooling Effect"), and the feedback's strongly negative all the way down. MySpace imploded quite rapidly. Google's G+ had some traction initially, but worked exceptionally hard to drive off its strongest fans. Those who are slower to learn (/me raises hand) are only now being convinced of our error.
But "Obsolescence" is the big one. Ford's plant degrades from the inside, and the rate of amortisation of manufacturing equipment is fairly well known. Innovation in automobiles peaked in the 1920s, though it's arguable that there were additional spurts in the 1970s (largely around economy), 1990s (quality and electronic controls), and now a possible shift to hybrid or electric vehicles, though those remain tiny portions of the entire market (highly visible, but still tiny by either unit count or, slightly less so due to much higher per-unit costs, currency marketshare).
Ford, along with other US automakers was blindsided when a very modest amount of market innovation, toward more efficient vehicles, hit in the 1970s. That was an exogenous obsolesence function.
Facebook and other technologies face this all the damned time. As I've slowly realised, the cost of provisioning technology hardware falls by an order of magnitude per decade. The rate is much slower for software, but there's far more capable, far more modular software rising up all the time. You can actually see this progression going back to the dawn of electronic computing, with IBM owning the market in the 1950s and 1960s, then a cascade of first minicomputers (DEC, Wang, Sun), then micros (PCs), then laptops, now handhelds, coming along at roughly 10-year intervals.
Software's taken a while to catch up.
Facebook had roughly 1/10 the hardware cost profile of Google (though growth of the Web may have increased that). Scaling out a startup now is largely a solved problem. Revenue model is harder -- but you need far less revenue.
The other problem Facebook (and any other tech player) faces is that their own codebase becomes liability. For every table-based desktop site (say, Hacker News), that existing site layout (and perhaps much the technology underpinning it) actively impedes movement to mobile or tablet devices. I've had long arguments with designers of sites who insist on pixel- and point-based font sizing, rather than em and rem, and then screw up with low-contrast sites to boot.
(HN's own fonts are barely readable for me on a 10" tablet, and no, mobile extensions don't help.)
Further, "Making Money" for Facebook has been exceptionally reliant on both easy-money Federal Reserve policies, and lending and banking regulations favouring Silicon Valley style investments. A tremendous amount of advertising is itself financial services, electronics, and other startups (I'm basing this off of Google's advertisers which I'm familiar with from other sources, but suspect FB's profile is similar). That ads money could well dry up damned quickly.
Tech companies have the problem that as the money dries up so does their tech workforce. Look at the salaries reported to have been offered to Yahoo's top tech talent (if you can't offer appreciating stock, you've got to bleed money). Lose programmer interest, and again there's a downward cascade of talent and capabilities, and some of the negative feedbacks start dominating.
I worry that I see it as over-hyped because of my discomfort in the future it proposes. Its valuation represents the market's belief in what I feel is a very dark future.
So, a slightly more optimistic way of looking at it is that investors think that other investors think that there's a dark future ahead, but may not believe so themselves. It's quite possible that no one really believes in that particular dystopian future, but everyone thinks that everyone else does.
Or, as we used to called it in my day, not actually socializing.
Digital is a nice way to keep touch or contact new people, but bad replacement for physical socializing. Of course it's also easier and needs far less commitment, courage and empathy, and you can't beat that for people...
It's fairly easy to imagine monetisation strategies that could be pretty negative in the long term.
Blackmail me based on private conversations?
Resell my photo uploads to shutterstock?
Charge the intelligence agencies $1k per user for a backdoor to my encrypted FB chat messages?
They could become the whole internet. In many places they already are. This is a very sad future for someone who sees the internet as a tool of human liberation and direct connection.
I don't care so much about them selling our information. It's worthless even to me. These other things are much more subtle and valuable.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/number-active-users-facebook-...
That video is fantastic.