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A good Straw offers a clear and concise perspective on the company and its prospects.
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With Dynamic Revenue Plus one of Siteminders three pillars of future growth, a lot is riding on the success of this new product line which was launched in Aus in September. As a shareholder I think it’s great, as a consumer, not so much.
It appears the Labor government has a similar opinion with Dynamic pricing models coming into their cross hairs for cost of living relief measures.
Australia is only a small portion of Siteminders overall market, however it does highlight susceptibility of the current strategy to government regulation.
Pleasantly suprised to see todays little SDR pop. Technically, it looks like it broke out upwards quite decisively from a nice textbook horizontal flag consolidation in the past week. Theory has it that it "should continue" in the direction of the breakout.
~$7.03 looks like the next resistance zone, this being the 2nd highest peak on 30 Dec 2021 since SDR listed on 8 Nov 2021. This also coincidentally happens to be in the zone of the uptrend line resistance from the low of 28 Jun 23. Might thus be a a bit of a struggle to go past $7.00. Suspect it will bounce between ~$6.50 and ~$7.00 for a bit, which for the longer term, is a healthy thing to have happen.
Price is also not too far from SDR's all-time high was $7.77 on 9 Nov 2021, after which we will be in completely price uncharted waters ...
The next business update will be likely Jan 2025 when 1H results are announced as SDR no longer reports quarterly. Time will tell whether what is poured on this price fire from those results is kero or water!
Discl: Held IRL and in SM
I know people are keen on SITEMINDER but with every hot tip share spike there are shorters around the corner. Short interest spiked with recent price increase.
Its rare to see Morningstar get so bullish in a SaaS valuation:
Updated Aug 27, 2024
We maintain our AUD 10 per share fair value estimate for narrow-moat SiteMinder. The company released fourth-quarter results last month, so the full-year result included limited new information. The shares screen as materially undervalued. The market does not seem to fully appreciate how the company’s scale-based advantages translate into the high winnability of a large market opportunity.
SiteMinder showed operating leverage as the business scales and broadens its product offering. For the past two years, the company increased the number of subscribed properties—which is the closest reported metric to customer count—by around 25%, which helped boost subscription gross margins by around 4 points. Given that SiteMinder works with around twice as many hotels as its closest competitors, we expect its superior scale to allow it to more efficiently translate revenue into gross profit, which the company can then reinvest into the business to make further gains relative to competitors.
SiteMinder is also demonstrating increased leverage from these investments. Despite increasing average subscription revenue per user by 14% over the past two years—which, all else equal, should lower conversion—customer conversion efficiency is improving, as measured by customer acquisition costs per customer decreasing 30% over the last two years. The company cites the use of artificial intelligence across operations, product, and engineering as contributing to the improvement.
Business Strategy and Outlook | by Roy Van Keulen Updated Aug 27, 2024
We expect SiteMinder’s strategy to be wide-ranging, including a focus on attracting new customers, increasing penetration of its current product suite, and developing and launching new products. We view SiteMinder’s strategy as appropriate, despite its wide-ranging nature, as all three focus areas provide large and highly winnable opportunities.
We expect SiteMinder to take significant market share within the hotels industry. SiteMinder’s market share among hotels currently sits in the midsingle digits, yet SiteMinder is the leader in its space, and has twice the market share of its closest competitor. We expect scale-based cost advantages to drive consolidation in the channel manager industry, as subscale players are pushed out of the market and scaled providers, like SiteMinder, take share. Specifically, we expect SiteMinder to take dominant market share in larger single-location hotels, and in hotel chains outside of the largest chains.
We also expect SiteMinder to increase its take rate through increased penetration of its existing product suite, especially through adoption of its transaction-based products. We estimate transaction-based revenue currently makes up around 10 basis points of the gross booking value, or GBV, of SiteMinder’s customers. For comparison, SiteMinder Pay has a take rate of around 2%-3% of payments that are processed through a hotel’s website or, from fiscal 2025, also on payments processed at a hotel’s premises. Similarly, SiteMinder Demand Plus has a take rate of 15% on incremental demand generated through search engine optimization.
