Is Plug Power Stock Overvalued Or Undervalued? We Think It's An Aggressive Buy

seekingalpha2021-09-08

Summary Plug Power's Green hydrogen technology has massive tailwinds as Europe and Asia move in earnest towards a carbon-neutral future. However, Plug Power has been struggling to turn a profit while...

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HoeMeng
·2021-09-08
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  Ridky
  2021-09-09
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We Think It's An Aggressive Buy","media":"seekingalpha","content":"<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nPlug Power's Green hydrogen technology has massive tailwinds as Europe and Asia move in earnest towards a carbon-neutral future.\nHowever, Plug Power has been struggling to turn a profit while...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453964-plug-power-stock-overvalued-undervalued\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n","source":"seekingalpha","html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Is Plug Power Stock Overvalued Or Undervalued? 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We Think It's An Aggressive Buy\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-09-08 20:55 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453964-plug-power-stock-overvalued-undervalued><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nPlug Power's Green hydrogen technology has massive tailwinds as Europe and Asia move in earnest towards a carbon-neutral future.\nHowever, Plug Power has been struggling to turn a profit while...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453964-plug-power-stock-overvalued-undervalued\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","isBrief":false,"type":0,"news_type":1,"symbol":"PLUG","symbol_name":"普拉格能源","start_time":0,"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453964-plug-power-stock-overvalued-undervalued","article_id":"1175056416","we_media_id":null,"thumbnails":[],"rights":null,"url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1175056416","pubTimestamp":1631105735,"sourceInfo":{"source_id":"seekingalpha","name":"Seeking Alpha"},"weMediaInfo":null,"summary":"Summary\n\nPlug Power's Green hydrogen technology has massive tailwinds as Europe and Asia move in ear","collect":0,"end_time":0,"defaultTopTitle":"seekingalpha.com","property":[],"viewcount":null,"language":"en","relate_stocks":{"PLUG":"普拉格能源"},"translate_title":"普拉格能源股票被高估还是被低估？我们认为这是一次激进的收购","themeId":null,"isJumpTheme":false,"ttsUrl":null,"symbols_score_info":{"PLUG":0.9},"content_text":"Summary\n\nPlug Power's Green hydrogen technology has massive tailwinds as Europe and Asia move in earnest towards a carbon-neutral future.\nHowever, Plug Power has been struggling to turn a profit while also massively diluting existing shareholders in the process.\nWe see the current share price as an opportunity only for investors with high conviction and at an aggressive buy level.\n\nInvestment Thesis\nPlug Power (PLUG) operates in an industry with a lot of promise, supported by the huge tailwinds from global governments and corporations in their push towards Green energy, even though profits have proven elusive. Even though the company has a pretty robust balance sheet, despite huge accumulated losses, shareholders have suffered the brunt of massive dilution over the years as the company sought to continue its mission to commercialize the use of its Green hydrogen energy technology, which arguably holds great promise, to say the least.\nWith the stock currently trading at about 65% below its all-time high (ATH), we think it's an opportune time to help our readers to understand better whether PLUG stock is still overvalued or is undervalued right now in their consideration on adding the hydrogen fuel cell maker to their portfolio to capitalize on the potentially massive opportunity as the world pivots towards carbon-neutrality.\nPLUG Stock YTD Performance\n\nPLUG stock & benchmark YTD performance as of 7 Sep 21.\nAlthough PLUG started the year outstandingly as it raced towards a 100% YTD lead by the start of Feb, the gains have since completely evaporated as the momentum fizzled out during the growth-to-value rotation earlier in the year as investors lost interest in speculative stocks while they turned their attention back to high-quality growth stocks as readers can glean from Vanguard Growth ETF's (VUG) performance. Readers who have been following us will know that we like to pick up the pieces when investors' sentiments are weak like they are now for PLUG. Pessimism often gives astute market participants some of the best opportunities to buy into the weakness, while the weak hands can't wait to get off the train. However, the caveat here is this strategy is likely to work only on good, high-quality growth stocks that have demonstrated their market leadership or emerging leadership, strong moat, on their \"promises\" of massive market opportunities and potential. In the following sections, we will unveil whether we think PLUG falls within this category of growth stocks for us to consider adding.