"Only in the frenzied excess of the 2021 SPAC boom could a pre-revenue launch company without any successful launches and, staring at the possibility of bankruptcy only 10 months earlier, be valued at such a ridiculous sum."
Callouts & quotes from 1,508+ activist slides
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"For example, LinkedIn indicates only 6 employees at Allonnia LLC, yet Ginkgo records a $38MM deferred revenue balance, on top of booking $5MM of revenue from Allonnia in 2020 and $2.3MM in Q1 2021 – a $9MM annual run rate."
"Despite having the largest revenue base in media, arguably the best IP, iconic studios, and multiple distribution channels, Disney's Media business ("Entertainment" and "Sports") significantly under-earns its media peers."
"Despite having the largest revenue base in media, arguably the best IP, iconic studios, and multiple distribution channels, Disney’s Media business (“Entertainment” and “Sports”) significantly under-earns its media peers."
"To Olam, an opportunity to pick up a large processing company at a discount, gain quick entry to a new segment of the US processed foods market, and potentially pick up over $200 million in revenue, must have looked ripe."
"In the final notes of the MD&A, it says both ShopKeep and Upserve were each less than 5% of total quarterly revenues of $57.6m; this implies that both deals contributed no more than $5.8m, or less than the $7.4m reported."
"Despite ~50% increase in revenue, ~800bps of margin expansion and improved free cash flow over the last two years, NFLX’s share price is down more than 40% from recent highs and has nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels"
"Spruce Point observes that IPX has issued multiple press releases about partnerships and non-binding MOUs, and in some cases they have lapsed or are no longer actively discussed. IPX also has still not reported revenues."
"Spruce Point believes the current consensus estimates incorporate significant improvement in revenue since the deal was announced on Jan 23rd (either through fundamental improvements and/or aggressive revenue synergies)."
"While choices around insourcing vs. outsourcing impact headcount comparisons, BK also spends the greatest % of revenues on professional and outside service fees compared to other custody, asset management and G-SIB peers"
"We use the annual change in sales reported under multiple performance obligations, and apply a range of percentages to this figure to estimate the revenue booked upfront from Axon’s aggressive revenue recognition policy."
"We have significant concerns that Axon raised $234m in June 2018, when its balance sheet had $96m of cash, no debt, and it was projecting accelerated revenue growth of 18-20% with healthy earnings projected at over $30m."
"PERI's partnership with Microsoft is 35% of its total revenues. We find clues that indicate its partnership is falling below target, and may be more than just temporarily impaired due to the loss of a Yandex partnership."
"In light of its material weaknesses of financial control and accounting, and unusual revisions to revenues, capex and interest interest income, we have serious concerns about the Company’s Chief Accounting Officer (CAO)."
"To support our view that Amcor’s revenue is declining organically, we point out that the Company’s “Reinvestment” is listed at $500m (recall $400m was needed for just Amcor standalone and $150-$185m was stated by Bemis)."
"Despite our belief that Danimer’s selected peer group is not a strong representation of its business, Danimer trades at substantially higher multiples that its self-selected peers on a projected revenue and EBITDA basis."
"For 2025, we estimate the ODR segment will generate low-single digit organic growth combined with over $100 million in incremental revenue between the Pioneer Power, Consolidated Mechanical, and Kent Island acquisitions."
"Cars.com has experienced an almost two-year continuing trend of customer losses and organic declines in revenue, despite increasing operating expenses, resulting in a pattern of missed expectations and lowered guidance."
"Our conclusion that approximately 90% of the YY Live revenues are fraudulent focuses on the ~70% of YY livestreaming revenue reported by XHL and uses the paid gifts in XHL's database to determine how much of it is fake."
"AtriCure's open-heart ablation devices and its AtriClip together amounted to about 80% of total 2019 revenues, highlighting the company's current dependence on procedures performed concomitantly with open-heart surgery."
"In order to sell a deal to the Capital Committee and get Board approval or whatever amount you want, Mobius was like over $200 million, you have to be pretty optimistic with what you think your revenues are going to be."
"XPO has abandoned its attempt at expanding organic revenue disclosure post Q1’18. Through YTD Q3’18, organic quarterly revenue growth has averaged 10.8%, yet equates to just 3.2% YTD organic operating cash flow growth."
"The RBA leadership team supporting Ms. Fandozzi is exceptionally qualified to adequately integrate IAA, execute on revenue and cost synergies available, and continue driving results in the global used equipment market."
"However, we also observe it slightly modified the wording for the segment's revenue recognition from "point in time" to "over time" which opens the door for greater discretion allowing management to manipulate revenue."
"We therefore conclude that either the Shunshun consultants are doing a terrbile job placing students overseaas, or Shunshun’s CY2016 deferred revenue numbers contain more fraud than we have been able to detect to date."
"Even as management has spent nearly $1B on acquisitions since FY15, revenue, Adj. EBITDA, operating cash flow, and free cash flow have remained largely flat, while free cash flow per share is down over the same period."
"Despite this fanfare and significant R&D spending, it appears that DSP has not generated meaningful revenue for its XpandR multimedia product and has not even mentioned the product during its last four conference calls"
"Simply assigning a revenue multiple of 7.5x, in-line with better positioned “online gaming” players such as Golden Nugget, Rush Street Interactive and PointsBet, would result in significant downside for Genius shares."
"By embracing the proposed actions, PepsiCo possesses a unique opportunity to accelerate revenue and earnings growth and drive a meaningful valuation re-rating, which could deliver more than 50% upside to shareholders."
