![]() In an Investing Club newsletter Monday, we provided part one of our two-part analysis on the Charitable Trust’s four semiconductor positions. Part one covered industry heavyweights Nvidia and AMD.
For part two, we want to discuss two holdings with slightly different end markets and risk/reward profiles. The first is Marvell Technology, a fast grower with concentrated exposure to strong secular growth end markets. The second is Broadcom, a name that is more in the realm of “value” with strong free cash flows and a healthy dividend yield more suitable to those investors interested in income generation.
Our view on Marvell Technology:
Marvell has gone through an incredible transformation under CEO Matt Murphy to become a data center, 5G, and automotive chip powerhouse. It's a premier name in high performance computing, operating in “the sweet spot” of the semiconductor industry.
Last week, Marvell Tech hosted an investor day at which management raised their long-term revenue growth target to 15% to 20%, above the prior 12%-to-16% range. Thanks to several key acquisitions including those of Inphi, Innovium, Cavium and Aquantia, the company has gone from 62% consumer-oriented revenues in FY2017 to 84% data infrastructure today — a transition that expanded the company’s total addressable market (TAM).
Did you know Marvell Tech has the highest revenue exposure to data infrastructure (the most important growth driver in semis) and the least exposure to the consumer market relative to its large industry peers? In other words, the Marvell of today is much more secular and less cyclical than before, resulting in strong growth rates and a higher price-to-earnings ratio.
Management now quantifies the TAM at $128 billion with an 8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), up from $110 billion with a 6% CAGR last year. That increase would not have been possible without the successful acquisitions noted above as the slower growing legacy businesses (Enterprise, on-premise, wired and industrial, and Consumer) are expected to shrink to 35% of sales by CY2024 (from ~47% in CY2021), whereas the company’s Cloud, 5G and auto business are expected to grow at twice the market rate or a 20% CAGR and account for 63% of sales in CY2024 (versus 53% in CY2021).
As for the valuation, the recent transformation brought with it some multiple expansion as shares currently trade at 34x FY2023 consensus earnings expectations, with analysts projecting a long-term growth rate of 29%, according to FactSet. This amounts to a PEG ratio of around 1.2x, a valuation we find to be attractive given the solid Investor Day event and management’s proven track record of execution and their ability grow the company’s addressable market opportunity.
Our view on Broadcom:
Finally, there is the always reliable Broadcom, an incredibly diverse semiconductor company headed by a serial dealmaker, CEO Hock Tan. Investors aren’t always that fond of a management team that likes to make a lot of acquisitions, instead preferring organic growth. However, Tan has proven himself to be uniquely adept at acquiring businesses, integrating them, cutting costs, and producing strong, reliable financial results with robust free cash flows.
Tan recently started to go beyond hardware, acquiring infrastructure software businesses such as Brocade, CA Technologies and Symantec’s enterprise security business. While the move into software acquisitions has raised some eyebrows, Tan has proven the doubters wrong, successfully integrating the acquisitions and expanding overall margins in the process. Gross margins expanded 10 percentage points since Tan made his first move into the infrastructure software space with the acquisition of Brocade in 2017. This emphasis on margins has helped offset concerns around sluggish topline growth.
While Broadcom is not as exciting as the others, it does have an incredible customer base – including Apple on the handset front and the likes of Alphabet, with whom they collaborate on the company’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips used for artificial intelligence applications.
What Broadcom lacks in excitement it more than makes up for in valuation, trading at just 16x FY2022 earnings expectations with a long-term growth projection of 23% per FactSet (amounting to a very attractive 0.7 PEG ratio) and a strong, cashflow backed 3% dividend yield.
In considering how investors should view these two names, we think Marvell is the way to gain more concentrated exposure to the 5G, data center, and automotive end markets – though some added volatility is to be expected given the higher multiple, and a market still trying to factor supply chain constraints, and the rise in interest rates.
Meanwhile, Broadcom caters more towards value-based, income-oriented investors who prefer a less expensive semiconductor stock that will still benefit from the explosion of data and cloud computing we expect to see in the decade ahead.
How to look at these 4 chip stocks:
Bringing it full circle and considering all four semiconductor names covered in our two-part series, Nvidia and AMD are your high flying pure-play ways to gain exposure to GPU-heavy end markets with best in class management teams and deep competitive moats in a duopoly industry.
Broadcom is the more diverse, value name of the bunch, providing investors with a below-market valuation and healthy, growing cash back dividend. And Marvell is something of hybrid as the business has transitioned to focus heavily on next-generation 5G, datacenter, and automotive technologies.
Bottom line: We believe long-term investors will do well in any of these stocks, however, one rule every investor must abide by is to “know thyself” and we hope to have provided a bit more understanding as to the end market exposure, risk and volatility investors can expect in each name.
The CNBC Investing Club is now the official home to my Charitable Trust. It’s the place where you can see every move we make for the portfolio and get my market insight before anyone else. The Charitable Trust and my writings are no longer affiliated with Action Alerts Plus in any way.
(Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust is long AAPL, AMD, AVGO, GOOGL, MRVL, NVDA.)
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