Some stocks are well known in value investing circles, even though they are anything but a classic value stock. XPEL, Inc. (CVE:DAP.U), a company specializing in paint protection films for cars, has been written up twice on VIC, once in 2013 and again in 2015. There is a long thread about it on CoBF, people write about it on Twitter and there are plenty of articles on SA as well. With a market cap of ~$185 million XPEL is a tiny company, but it is remarkable well-known in certain circles. But with the stock trading at a 37x P/E and 10x P/B-ratio while it’s up almost 400% this year it sounds like an unlikely candidate for me to investigate.

Share price: $6.54
Shares outstanding: 27,612,597
Market cap: $180.6 million
Enterprise value: $180.9 million
P/E (ttm): 37.1
EV/EBITDA (ttm): 20.8
P/B (mrq): 10.0

Financials

Based on these simple metrics above XPEL is anything but cheap, but what this doesn’t show is the extremely impressive growth the company has been experiencing. The company had revenues of $6.0 million in 2011 while revenues for the last three months alone were a whopping $28.9 million. That’s a compounded annual growth rate of more than 50% for six and a half years straight! Even more impressive is that all this growth was accomplished with almost no increase in share count, minimal debt levels, and while fighting a lawsuit against 3M (settled last year). An overview of the historical income statement is shown below:

While these numbers are pretty impressive, the last two quarters have been even better: revenue grew in the first half of 2018 with more than 80% compared to the first half of 2017, while realizing a 3 percentage points higher gross margin. And too be honest, that was about time. Because despite the impressive growth the past years, the operating profit of the company was a bit disappointing. In 2013 the company earned about $2 million on $18 million in revenue, and 4 years later it was still earning $2 million on $68 million in revenue. Growing revenue is great, but in the end it’s about earning money. But once you have a lot of revenue, increasing your margins a little bit does wonders for your profitability.

Valuation

Valuing a growth company is never easy, but in my experience they are usually so expensive that no matter what kind of model I produce, I have a very hard time justifying the current share price. So I (almost) never end up buying anything that can be classified as a growth stock. But with XPEL it’s remarkable easy. We don’t have to make a fancy model that projects (high) growth rates a decade forward. Really all that is needed is to assume that the company can grow revenues by 35% for two years in a row while maintaining its current gross margin. Considering the historic growth I think that’s a pretty low hurdle to jump over. I have no idea how far growth can continue, but if you can grow for 6.5 half years at more than 50%, while growing at 80% in the last half year, I’m sure there must be quite a bit of runway left.

Asumme at the same time that there is a bit of operating leverage in the “Selling, general and administrative costs” and that these will grow a bit slower than revenues at 25% and the following picture is painted:

With the stock currently trading at $6.54 that means that you can buy this rapidly growing company at just 10.8 times its earnings in two years time.

Insiders

What I like about XPEL is that insiders own a decent chunk of the company. The CEO owns 5% of the outstanding shares while various members of the board of directors own another 35%. Surprisingly enough, the company doesn’t pay its executive officers with options. The number of outstanding shares increased with 7% since 2012, from 25.8 million to 27.6 million, but not from options or other share based compensation. The reason for the increased share count was a private placement in 2017 at $1.43/share (then the current share price). Most of the shares in the private placement were issued to certain directors and officers of the company, and in hindsight these were for sure issued at an opportunistic time, just before the settlement with 3M. It leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth because there didn’t seems to be a pressing need to raise cash at the time. At the same time, I wouldn’t be complaining if the company would have paid twice the amount in share based compensation throughout the years…

Conclusion

Some people think that as a value investor you have to buy stuff like net-nets and stocks trading at a single digit P/E-ratio. While I often like companies like that, the only thing that matters is whether or not something is cheap. Sometimes a stock trading at a single digit P/E-ratio is expensive if for example bankruptcy is around the corner, and sometimes a stock trading at an almost 40x P/E ratio is cheap if revenues are expected to grow explosively. I think XPEL is one of those stocks. How fast it is growing is really amazing, yet the stock is surprisingly affordable.

Of course, it’s not without risks. There are all the “normal” risks like growth slowing because of higher market penetration or a downturn in the economic cycle and people stop buying cars. But I think the biggest risk is basically that this is more or less a one product company. They are growing fast because they have a great product (their ultimate paint protection film was introduced in 2011). I don’t have a car, so I don’t really know how useful it is, but the numbers speak for themselves. But what happens if some company, lets say 3M, creates a superior product? Can they still thrive, or would business slowly deteriorate until nothing is left? That’s the big question. If you pay a high price you not only need XPEL to grow the coming years, it also needs to be a good business 10 years and probably 20 years from now. A lot can happen in such a timeframe.

That said, I couldn’t resist picking up some shares. I don’t think XPEL is a sure thing (it never is), but at the same time it’s just too cheap to ignore considering the absolute fantastic growth.

Disclosure

Long XPEL