Carpe Diem

The addressable market-size is the base foundation on which successful businesses are built. In the last 5 years, we have seen that companies like Page industries, which commands high valuation, have continued to grow and offer profits to investors. They were able to grow owing to the large size of the addressable markets that they were in. The story is about where you can go, and not about where are you today. We are constantly in search of companies that are hungry to go far, and when this is coupled with a market that is large enough to grow and a management with a growth mindset, there is no stopping them. Look at Suprajit Engineering, which has delivered in excess of 300 times since listing, or Page or Edelweiss- these are examples of compounding machines, because they were in businesses that could scale. So while evaluating a stock, it is important to estimate the size of the market at a future time and see if the business can have a long runway, so that the stock (business) can compound and create value. The essential question is therefore whether the market potential for the business can become very large.

The character of the management and the economics of the business will be the catalyst for compounding. Take the story of TTK Prestige, the cooker business that was impacted by what we refer to as “value migration”. The onset of nuclear families meant that more people will need cookers. So the trend was that of nuclear families, and the outcome was a long run-way, where companies manufacturing cookers could sell more for a long period of time, as the size of the market expanded.

The “New Generation” business offers an opportunity in outsourcing: companies like T Q S are in the range of 4000 crores to 14,000 crores MCAP. We do need to visualize which of these could grow 2x or 4x in the very big pond of outsourced services, staffing and facility management. For instance, we are witnessing a one-time opportunity in ARC resolution, that Uday Kotak calls a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity. (Article link here)

Here we see an E NBFC that has put up a system in place to capture the ARC headroom for growth and is available at a reasonable valuation compared to the growth opportunity; and with a market cap of 24,000 crores- run by a management with vision and integrity.
A growing company needs a large opportunity-size for it to sustain high growth and become a compounding machine. There is a trap in this that sometimes, large market-size does not necessarily contribute to profitable growth like we have seen in the education sector, or in the retail. Merely a large opportunity size is not sufficient; the business should have the right character to seize the moment.