🗞 The 5 Most Impressive Charts of Earnings Season Week 5

Happy Sunday!

Here’s what’s on the docket for this week’s newsletter:

• 📊 The Most Impressive Charts From Earnings Season Week 5

• ⚡️ The Battle of The Energy Drink Aisle

Let’s dive in!

Earnings Season Week 3:

Charts of the Week

Earnings season is starting to come to a close, but we still had another ~2,000 companies that reported over the last 5 days.

And as always, that meant tons of new data for the FinChat team to parse through.

Here were the 5 most impressive Charts/KPIs from this week:

1.) Booking Holdings - Gross Booking Value

Despite having very few physical assets, Booking Holdings is the largest travel company in the world.

Yet even while being the largest Online Travel Agency, they are still growing faster than their 2 largest competitors, AirBnB and Expedia.

Performance since earnings: +5%

2.) Remitly - Active Customers

The fast growing digital remittance platform is now serving 7.8 million active customers each quarter.

Thanks to its intuitive user experience and lower cost, Remitly has been able to steal market share from both the clunky legacy providers like Western Union and the higher priced platforms like PayPal.

Performance since earnings: -9%

3.) Alibaba - Revenue by Category

The Chinese conglomerate is proving to be much more than just an online retailer.

Despite experiencing significant competitive headwinds in its retail business, Alibaba has still been able to grow its top line thanks to the success of several new business lines in recent years.

Performance since earnings: +16%

4.) Arista Networks - Product & Services Revenue

Arista's industry-leading network switches have been in high demand over the last couple of years thanks to the rapid growth of datacenter spending.

Total revenue has increased by more than 10x over the last decade.

Performance since earnings: -9%

5.) Toast - Gross Payment Volume

Restaurant Point-of-Sales and software provider Toast has been rapidly growing its payment volume since lapping COVID.

In fact, they continue to grow revenue at a much quicker pace than some of their largest competitors such as Block’s Square Seller Ecosystem. 

Performance since earnings: -1%

Featured Story

The Battle of the Energy Drink Aisle

Celsius has had a rough year.

Between an inventory snafu with its largest distribution partner Pepsi, and an industry-wide slowdown in energy drink consumption broadly, shares of Celsius dropped by as much as 77% at one point this year.

But perhaps the most concerning development for investors has been the evolving competitive landscape.

With the rise of brands like Ghost, Reign, Zoa, and most notably Alani Nu, Celsius’ foothold on the “healthy” energy drink category seems to be at risk.

This is perhaps most evident in the recent US market share trends (see Celsius vs. Alani Nu since May 2024):

So how do you earn back investor trust?

Well, if you’re Celsius CEO John Fieldy, you crack open the piggy bank.

On Thursday of this week, Celsius announced that it is acquiring Alani Nu for $1.8 billion in a mix of cash ($1.3 billion) and stock ($500 million).

Celsius only has $890 million in cash on its balance sheet, so it’ll be adding another $900 million in debt to help cover the cost.

While one would probably imagine that buying the fastest growing brand in the energy drink category would come at a pretty penny, it doesn’t appear that way at first glance.

Alani Nu generated $595 million in sales and $137 million in Adj. EBITDA in 2024, meaning Celsius is acquiring the company at roughly 13x “earnings”, which is actually a ~40% discount to Celsius’ own valuation.

So far, this move seems to have pleased shareholders, as shares jumped ~30% on Friday. 

While buying a business that’s growing 50% per year at 13x earnings is generally a good idea (if you think it can keep growing), one wouldn’t be faulted to think that this calls into question the overall competitive advantages of energy drink brands.

Just as Celsius stole share from Monster, Alani Nu has now stolen share from Celsius, and the competitive field is continuing to become more populated each year.

Distribution leaders like Pepsi, Coke, Molson Coors, and others have all begun offering their distribution network as a service to new brands, which is helping startups get off the ground much quicker.

With increasing brand diversity across convenience store aisles, consumers are faced with far more options than they had a decade or even 5 years ago.

Though it’s hard to imagine that increasing your revenue 10-fold in less than 5 years could be anything but good, it appears Celsius’ success has attracted some competition.

Meme of the week

JPMorgan Chase recently had an employee start a petition with the goal of encouraging top management to let employees work from home more.

Well, this week, audio was leaked from an internal meeting at the company where CEO and banking legend Jamie Dimon told everyone exactly where he stands on the subject:

“I don’t care how many people sign that f***ing petition… If you don’t think this slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness… It does!”