08 Feb Key Stock Highlights from 2022 Growth Sectors
ASML (NASDAQ: ASML): Semiconductor Industry experiencing strong growth
Question:To close off, do you expect strong demand to continue beyond 2022?
ASML CEO Peter Wennick: Absolutely. I said it before, we are looking at the secular growth trend and we talked about this extensively during our Capital Markets day at the end of last year. The growth profile of this industry is impressive. The semiconductor industry is planned to double in size to a trillion dollars by the end of this decade. And of course, this will also have an effect on our business. So what do we do? And I have to admit, we as an industry, us and our customers and their customers, we have underestimated the long-term growth profile of the company. So we need to catch up. How do we do that? We build capacity. And that is what we are very much focusing on. Building capacity at ASML, but also in the supply chain. To make sure that we can significantly increase our output both for DUV and for EUV and for our metrology and measurement systems – basically across our entire product line. So, bearing that in mind, I’m even more optimistic about the long-term growth profile of this company.
WISE plc (LON: WISE): Cross border transaction volume growing and prices decreasing
WISE Trading update: Revenue grew by 34% YoY and 13% QoQ to £149.8 million, broadly in line with the rate of growth in volume. Our continuing efforts to engineer and optimise away costs to support sustainably lower prices for customers resulted in a lower take rate as expected, reducing to 0.73%, down 2bps YoY and 1bp QoQ. This reflects the price drops which are partially offset by incremental revenue from other sources beyond cross-border transactions.
Looking ahead, we continue to expect the take rate to be slightly lower in the second half of FY2022 (WISE’s financial year-end is 30 June) compared to the first half as a result of price reductions. This is expected to be more than offset by higher volumes as we now anticipate revenue growth of c. 30% for FY2022 over FY2021. We continue to expect gross margin for FY2022 to be c.65-67%, subject to foreign exchange related costs continuing to remain broadly stable.
Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ: ISRG): Number of robot-assisted surgery grows in 2021
Gary Guthhart (CEO): Putting 2021 in context, demand for our robotically assisted interventions has been resilient during COVID. While these interventions get delayed during COVID peaks, the return when COVID wanes, and that is encouraging. Pandemic stresses on healthcare systems emphasize the need for the kind of high-quality, minimally invasive interventions or products enable. MIS (minimally invasive surgical) procedures allow greater use of ambulatory surgery, free up resources and ORs relative to other approaches, and often enable faster patient return to home and overall recovery.
In 2021, da Vinci procedures grew 28% compared to full-year 2020, reflecting a partial recovery in surgery after the first wave of the pandemic. Over the two-year period, 2020 and 2021, the compound annual growth rate in procedures was 14%.
Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX): Low member add guidance for Q1 2022 due to combination of factors but business still structurally unchanged
Spencer Neumann (CFO): No structural change in the business that we see. We guided to 2.5 million paid net adds in Q1. And what’s reflected there is pretty much the same trends we saw in Q4: so healthy retention with churn down, healthy viewing and engagement with viewing up and acquisition growing but a bit slower than pre-COVID levels, just hasn’t fully recovered.
And we’re trying to pinpoint why that is. It’s tough to say exactly why our acquisition hasn’t recovered to pre-COVID levels. It’s probably a bit of just overall COVID overhang that’s still happening after two years of a global pandemic that we’re still unfortunately not fully out of, some macroeconomic strain in some parts of the world like Latin America in particular. While we can’t pinpoint or point a straight line using — when we look at the data on a competitive impact, there may be on the marginal side of our growth, some impact from competition but which, again, we just don’t see it specifically.
So overall, that’s what’s reflected in the guide. I’d say our big titles are also landing, at least our known big titles, a little bit later in the quarter with Season 2 of “Bridgerton” in March, “The Adam Project” also in March. As you know, we are also changing prices in some countries in Q1 of this year and it happens to be our largest country, as we announced last week, actually our largest region with Canada as well. So that’s probably a little bit more impact than a typical quarter.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT): Broad-based growth and optimism from management
Amy Hood (CFO): And finally, for FY22, given our strong performance in the first half of the fiscal year and our current H2 outlook, full-year operating margins should be slightly up year-over-year even with the impact of changes in accounting estimates noted earlier and the significant strategic investments we are making to capture the tremendous opportunities ahead of us.
