Random #1 | Earnings Calls
Sir, aapki company ki g@@@ lag gayi hai, but congratulations on a great quarter
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Earnings season brings reasons to laugh. Loudly.
I have attended a few earnings calls. It is not uncommon to see really hard questions being asked of management teams in the US. In India though, I don’t get why every analyst question begins with a version of this:
“Sir, congratulations on another set of great results”
Great results in at least one case are a YoY dip of 30% in sales and EBITDA contraction by almost 45%. Perhaps CEOs need their egos massaged. Does that lead to better returns?
Once upon a time, I was on the management side of the table in an analyst call. Bad market, numbers were down. I was shitting bricks. I was going to take full responsibility as the CEO designate, demonstrate contrition (aka taking one for the team), outline a plan to bring things back on track and pretty much cover for the parent company CEO’s steadily worsening dementia and paranoia that led to the crapfest I now had to defend. And then I heard the sweetest words any man can hear.
“Mr. Goyal, Excellent numbers”
Almost choked on my coffee. Here I was, dreading a barrage of hard questions, and all I was getting was full tosses. Needless to say, knocked it out of the park.
Here are some other things that make me chuckle:
Junior analysts will ask for a ton of specific data points. Highly. Specific. Our man has a model and the poor guy is under pressure to populate it. Now, going through the reports takes time, so might as well ask the management. Plus if your bosses end up reading the transcript - you look as if you are working really hard.
“Busy” fund managers will join late in the call. And then proceed to ask all the questions that people have already asked. Really basic shit which is right there in 72 size fonts on page 1 of the quarterly update deck. Because everyone’s time MUST be less valuable than theirs. Preparation is overrated.
Outlook seekers want an estimate on growth rate. Much facepalming ensues. CEO will say something like “we would aim for better than industry”. Analyst: “So 25% growth?”. Did they not get the memos about forward guidances?
Once there was a guy who wanted to get a gist of what the company did….
And finally: “Your-stock-price-is-in-the-toilet-and-I-am-not-making-money-and-WTF-are-you-doing”. Only seen this happen once, at the peak of the pandemic. How is the management responsible for your price basis. Did they ask you to buy when you did? What do you expect them to do about it now?
Feel free to add funny anecdotes here.