Finally, we expect SiteMinder’s new products to be significant growth drivers, especially Channels Plus. We expect Channels Plus, which aggregates several smaller channels into a single channel, will see rapid adoption among SiteMinder’s existing customers, and help attract new customers. Although the take rate of this product is like that of payments, we expect its uptake to be much higher, due to its more differentiated nature, as well as the clear value it provides.
Economic Moat | by Roy Van Keulen Updated Aug 27, 2024
We assign SiteMinder a narrow economic moat based on switching costs, cost advantages, and nascent network effects.
Over 40,000 small and midsize accommodation businesses use SiteMinder’s e-commerce software to increase their room utilization, rates, and profitability, which is around twice as many accommodation businesses as use the products of its closest competitors. SiteMinder is principally a channel manager, meaning it provides the infrastructure for hotels to connect to travel channels—such as Booking.com and Expedia.com. Secondary tools include software for direct bookings, search engine optimization, corporate travel channel management, payments, and analytics.
We consider SiteMinder’s economic moat to be widest in its channel manager product. Like with other software-as-a-service, or SaaS, companies, SiteMinder’s products benefit from switching costs. These switching costs principally arise from the mission-critical nature of the products and the risks related to switching vendors—companies switching vendors risks core channels of customer demand temporarily not working or not working as well as they had previously. Additionally, there is direct time and expense involved with setting up channel managers. As customers adopt more products from SiteMinder’s suite, these switching costs increase commensurately.
SiteMinder’s customer retention metrics reflect its switching cost-based economic moat. Monthly revenue churn—which the company defines as the value of monthly recurring revenue attributed to subscribers who terminate their contract in a specific month—is about 1%, which implies about 12% churn on an annual basis. We consider this to be in line with other moated SaaS companies that have customers of comparably low quality and therefore also have a relatively high base churn rate due to the higher business failure risk inherent in their respective industries. We estimate business failure in the hotel industry, when adjusted for the size and maturity of SiteMinder’s customers, is around 9%. We believe business failure rates for SiteMinder customers are around 7%-8%, meaning its customers slightly outperform the industry average, which hints at utility-based switching costs. Of the remaining customers, the largest share switch because they have outgrown SiteMinder’s product geared toward very small hotels, Little Hotelier, not because they switch to a competing vendor.
We believe SiteMinder’s economic moat goes beyond switching costs. We see cost advantages from the company’s scale relative to competitors. Channel managers build the infrastructure to connect demand channels to property management systems. Given that the property management system market is highly fragmented and hotels typically only use one property management system, channel managers that integrate with a larger number of property management systems can tap into a larger base of prospective customers. Demand channels, on the other hand, are far less fragmented, with narrow-moat Booking and narrow-moat Expedia commanding the vast majority of market share. Nearly all hotels use these channels. Additional channels typically focus on niche demand, such as certain geographies, types of buyers (bulk buyer tour operators), price points (budget versus luxury) or specific use cases (last-minute and mystery bookings.) Although these channels are smaller, each incremental demand channel can help drive commensurate incremental demand and is therefore crucial to top-line and especially bottom-line performance for hotels. In addition to breadth of integrations, we believe customers also value the depth or quality of integrations, such as the number of data fields connected, and the reliability and security of connections.
Building the infrastructure to connect demand channels and property management systems is largely a fixed cost, consisting of technical costs from mapping data fields between systems, and incorporating regulatory logic. These costs are ongoing as technical specifications and regulations will constantly change. However, like with other infrastructure, costs are largely disconnected from usage. Given that we don’t believe different channel manager providers can build this infrastructure with a higher level of efficiency than peers, we believe SiteMinder’s superior scale provides it with a cost advantage, as it can spread out the costs over a customer base that is at least twice the size of its closest competitors.
We view SiteMinder’s scale-based economic moat as strong and don’t believe competitors have attractive options to escape their lack of scale. Competitors can try to offer similar coverage as SiteMinder, in terms of the breadth and depth of integrations, but this would reduce financial resources available for sales and marketing, or product innovation. Given high industry churn, this would see them quickly losing market share, as churned customers are not replenished at an appropriate rate. Alternatively, competitors can try to push harder on sales and marketing, while letting the product fall in quality and hoping for the market to be inefficient. However, we believe that having fewer demand channels would lead to higher business failure rates among their customer bases, thereby dampening market share gains. Focusing on product innovation also seems an unlikely solution, as SiteMinder can likely copy any innovations before they start to affect market share and do so at superior scale. Essentially, we believe that due to the cross-border nature of travel, the small and midsize segment of the hotel industry will consolidate globally toward the largest company with the broadest and deepest set of integrations.
