March Madness Round 2: Ford Motor Company vs. Walt Disney Company

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Submitted by Sizemore Insights as part of our contributors program

March Madness Round 2: Ford Motor Company vs. Walt Disney Company

by Charles Lewis Sizemore, CFA

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March Madness

This piece is part of InvestorPlace’s 2015 Stock Market March Madness contest. Follow the link and vote for your favorite stocks.

In Round 1 of InvestorPlace’s Stock Market March Madness, I predicted that Ford Motor Company (F) would roll over Monsanto Company (MON), and Ford fans outvoted Monsanto fans by a three to one margin.

Alas, I was not no prescient with respect to the Walt Disney Company (DIS) vs. General Electric Company (GE) contest. While I still consider GE to be the better long-term bet, I was outvoted by a wide margin. Disney took 84% of the vote, utterly crushing GE.

Now, Round 2 pits Ford against Disney, a very uneven match-up. In Ford, we have an old-line manufacturer fighting against ugly demographic trends: As the Baby Boomers age, they are driving less, and the Millennials are less interested in cars than preceding generations. And in Disney, we have an old-line media company with an uncertain future in the era of cord-cutting and paid TV delivered over the internet.

Both companies face their challenges, but in my mind there is no real contest. Ford is cheap and essentially has nowhere to go but up. Disney is quite expensive, and investors seem to be ignoring the risks on the horizon. The clear choice here is Ford.

Ford Motor Company

Auto sales are at roughly 2005 levels, unchanged for ten years after falling to 30-year lows in 2009. Over that same period, real GDP grew by more than 16% and the US population grew by 9%. There is a big gaping black hole where auto sales should be, and one that I expect will be filled soon.

As I mentioned in Round 1, Americans have been putting off car purchases for years due to the bad economy, and the average car on the road is over 11 years old. So yes, even while Baby Boomers drive less and Millennials opt for Uber, you’re still looking at a lot of demand for new cars in the years ahead as the existing stock eventually breaks down. While not a “backlog” of orders, per se, it’s fairly close.

AutoSales

Let’s take a look under the hood at Ford. At first glance, Ford stock looks mildly pricey at 19.8 times trailing earnings. But remember, Ford’s earnings are highly cyclical, and looking at only a single year of data can be very misleading. Using the cyclically-adjusted price/earnings ratio (“CAPE”) or the current price divided by the average of the past ten years of earnings, we get a much more reasonable valuation of 8.4.

To put that in perspective, the lowest CAPE on record for Ford was 7.3. So, at today’s prices, Ford is trading not too far from its all-time valuation lows.

FDiv

Meanwhile, Ford has lately emerged as one of the highest-yielding stocks in the S&P 500 with a dividend yield of 3.8%. After a long hiatus, Ford reinstated its dividend in 2012 and has since tripled it from $0.05 per quarter to $0.15.

In Ford, we get a cheap stock paying a high dividend that is likely to get a catalyst from what I expect to be several years of rising car sales. That sounds like a winner to me.

Walt Disney Company

Though we shouldn’t count out Disney. After its performance in Round 1 it’s safe to say that Disney is a fan favorite, and with good reason. Disney’s earnings per share and revenues per share are sitting at all-time highs, and Disney may well enjoy the best summer in its history if the Avengers sequel is as big a hit at the box office as expected.

Dis

But as I mentioned in the Round 1 article, Disney is not primarily a movie studio or a theme park operator. It is first and foremost a TV studio. Its media division — which includes broadcast giant ABC and cable sports juggernaut ESPN among others — accounts for close to half of revenues in any given year.

So far, this hasn’t been a problem for Disney. But things are changing in the world of paid TV, and it’s not entirely clear how the existing operators will fare.

Dish Network (DISH) potentially launched a game changer earlier this quarter when it released Sling TV, the first cable TV package delivered over the Internet to streaming boxes like the Roku or Apple TV and to mobile devices. And now Apple (AAPL) is getting in on the action with a similar web-based TV offering.

If these services entice cord-cutters to pay for TV—and the attrition from existing cable companies tapers off—then network owners like Disney might actually be the winners in this new revolution. But if it also leads to price wars, I could see margins getting hit hard. Frankly, it’s just too early to say how it will shake out, yet investors seem to be ignoring the risk altogether. Disney’s stock is very expensive at a cyclically-adjusted price earnings ratio of 35.

My pick in Round 2 is Ford. It’s less sexy than Disney, but it’s a lot cheaper and far less at risk of a major business upheaval.

Disclosures: Long AAPL

Charles Lewis Sizemore, CFA, is chief investment officer of the investment firm Sizemore Capital Management and the author of the Sizemore Insights blog.

 

This article first appeared on Sizemore Insights as March Madness Round 2: Ford Motor Company vs. Walt Disney Company