• The Company’s services will be more demanded over time. • Comparative valuations imply growth potential. • Technical analysis.
Investment Thesis
Symbotic Inc. (SYM) is an automation technology company, providing robotics and technologies to improve the efficiency of retail and wholesale stores in the US. The Company offers its comprehensive warehouse automation system (Symbotic) for product distribution; besides, it develops, builds and installs modular inventory management systems, and performs firmware configuration.
The Company has a strong customer base, including the world’s largest retail and wholesale companies, such as Walmart, Albertsons, AFS, C&S Wholesale Grocers, Giant Tiger, GreenBox, Target and UNFI, which means that its solutions are becoming more popular among companies engaged in sales of everyday (and other) goods.
Although Walmart is the Company’s main customer (about 88% of the order book), which poses a risk of counterparty concentration, Symbotic has a clear plan for automating its outlets and warehouses. By the end of FY 2026, according to the Company, about 65% of stores will be automated, approximately 55% of the volume of order processing centers will pass through automated facilities, and average unit costs may be reduced by about 20%. For the retail giant, it will be vital to make this plan a reality, since its operating profitability has tended to decrease over the past 10 years, and the increased shoplifting only exacerbates the problem. Moreover, Greenbox, the joint venture between Symbotic and Softbank, aims at implementing the WaaS strategy (Warehouse as a service, or “subscription warehouse”). The Company says that the geography of this solution is quite extensive: TAM (total addressable market) can exceed $500 billion. GreenBox has recently signed a contract with the first client, C&S, therefore, Symbotic will begin to recognize the first revenue from the joint venture in FY24Q3. The scaling of operations is supposed to begin in full swing from 2026.
The main part of Symbotic’s contracts involves compensation for expenses incurred in excess of those stipulated in the contract. Thus, the Company can maintain its gross margin, and achieve profitability by increasing the scale of sales and optimizing SG&A expenses: the share of quarterly administrative expenses in revenue has decreased from 47% to 22% over the past two years. Besides, revenue is growing at a high double-digit rate (more than 50%): FY24 estimates imply similar growth.
Although most of this kind of business is made within conglomerates, such as Honeywell or Toshiba, there is a similar public company on the European market – AutoStore Holdings Ltd. (AUTO-NO). However, the SYM forward EV/EBITDA (10.6x) looks a bit more attractive than that of its competitor (12.3x).
Recently, the stock price, reaching oversold, has made a reversal from the horizontal support level, and further momentum may continue due to positive expectations from the report.
We expect SYM stock to grow more than 20% to $45 over the next two months. A stop loss order is recommended at $29.4.
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