We see SiteMinder’s superior scale evolving into network effects. Although channel managers provide access to hundreds of demand channels, most hotels only use around half a dozen channels due to the required costs to set up each channel, both from a technical and a commercial perspective. SiteMinder, using its superior scale, is standardizing various second-tier channels—such as Trip.com, Agoda.com, and Hopper.com—so that they can be accessed as a single, first-tier channel. Although this Channels Plus product is nascent, we believe it is a natural evolution of SiteMinder’s leading market position and will prove to be a highly attractive channel for hotels due to higher leverage on setup costs. In turn, we expect more second- and third-tier demand channels to join SiteMinder’s standard to connect to a large and growing pool of hotel inventory.
Fair Value and Profit Drivers | by Roy Van Keulen Updated Aug 27, 2024
Our fair value estimate for SiteMinder is AUD 10 per share, implying an enterprise value/sales multiple of 12 on our fiscal 2025 estimates. We use a weighted average cost of capital, or WACC, of 9%, reflecting high revenue cyclicality, medium operating leverage, and low credit risk.
We assume revenue to grow at an organic compound annual growth rate of 22% over the next decade, driven primarily by transaction-based products, including Channels Plus. We expect EBIT margins to expand to 18% by fiscal 2034, compared with negative 13% in 2024. We expect SiteMinder’s operating expenses to decline as a share of revenue over time, as it evolves from a middleware software company to a platform company. We expect this to result in lower customer acquisition costs, and integration costs with the platform increasingly being born by network participants, such as online travel agencies and hotels, rather than by SiteMinder itself.
Risk and Uncertainty | by Roy Van Keulen Updated Aug 27, 2024
We assign SiteMinder a Morningstar Uncertainty Rating of High.
We see high risk from economic cyclicality. Although most of the company’s revenue and gross profit comes from subscriptions, an increasingly large share of the company’s business will be coming from transaction-based products, which follow the highly cyclical travel industry.
We see medium risk from competition. SiteMinder is the largest provider in an industry where scale matters. SiteMinder can charge lower prices than competitors due to its ability to fractionalize fixed technological and regulatory costs over a customer base twice the size of its closest competitor. However, SiteMinder’s scale advantage is not insurmountable and we believe the market for channel manager software is not especially efficient. We expect SiteMinder’s competitive position to improve over time as its new Channels Plus product starts creating a network effect between hotels and online travel agencies.
Finally, we see medium risk from execution. We expect SiteMinder’s Channels Plus product will be a significant driver of revenue growth, margin expansion, and help widen its economic moat. But the product is still in its early stages and adoption of the solution could miss expectations.
Capital Allocation | by Roy Van Keulen Updated Aug 27, 2024
SiteMinder has an Exemplary Morningstar Capital Allocation rating, reflecting our assessment of a sound balance sheet, exceptional investment efficacy, and appropriate shareholder distributions.
SiteMinder’s balance sheet is sound. As of the end of June 2024, it held significant cash with no debt.
We rate investment efficacy as exceptional. The primary contributor to our rating is SiteMinder’s investment in new, market-leading products, such as Channels Plus. We view these as contributing significantly to SiteMinder’s economic moat through the establishment of network effects.
SiteMinder does not currently return capital to shareholders, which we view as appropriate, given that the company is currently not profitable
Anyone aware of who bought so aggressively?
Bear - 20% Revenue growth slowing to 15%
Base - 25% Revenue growth slowing to 20%
Bull - 30% Revenue growth slowing to 20%
Discount rate lowered to 12.5% since operating cashflow positive milestone met.
SUMMARY
A very good all round operational result - very hard to find fault with it as the business appears to have fired on all CURRENT cylinders.
Smart Platform new capabilities are being progressively rolled out in 1HFY25 - sets the foundation for a good step up in revenue in 2HFY2025.
