Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It's not about market share. If you have a successful company, you will get your market share. But to get a successful company, what do you have to have? The same metrics of success that your customer does.
This 90/10 rule holds true in almost anything financial. Take the game of golf, for example. Ten percent of the professional golfers make 90 percent of the money.
It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.
When deciding whether to fund and build a company, we start from basic principles and because many of the businesses and products that our companies create are a complete novelty to us, them and the market, we have to do the math.
When e-commerce companies build scale, cost comes down. Companies that can handle scale and reduce costs over time will win. Margins will come from reducing costs over time and not by increasing prices. Technology is the answer at large scale.
The value that some analysts put on revenue vs. what they put on profit is out of whack. If you can grow real cash earnings, that's 80% of what you ought to do, and the revenue component is 20%.
Valuation depends on several factors. From an investor angle, they look at leadership position, management, and what the company's offerings are. I think these three things got 5/5 for a company like Flipkart, and that is what is driving valuations and growth.
I generally disagree with most of the very high margin opportunities. Why? Because it's a business strategy tradeoff: the lower the margin you take, the faster you grow.
Many follow a rule of thumb - no more than 5% in one stock. But that's not the entrepreneurial road to riches.
We care about margins.