Great Businesses Stay Great

Great businesses continue to be great and not so great businesses continue to be not so great.

When we look for businesses to invest in and find these great businesses that gained market share over the years, grew strongly, stayed highly profitable, and generated handsome shareholder return, most of us doubt whether these businesses will continue to perform the same way it did in last decades or so.

We ask whether they have reached a point of maturity and are set to decline from here. But most research suggests that, these great businesses continue to be great longer than we normally estimate. And most not so great businesses continue to be not so great.

How Food Delivery Apps Make Money

Third party food delivery is proving to be a tough business space with minimum option to differentiate, tight profitability margin and intense competition that is putting the industry in the process of more and more consolidation. When Uber started and turned into something that people would use everyday, it became obvious that the idea of moving people from Point A to Point B with the help of an app would branch into Uber for other services like food delivery, groceries or any other parcel. The world of convenience economy was only about to expand. Like Uber, an app would connect merchants to consumers via riders. The app is a platform that help connect these three parties that are required to make a transaction and shipment. The space that was ripe for disruption in this convenience economy was restaurants. Most restaurants didn't have their own delivery logistics. There were only few exception that you can think of that had their own delivery logistics. They had so because they...

What to Look for in a Cash Flow Statement

Cash flow statement demonstrates the flow of cash coming into a business and going out from a business. It differs from income statement because cash flow statement is recorded on a purely cash basis. In income statement, if a business booked a sale of a product or a service and was yet to receive cash from the customer, the business would record it as sale in its income statement. On the other hand, if the business purchased raw materials for the products they sold or incurred cost for the service they provided, they would record this expense as cost of sales or cost of service regardless of whether the transaction was on a credit basis or cash basis. This method of accounting is called accrual accounting which is the most used method of accounting for income statement. So, cash flow statement gives you a different perspective. Since, it records how much cash is coming into a business and going out from the business through operating activities, investing activities and financing acti...

Understanding Free Cash Flow

When I was first introduced to the concept of 'free cash flow' back in my BBA program, I didn't grasp it as clearly as I should or could have. I blame myself for not putting in enough effort to understand the concept back then. Now that I have spent a considerable amount of time using ‘free cash flow’ as one of the major valuation methods, I can see how this concept can be learned in an effective way. In this article, I attempt to explain how businesses generate free cash flow, what it means to investors, and why and how free cash flow is used in company valuation. The Basic In a nutshell, free cash flows are the cash flows available for distribution to suppliers of capital . When we consider free cash flow to the firm (FCFF), it is the cash flow available to both debtholders (those who lend to the company) and stockholders or equity holders (those who buy the stock of the company or have equity ownership of the company). And when we consider free cash flow to equity...

How HelloFresh Makes Money | HelloFresh Business Model

HelloFresh - Delivering Meal Kits Riding on Complex but Efficient Supply Chain Hello Fresh is a meal kit delivery service that sends customers pre-portioned ingredients and step-by-step recipes so they can cook meals at home. Hello Fresh, which was founded in 2011, operates in several countries and has grown to become one of the leading companies in the meal kit industry. How HelloFresh Works On the HelloFresh platform, customers can sign up for a subscription plan and select the number of meals they want per week as well as the serving size. Hello Fresh delivers a box containing fresh ingredients and recipe cards to the customer's door every week. To ensure freshness and minimize food waste, the ingredients are carefully selected, portioned, and packed. The recipe cards include step-by-step instructions for preparing the meals, making it simple for even inexperienced cooks to follow along. Hello Fresh provides a variety of recipes to accommodate various dietary prefer...

How Pinduoduo Made it Big | History of Pinduoduo

Alibaba (Taobao and Tmall) and JD was dominating the China e-commerce space and no other company was able to match their scale until a new company emerged with an aim to serve the tier 3 and 4 cities that remained underserved. It focused on perishable products and daily necessities to make sure the users have high purchase frequency and it was also their category of choice because of low competition. It growthhacked its way by offering group buying feature at too good to believe discounts. It took it to the next level by focusing on interactivity by making the app browsable for fun and rewards. The company’s IPO prospectus referred to the platform as mix of Costco and Disneyland, the pricing is the Costco part and the fun browsing is the Disney part. Pinduoduo built a recipe for building a social commerce platform that mimicked the way people shop offline. It took cues from the gaming world to entice users to spend time on the app. All these viral elements made Pinduoduo the largest e...

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