Focus is now increasing on larger hotel properties vs SDR’s earlier focus on small hotel properties - this opens up the TAM, is a good sign of growing product/platform confidence and will support future revenue momentum given the higher Gross Booking Value of larger hotels
Am very bullish as things are falling into place very nicely.
Thesis of SDR being the dominant platform in small and medium-sized hotels is very much intact and in play with the existing capabilities, and with the promise of more from the imminent Smart Platform capability rollout.
Market does not seem to have recognised this and prices have fallen to my top up zone of ~$4.90
Topped up today at $4.92 IRL and in SM, with dry powder kept on standby to further top up around $4.60, if prices fall to those levels.
Disc: Held IRL and in SM, High Conviction holding
Financials (all amounts and %’s are YoY comparisons)
Total revenue up 26.0% to $190.7m - while this is shy of SDR’s “medium term” goal of ~30% annual organic growth, it has grown at a fast clip and is before new Smart Platform capabilities are released.
Margins have been sustained:
Underlying EBITDA turned positive from FY23 ($21.9m) to FY24 $0.9m, importantly, this occurred in 2HFY24, reflecting the benefits of operating leverage and cost discipline
LTV/CAC continues to improve on a steep trajectory - 31.7% improvement from 4.1x to 5.4x
Rule of 40 performance improved 230%, from 5 to 17, reaching 21 in 2H
Operating leverage is kicking in as revenue increases - this is very evident in falling product Development Cost despite the intense focus on developing and deploying the new Smart Platform capabilities in the back half of FY2023.
Balance Sheet
Underlying FCF improved from ($34.0m to ($6.4m)
$72.3m in available funds, which includes $30.0m of undrawn debt facilities
3-Pillar Smart Platform Strategy
Clear evidence that the SDR platforms are being actively used
The industry is coming onboard, including the big Global Distributors
New capabilities appear on track for rollout in 1HFY25 - expect revenue to get a good leg up in 2HFY25 as a result
My notes on SDR's Appendix 4C and Trading Update today. I really like how things are panning out not only for FY24, but also what is ahead for FY25 ...
Disc: Held IRL and in SM
TAKEAWAYS
Summary of the Updates on Key Metrics
SMART PLATFORM STRATEGY
Dynamic Revenue Plus
Channels Plus
Smart Distribution Program - Newly Announced
TRANSACTION PRODUCT INITIATIVES
Payment Solution
Metaseach Manager
GUIDANCE
Morningstar imitating with a $10 price target.
Same points made:
Wrote an article about Siteminder for arichlife. Would love to have another strawman meeting with CEO.
https://arichlife.com.au/an-introduction-to-siteminder-asx-sdr/
Good to know Aust Super is accumulating SDR, adding another 1%.
The Good
The Not So Good
What To Watch
Watch Status
Valuation Status
Board
Inside Ownership Ordinary Shares %SDR Issued Net Value at $5.40
Pat O’Sullivan 65,976 0.02% $356K
Sankar Narayan 7,147,691 2.58% $38.598m
Jenny Macdonald 54,525 0.02% $294K
Paul Wilson 16,760,807 6.05% $90.508m
Les Szekely 15,549,072 5.61% $83.965m
Kim Anderson 24,500 0.01% $132K
Dean A. Stoecker 20,000 0.01% $108K
Total 39,622,571 14.3% $213.962m
Recent Board Buying
Kim Anderson
· 28 November 2023
5,000 shares at $4.58 ($22,949.81)
· 2 November 2023
4,500 shares at $4.265 ($19,192.50)
Board Bios
Pat O’Sullivan - Independent, Non-Executive Chairman
Pat was appointed independent non-executive Chairman of the Company in October 2021.
Pat has extensive experience as a Director of both listed and unlisted entities. Pat is currently the non-executive Chair of both carsales.com Limited (ASX:CAR) and TechnologyOne. He was previously a non-executive Director of APN Outdoor (ASX: APO), iSentia (ASX:ISD), Marley Spoon (ASX:MMM), iSelect (ASX:ISU) and iiNet (ASX: IIN).
