Summary
Palantir Technologies Inc. is extremely overvalued, trading at 57x forward sales, with a market cap exceeding $150 billion despite modest revenue growth.
The company's fundamentals are improving, but the current valuation is unsustainable, risking significant downside if growth stalls or estimates are missed.
Multiple expansion has driven recent gains, but comparisons to Snowflake and Zoom highlight the potential for severe valuation contraction.
Investors face the risk of either minimal returns or substantial losses over the coming years, making Palantir a precarious investment.
I am Mark Holder (aka Stone Fox Capital), a CPA with degrees in Accounting and Finance. I attempt to uncover potential multibaggers while managing portfolio risk via diversification.
Palantir Technologies, Inc. is a prime example of how a stock can trade at any price possible, whether a fraction of cash value or a huge multiple of sales. The stock market requires investors to figure out how to handle vastly different valuations, which currently is the case of an extreme overvaluation in Palantir. My investment thesis is extremely Bearish on the stock, which is reaching wildly expensive P/S ratios at $70.
Finviz Chart
Learn The Value
Palantir has soared the last couple of months, going from $30 to start September to over $70 to start December. The AI software company reported a big Q3 revenue beat of $22 million and sales growth accelerating to 30%. The stock has now gained over $70 billion in valuation on a minimal $22 million revenue beat.
The business saw U.S. commercial sales soar 54% with accounts up 77%. The market definitely has a big reason to be excited about the future in AI.
Palantir even announced the FedRAMP authorization to potentially boost sales to the U.S. government for secure cloud services. The U.S. govt. sector was lagging, but Q3 sales jumped 40% YoY to reach $320 million.
An investor has every reason to be excited about the potential business opportunity. One can look at the current market cap topping $150 billion and extract how Palantir can eventually match the size of the Magnificent 7 stocks with market caps topping $1 trillion, but investors need to be careful here.
Stocks only have 2 basic ways for gaining value: improving fundamentals or multiple expansion.
Improving Fundamentals
Palantir definitely falls into the category of improving fundamentals. The AI software company reported Q3 sales grew at a 30% clip, but the company only reached sales of $725 million.
In a valuation multiple neutral scenario, the stock should rally at a similar 30% clip annually to match sales growth. The consensus analyst estimates have sales rising ~25% annually over the next couple of years.
Investors also need to take a step back and realize the huge customer success is coming off a tiny base. Palantir only had 181 U.S. commercial customers last Q3, and the number is now 321.
Source: Palantir Tech. Q3'24 presentation
The company grew sequential accounts by just 9% in Q3 '24 after growing at a 22% clip back during the December quarter. The net new accounts only grew by 26, which was down from the pace of 40+ accounts each quarter earlier this year when the AI software excitement started.
Multiple Expansion
Most investors don't seem to understand the multiple expansion concept. The prime way to make a substantial amount of money in a stock over the short term is via multiple expansion.
Multiple expansion occurs when investors feel the fundamentals of the company are improving to the point of rerating the valuation multiple assigned to the stock at a higher level. A stock can trade at a below-market multiple, and improving results can end up with the multiple expanding to a market multiple. Or, the market can decide a stock is worthy of a premium valuation, such as the case with Palantir.
Palantir and Meta Platforms (META) are prime examples of how stocks can generate massive gains and end up in vastly different situations. Meta has rallied from below $100 to $610 in the past 2 years, with the stock only expanding the forward P/S multiple to just above 9x. Palantir has rallied from an already stretched multiple to reach 57x forward sales.
Data by YCharts
The equation is even stranger when considering Meta is growing at a 20% clip, while Palantir only grew at a faster clip in the last quarter at 30%. Meta only trades at 23x EPS estimates, suggesting the stock isn't overvalued and investors can generate solid returns over time holding the stock. Palantir trades at over 140x 2025 EPS estimates, suggesting the stock would need years, upon years, to grow into this multiple.
Palantir even faces the Zoom Video (ZM) scenario where all the gains are given back, especially if AI growth stalls. Zoom was off to the races during the COVID-19 shutdowns, with the stock reaching a market cap of $175 billion at the peak above $560 per share, while the sales forecasts hit $4 billion. The below chart doesn't provide the correct numbers due to the use of a TTM P/S ratio, but the chart does provide the scale and how multiple contraction occurs when sales growth normalizes.
Data by YCharts
Palantir definitely appears to have stronger long-term growth prospects than Zoom Video, but AI could end up being a gimmick, such as Covid shutdowns. The market could shift on a dime and the AI software company could end up trading at 5x forward sales, or the equivalent of somewhere below a $20 billion market cap based on 2025 sales of $3.5 billion.
Dead Money
The company could actually grow sales at a 25% annual clip for the next 4 years and the stock would still trade at 25x forward sales in 2028. The current consensus target is for 2028 sales of $6.2 billion.
Source: Seeking Alpha
Snowflake (SNOW), Salesforce (CRM), and CrowdStrike (CRWD) are some examples of very successful software companies with stocks trading at rich valuations. All of these stocks trade below 25x forward sales, with Snowflake providing another grave warning of the negative outcomes of paying too rich a valuation multiple for a hot stock.
Data by YCharts
Snowflake came public trading at 50x forward sales, with the stock surging to $400. Over 4 years later, one has to decide if the AI data stock is worth owning at $174 (down 55% over the period) still trading at 16x forward sales.
The really bad news for investors is that one can make the case for how Palantir could ultimately be worth the valuation of a Magnificent 7 stock in the future. However, the software companies above have market caps only in the $50 to $300 billion range. While software is an attractive business model with higher gross margins, software has limitations in market size and the ability to scale when reliant on enterprises and governments, especially in international locations.
If Palantir traded at 10x 2028 revenue targets of $6.2 billion, the stock would only have a market cap of $62 billion in 3 to 4 years. The stock would trade at $25 a few years from now, using the 2.46 billion shares outstanding and not factoring in any impact from higher share counts due to substantial stock-based compensation.
Takeaway
The key investor takeaway is that Palantir Technologies Inc. stock is extremely overvalued. The stock could easily run even higher, but the downside risk is even further.
Investors have plenty of examples of where a stock is either dead money for years, or the stock valuation gets crushed after a company misses estimates. The investment story ultimately comes down to one either losses a small amount over the coming years, or one loses all the gains of the last year. Neither outcome is very attractive.
Comments