Corporate pivots and corporate ponzis

Companies that repeatedly pivot from one business to another (more glamorous) business could be indulging in a ponzi scheme designed to hide business failure and lead investors on a wild goose chase for an ever elusive pot of gold. There are some very large companies in India and in the United States about whom one could harbour such a suspicion.

The question is how can one distinguish these corporate ponzis from genuine pivots. After all it makes sense to change your business as situations change. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathawy pivoted from the textiles business to insurance and finance and if its next elephant size deal is like its last one, it could pivot again to a non financial conglomerate. In India, Wipro became a software giant after a pivot from vegetable products.

One indicator of a ponzi is that the pivot typically chases a prevailing stock market fad rather than any particular competence or competitive advantage in the new business (unless one counts cheap capital as a competitive advantage). But even that is not determinative as the case of GE makes clear. As a Financial Times FT View pointed out a couple of months ago “In the dotcom bubble, GE was valued as a tech stock; in the credit bubble, it was valued like a leveraged debt vehicle (which, in large part, it was).” To which one could add that till recently it was trying to position itself as a leader in the industrial Internet of Things. That makes GE a stock market opportunist, but not a ponzi. Even after returning to its old industrial roots in the last few months, GE remains a valuable business.

The corporate ponzis that I worry about are something else altogether. This kind of company is a graveyard of serial failures, even though the future always looks rosy. In the heyday of each of these failed businesses, the market would not have bothered about current losses, because it would have valued the business on multiples of current or future revenues. After the company pivoted away from the business, the market would not bother about the losses (and revenue collapse) in the old business because the market is always “forward looking”. The corporate ponzi’s challenge is to find the next big thing (and make it bigger than the last big thing). When their luck runs out and the corporate ponzi finally fails, everybody wonders why nobody saw through the fraud earlier.

Posted at 6:41 pm IST on Wed, 21 Mar 2018         permanent link

Categories: corporate governance

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