Pat has over 30 years’ commercial and business management experience, including holding various senior financial and operational roles in Ireland, the US, Australia and New Zealand across a number of industries including traditional and online media, telecommunications, fast moving consumer goods and professional accounting. He was the Chief Financial Officer of Optus from 2001 to 2006 and was the Chief Operating Officer and Finance Director of Nine Entertainment Co Pty Limited from 2006 until 2012.
Pat is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland and Australia. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program.
Sankar Narayan -Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director
For more than 20 years, Sankar Narayan has delivered change management, operational rigour and business growth across the travel, technology, media and telecommunications sectors, with particular expertise in company transformations and business strategy to achieve strong shareholder outcomes. Following several senior management roles at Virgin Australia, Fairfax Media and Foxtel, and having also worked at Vodafone Australia, Boston Consulting Group and Schlumberger prior, in 2015 Sankar joined Xero where he went on to serve in the dual capacity of Chief Operating and Financial Officer.
Today, Sankar leads SiteMinder’s internationalised software and multilingual teams across 20 locations globally, and which see more than 80% of revenue sourced from outside the company’s home market of Australasia.
Sankar holds a Masters in Business Administration with Honours from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York. He is a Certified Practising Accountant and a Fellow of CPA (Australia), and has been a regular contributor to Forbes.com on the crucial topics of strategy, disruption and managing high growth businesses.
Jenny Macdonald - Non-Executive Director, Audit and Risk Committee Chair
Jenny was appointed as an independent non-executive Director of the Company in October 2021.
Jenny has a background in financial and general management roles across a range of industry sectors including fast moving consumer goods, resources, travel and digital media. She has a proven track record in developing and implementing strategy with a focus on risk management, growth and value creation. Jenny was previously Chief Financial Officer and Interim Chief Executive Officer at Helloworld Travel and Chief Financial Officer and General Manager International at REA Group.
Jenny is currently non-executive director of Redbubble (ASX:RBL) and Australian Pharmaceutical Industries (ASX:API), and is Chair of Healius Limited (ASX:HLS).
Jenny is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants ANZ, has a Masters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation from Swinburne University and is Graduate member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Paul Wilson - Non-Executive Director
Paul was appointed a non-executive director of the Company in 2012. Paul held the role of SiteMinder Chair from 2012 to 2018, and was previously Chair of the People and Culture Committee. He is a member of the Audit and Risk Committee.
Paul is a co-founder and Managing Partner of ASX-listed Bailador Technology Investments (ASX:BTI) (which is a substantial shareholder of SiteMinder). Paul’s business background includes positions with leading Australian private equity house CHAMP Private Equity in Sydney and New York, with MetLife in London, media and technology focussed investment group, Illyria and with Ernst & Young.
Paul’s other non-executive director roles include ASX-listed Vita Group (ASX:VTG) and Straker Translations (ASX:STG), as well as private companies InstantScripts and the Rajasthan Royals IPL cricket franchise.
Paul has a Bachelor of Business, from Queensland University of Technology and is a Fellow of the Financial Services Institute of Australia, a Member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Australia and a Member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Les Szekely - Non-Executive Director
Les was appointed a non-executive director of the Company in 2012. He was the first angel investor in SiteMinder.
Les was a tax consulting partner with Horwaths Chartered Accountants for 20 years, until the company merged with Deloitte, when he became a Director of Taxation in Deloitte Growth Solutions.
Since leaving Deloitte in 2008, Les has dedicated his time to angel and venture capital investing. He is the Chairman of Grand Prix Capital, Equity Venture Partners and Microequities Asset Management Group Limited (ASX: MAM). These businesses are engaged in venture investment at the angel, venture capital and early listed stages, respectively. Les is also is a director of several venture backed growth companies.
Les holds a Bachelor of Law and Arts from the University of New South Wales, a Master of Laws from the University of Sydney.
Kim Anderson -Non-executive Director, People & Culture Chair
Kim was appointed a non-executive director of the company in April 2022. She is the Chair of the People and Culture Committee.
Kim brings more than 30 years’ board and executive expertise to SiteMinder from a range of media and e-commerce companies. Kim is the former CEO and founder of Reading Room Inc (bookstr.com), CEO of Southern Star Entertainment, and has held senior executive positions at PBL and Ninemsn.