In closing, digital technologies are increasingly essential to empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more and we are well-positioned with innovative, high-value products. Our diverse, yet connected portfolio of solutions span end markets, customer sizes, and business models uniquely enabling us to deliver long-term revenue and profit growth.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA): Steady growth and FSD software will become financially important
Elon Musk (CEO): In 2022, supply chain will continue to be the fundamental limiter of output across all factories. So the chip shortage, while better than last year, is still an issue. There are multiple supply chain challenges. And last year was difficult to predict, and hopefully, this year will be smooth sailing, but I’m not sure what you do for an encore to 2021, 2020.
Nonetheless, we do expect significant growth in 2022 over 2021, comfortably above 50% growth in 2022. Full self-driving. So, over time, we think full self-driving will become the most important source of profitability for Tesla. Actually, if you run the numbers on robotaxis, it’s kind of nutty — it’s nutty good from a financial standpoint.
And I think we are completely confident at this point that it will be achieved. And my personal guess is that we’ll achieve full self-driving this year with a data safety level significantly greater than the present. So it’s the cars in the fleet essentially becoming self-driving by a software update, I think, might end up being the biggest increase in asset value of any asset class in history.
Mastercard (NYSE: MA): Cross border transactions growing, Omicron only expected to have temporary impact
Michael Miebach (CEO): Looking at Mastercard’s spending trends, switch volume growth continued to improve quarter over quarter. Both consumer credit and debit continued to grow well.
Turning to cross-border. The recovery has continued with overall Quarter 4 cross-border levels now higher than those in 2019. Cross-border travel continued to show improvement relative to Quarter 3 levels, aided by border openings in the U.S., U.K. and Canada.
While Omicron has had some recent impact on cross-border travel, we continue to believe that cross-border travel will return to 2019 levels by the end of this year. Cross-border card-not-present spending ex travel continued to hold up well in the quarter. So overall, the spending trends are moving in the right direction with some near-term travel-related headwinds as a result of the variant.
Visa (NYSE: V): Long growth runway ahead
Vasant Prabhu (Vice-Chair and CFO): FY ’22 is off to an excellent start. We expect our growth this year will be well above the pre-COVID rate as cross-border recovers. This will likely continue into fiscal year ’23.
Beyond that, we are confident the business can sustain a revenue growth rate above pre-COVID levels for three reasons: first, an acceleration away from cash and check for merchant payments, both domestic and cross-border, as digitization becomes pervasive across consumers and businesses globally; second, acceleration of cash, check and wire transfer displacement as our new flows initiatives penetrate a broad range of new use cases with very large total addressable markets; third, sustainable high-teens growth across our value-added services, both from existing services and new offerings. As new flows and value-added services become a larger part of our revenue mix, growing faster than consumer payments, the sustainable growth rate will continue to rise. We are and will continue to invest in the capabilities required to capture the extraordinary growth opportunity ahead of us.
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL): Strong quarter with broad-based growth
Tim Cook (CEO): Today, we are proud to announce Apple’s biggest quarter ever. Through the busy holiday season, we set an all-time revenue record of nearly $124 billion, up 11% from last year and better than we had expected at the beginning of the quarter. And we are pleased to see that our active installed base of devices is now at a new record with more than 1.8 billion devices.
We set all-time records for both developed and emerging markets and saw revenue growth across all of our product categories, except for iPad, which we said would be supply-constrained.
Note: An earlier version of this article was published at The Good Investors, a personal blog run by our friends.
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Disclosure: Jeremy Chia owns shares of Apple, Mastercard, Visa, ASML, Microsoft, Netflix, Wise, Intuitive Surgical, and Tesla.