"It is possible that management was instead not recognizing revenue appropriately, and building a source of inorganic growth which could gradually be recognized as seemingly organic revenue through subsequent quarters."
"The market believes in UEC's ability to significantly ramp its production and uranium sales to deliver rapid revenue and EBITDA growth. We believe expectations are simply too high and the valuation premium is extreme."
"Before even mentioning anything about revenue, Porch cited in its SPAC deal press release “$2.2 billion of gross services volumes through its platform” in an attempt, we believe, to puff up its large market relevance."
"The HIMS engagement partner at KPMG has only one other publicly-listed audit client according to his PCAOB profile: 89bio, a $1 billion market cap pre-revenue biotech company that lacks the structural issues of HIMS."
"While it appears more substantive on the surface as an entity engaged in legitimate - albeit failed - R&D, later sections discuss why we believe that Ginkgo uses it as just another front to create fictitious revenue."
"As we show in subsequent slides, we believe that, with the Company having increased sales by just $100M over the same three years, Verint’s organic revenue growth was likely materially negative over this time period."
"We believe Amcor is obscuring significant financial strain (organic revenue decline 3.0% - 4.0%, cash overdrafts and cash flow contraction) that will place its dividend and BBB investment grade credit rating at risk."
"It strikes us that it would be easier to overstate revenue than to commensurately overstate the number of employees, given the payroll and other taxes, social benefits, and insurance that employers generally provide."
"A Revenue Growth Program lays out how a company is going to achieve organic growth targets over the next 3-5 years to both provide focus (forward looking) and test accountability & predictability (backward looking)."
"If we assume that historical small-class, one-on-one, and Xueersi.com revenues are as stated and that their associated enrollment increases are credible, then Peiyou offline revenue growth should have been negative."
"We believe this revenue model serves as a proxy for Wall Street's current revenue expectations. It also illustrates that the Street is expecting near flawless execution of ~84 program launches between 2016 and 2021."
"While we acknowledge that Monster is 6x larger and Celsius was trading between 10x-12x revenues at the time, it is still instructive to see what can happen once investors embrace a fundamentally broken growth story."
"Using standard industry success rates, our base case implies a revenue miss against analyst expectations of more than 60%, while an aggressive case in the Company's favor would yield a revenue miss in excess of 50%."
"We have a strong conviction in our ability to create incremental value from this combination and are raising our long-term target for real estate revenue growth to the high-teens from the mid-teens percentage range."
"Wall Street analysts are projecting 2023 revenue growth of $283 million and improving margins. We believe these expectations are overly optimistic based on the breadth of revenue and profit headwinds we see in 2023."
"Nuvei doesn't give investors color on what is causing the apparent decline of North American revenue. As a result, we interviewed a former Nuvei executive who gave us his opinion of the dynamics in the marketplace."
"SafeCharge provided better disclosures around where its revenues came from. In particular, notice that it classified revenues by industry and customer concentration. Under Nuvei, these disclosures are not provided."
"Revenue attributed to "noncash consideration", a result of value-in-kind / contra deals (i.e. barter transactions), raises significant concerns regarding Genius’ revenue recognition and reported / forecasted growth"
"Xerox should leverage its position of power – being a critical revenue stream for Fuji Xerox and Fuji Xerox being a large part of Fuji – to renegotiate or eliminate the one-sided Fuji Xerox joint venture agreements"
"Excluding revenue from in-year acquisitions, Limbach has fallen short of the midpoint of its initial annual revenue guidance in three of the past four years, and below the low-end of guidance in two of those years."
"Genius currently trades at a premium to peers on a sales and EBITDA multiple basis while generating significantly lower margins than peers and below average projected revenue growth to online gaming and B2B peers."
"Spruce Point expresses concerns with Lumen and Charter Communications' revenue quality. We observe that the ratio of accounts receivable and net contract assets to LTM revenues is materially above other customers."
"GoDaddy has significantly increased its Technology & Developments expenses over the last several years, but has seen revenue growth continue to decelerate, indicating a likely opportunity for cost rationalization."
"Based on our view of appropriate revenue growth and operating profit margins, we believe that P&G should be earning closer to $6/share by FY June 2016 – a level more indicative of the company’s true earnings power"
"GoDaddy has significantly increased its Technology & Developments expenses over the last several years, but has seen revenue growth continue to decelerate, indicating a likely opportunity for cost rationalization."
"GoDaddy has significantly increased its Technology & Developments expenses over the last several years, but has seen revenue growth continue to decelerate, indicating a likely opportunity for cost rationalization."
"With Q3 2020 run rate revenues at Security Detection & Automation (SD&A) running 41% below plan, how are management’s claims credible that they are “ahead of milestones” and things are “going really, really well”?"
"We believe that Remitly is dependent on keeping the perceived value of its equity high because it is among the most aggressive issuers of stock-based compensation at 12% of revenue and 78% of operating cash flow."
"Pramac’s Italian financial statements suggest channel stuffing or accelerated booking of revenue well ahead of cash collection. We observe its receivables to sales ratio is over 40%, or nearly 3x Generac’s ratio."
"We further believe that these apps operated in order to help inflate Bigo’s topline, boosting both its historical and recent contributions to YY, yielding both ongoing revenue inflation and past fair value gains."
"Changes in percentage-of-completion-related balance sheet accounts contributed more than 2.5% of quarterly revenue four times since Q1 FY 2016, and more than 5% three times, contributing up to 7.8% in Q3 FY 2016."