She is currently a non-executive director of Carsales (ASX:CAR), Marley Spoon AG (ASX:MMM), Invocare Ltd (ASX:IVC) and Infomedia (ASX:IFM). She serves as Chair of the Remuneration, People and Culture Committee on all her boards.
Dean A. Stoecker - Non-Executive Director
Dean Stoecker is an American entrepreneur and businessman, who co-founded software giant Alteryx (NYSE:AYX) in 1997, a company specialising in automating analytics, which today plays a key role in making data-driven tools accessible at all levels of the world’s leading organisations.
Currently Alteryx’s Executive Chairman, Dean was previously the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Prior to this, Dean was Director-Enterprise Solutions at Integration Technologies, Principal at Donnelley Marketing Information Services and Vice President of Sales at Strategic Mapping.
Dean holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, and a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) from Pepperdine University. He lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Following the post on SDR's 1HFY24 results earlier, here is the summary of the SDR 3QFY24 Appendix 4C. More of the same from 1HFY24 ...
Very excited with progress on the 2 new capabilities currently in pilot release ahead of 1QFY25 release as this will propel SDR's next phase of growth, in parallel to the ongoing growth in the current base products.
Discl: Held IRL and in SM
KEY POINTS FROM THE ANNOUNCEMENT
Belatedly worked through SDR's 1HFY24 results and last week's 3QFY24 Appendix 4C after leaving it aside for about 6M.
The FY2024 slides is an easy read and tells the story very clearly SDR 1HFY24 Preso
Added notes taken during the 1HFY2024 call and a summary of the P&L and KPI's across the halfs, so that I can more clearly see the trend across half's rather than pcp.
SUMMARY
KEY POINTS FROM 1HFY24 INVESTOR CALL
Discl: Held IRL and in SM
As @PeregrineCapital pointed out, BTI's February Update is all about SiteMinder, which is their largest holding in the portfolio. BTI are still quite bullish given the significant portion it makes up of their NTA and for me, any sell downs from the BTI team would be worth paying attention to. (Even though they probably should to move capital into other unlisted ventures).
The update breaks down Short, Medium and Long term prospects for the company, but implies there is value at current levels.
I'm yet to do my review of Q2/H1 but will revisit this when I do.
The Good
The Not So Good
What Status
What To Watch
Siteminder trading update. Business continues to progress
Went through the SDR Investor Day Presentation slide pack released yesterday 16 Oct 2023:
https://www.asx.com.au/markets/company/SDR
It was well worth spending the 25-30 mins working through the 78 slides to get a flavour of the 2 Smart Patform offerings targetted to be released in FY24 and the opportunity ahead to upsell within existing customers, over and above the signing up of new hotels.
Having had some past exposure to cruise ship revenue management and reservation systems, the offerings make complete sense to me. It solves some big problems, especially for smaller hotels that do not have extensive distribution and revenue management capabilities.
Very keen to see how the SDR customer base takes up these new offerings and the resultant financial impact in the coming Q's.
SUMMARY
Discl: Held IRL and in SM.
SDR's FY23 results had no surprises as most of it was revealed during the earlier 4Q Appendix 4C Release. However, these charts in the pack stood out for me as it provided a bit more "colour" on the performance.
It was a strong result and it is executing/delivering on the trajectory Sankar said it would. Will be interesting to see how much this holds up in the next 2Q's as global economies decelerate further, eating into discretionary travel demand.
Discl: Held IRL and in SM.
SDR Director buy from Dean Stoecker - around $50k worth
@Strawman any chance of getting Sankar Narayan back for another update?
Life360 and SiteMinder are among the locally listed companies to have banked with failed VC lender Silicon Valley Bank.
some local fall out
Siteminder Half Yearly Report
Consistent growth rate and has not missed a beat since IPO and subsequent tech sell off. Long growth runway and obvious large TAM. Continue to impress and I continue to add in RL PF.
Siteminder Quarterly report - impressive revenue growth numbers continuing (fastest in 5 years)
I’ve also been watching SiteMinder. This observation is a bit from left field, but it may have an impact on SDR in the short/med term.
Within 2 days, I heard 2 podcast references to hotels operating at low capacity, due to lack of staff availability and the subsequent flow on of price increases for accommodation to ensure operators are profitable.
My initial thought is that this is a headwind for SDR as there are less rooms to clip the ticket on. Alternatively, it could be a positive as operators need to ensure they fill rooms to a predetermined capacity to make a profit/break even. I don’t have a strong view either way, just another data point to consider.
Sources below:
Ref 1: “Imagine that China moves away from zero COVID. I'm not saying they will, I'm saying imagine, then all of a sudden, the demand for all sorts of basic materials, the demand for luxury goods. I'll give you just an example. I just went around Europe visiting clients and the hotel rooms that used to cost me 200 euros now costs 400 euros, and you can't get room service at night because they don't have enough staff anymore. What happens when the Chinese tourists come back? That probably goes from 400 euros to 600 euros.”
Excerpt from podcast, (my emphasis in bold) Louis-Vincent Gave: The Xi Pivot vs. The Powell Pivot October 20th, 2022
Ref 2: On The Call yesterday, Adam and Jun Bei discuss business travel, with hotels running low occupancy due to staffing issues and increasing prices to compensate. They note that business travel is strong but expect it to taper going forward re the higher costs to travel.
https://www.ausbiz.com.au/media/the-call-friday-21-october-?videoId=24901
Adam Dawes & Jun Bei Liu At 20.30
As a side note, the macrovoices podcast is interesting. It refers to a potential Xi pivot. That is, when China loosens covid restrictions, there may be a “flood” of liquidity that will be released from pent up Chinese demand.
A solid result from Siteminder. @west has posted the key details, but the company has delivered exactly what they said at their IPO and in line with what CEO Sankar Narayan said we spoke to him in early June.
...and yet shares are down 33% since then!
Yes, they're burning through the cash, but they have +$100m in 'liquidity' ($25m in cash, $50m in term deposits, and a $30m loan facility). Moreover, it's more about what they are spending the cash on and what return they are getting on that -- and investors can't really pretend to have seen any nasty surprises.
Of course, the macro situation has changed a lot, as has general market sentiment. And they are directly related to travel.
Fair to point out too that shares are still on 5x ARR, so certainly some growth priced in.
Still, this is all about a huge market opportunity, high margins and a capacity (it is hoped) to scale effectively.
I don't own, but on my watchlist.
Just a rough cut to draw a line in the sand.
Will assume 25%-odd growth for 5 years to get a FY27 revenue of $400m.
Let's also assume a 20% net margin, and 280m shares on issue to get an EPS of 29cps.
I'll apply a PE of 25 and discount back by 10%pa to get a valuation of $4.50
Hope you found the discussion with Sankar Narayan valuable.
He struck me as a straight shooter with a clear focus on what matters, and as someone who is thinking years into the future.
You can catch the recording on the Meetings page, but a few things that stood out for me:
All told, it looks to me like a well run business that has not only survived a near existential threat, but emerged far stronger on the other side. Management is capable, aligned and thinking long term. The business is very sticky, and should scale well as revenues grow, and is unlikely to need any outside capital for the foreseeable future.
All that being said, despite the drop in the share price, shares are still on something like 10x ARR. Yes, it's growing well with attractive economics, but it feels like a lot in the current market.
Very rough quick Valuation more research to be conduct. Really hard to value at moment due to effect of COVID and how the hotel sector recovers from the pandemic. Overvalue at this stage for us unless we can see some massive future growth in revenue.
CEO Sankar Narayan – joined SiteMinder in January 2019. Previous roles before SiteMinder include CFO and COO at Xero (ASX: XRO), CFO at Virgin Australia, Fairfax media and Foxtel.
Podcast link below from last year interview with Sankar Narayan.
Founders
SiteMinder was co-founded by Michael Ford and Michael Rogers in 2006.
Michael Ford is currently a Non- Executive Director with SiteMinder with approx 12,453,770 or 4.62% shares on issue.
https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/s03e05-mike-ford-siteminder/id1490231090?i=1000458624547
Michael Rogers is currently SiteMinders Chief Technology Officer with approx. 2,300,353 Share or 0.85% of shares on issue.