\nPlug Power's Market Opportunity\n\nPLUG stock & benchmark 2020 performance.\nBefore investors think that PLUG has been a poor performer over the last year, we would like to remind investors that PLUG easily outperformed the market in 2020 as it notched 947% in returns to end the year, even though investors who invested in PLUG in the early 2000s must still have felt the \"boom and bust\" again earlier this year as PLUG failed to build on its gains further. However, a drop of 65% from the heights of Feb might not seem too bad from 2020's perspective, and we would encourage investors to consider PLUG's longer-term momentum when evaluating Plug's fundamental thesis, especially for investors who have yet to add exposure to the stock.\nAs we mentioned earlier, the secular tailwinds driving PLUG's renaissance \"was emblematicof a broader revival in the cleantech sector.\" The momentum observed in renewables and Green energy saw huge investments of $17B in 2020 that followed into related start-ups compared to just $1.4B in 2010. This shows that there is huge institutional interest in this emerging field, as technologies have improved tremendously, and emerging leaders who can commercialize their technologies gaining widespread adoption would be able to tap into huge \"blue oceans,\" giving them an unbelievably huge market opportunity.\nPlug Power Inc. has staked its leadership claim through its hydrogen fuel cell technologies, particularly in industrial and commercial applications. While the company's focus on Green hydrogen has huge potential, especially in Asia and Europe, as they move towards adopting renewable energy sources in their industrial value chain, investors should note that Green hydrogen is still not competitive with its gray hydrogen counterpart yet. Currently, Green hydrogencosts between $2.50 to $4.50 per kgto produce, and it would need to fall below $1 per kg to be competitive with Gray hydrogen. Estimates vary widely in the timeline for Green hydrogen to achieve such competitiveness, and it also depends on multiple factors such as having sufficient electrolyzer capacity and also whether the increase in electricity generation could keep pace with the huge increase in expected electricity demand also expected from the rapidly expanding electric vehicles market. Therefore, it could still take close to ten years before Green hydrogen could be competitive and be successfully commercialized as the standard-bearer for renewable energy sources.\nDespite that, we think the massive market opportunity provided by Europe's push towards a Green hydrogen future, China's drive towards its goal of achieving 1M vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells, among others, could certainly be huge catalysts in spurring demand and developing the market for Green hydrogen. Importantly, Asia's largest physical oil trading hub: Singapore, has laid ambitious plans towards a Green future. The Singapore government has commissionedfeasibility studieson using hydrogen as a fuel and the opportunities as the regional trading hub for hydrogen fuel trading, swapping its status as Asia's largest physical oil trading hub. Given the importance of the country's oil hub to its domestic economy, where oil trading has been a key pillar ofSingapore's economy for six decades, we think it's definitely a carefully considered decision, and one that the government thinks has huge relevance and critical importance in making sure that the city-state pivots in time and effectively to maintain its role as the leading energy trading hub in Asia, as the country's Second Minister for Trade and Industry Tan See Leng articulated: \"We have come a long way as a result of the energy and chemical sector, the key thing is not to completely sort of move away, but to see how we can pivot, how we can transform.\"\nPLUG has also been absolutely clear from the start where the company thinks its key markets are as it stated: \"Plug Poweris targeting Asia and Europefor expansion in adoption. Europe has rolled out ambitious targets for the hydrogen economy, and Plug Power is executing on its strategy to become one of the European leaders.\"\nWhile we think the future certainly looks rosy and hopeful for PLUG, as investors, we have always understood that execution remains the biggest challenge, especially for Green hydrogen. We think PLUG has yet to demonstrate to investors that it could yet deliver on its promises. As a result, we consider execution as the biggest risk factor that investors must consider, even before they move into valuations for the company's opportunity.\nValuation\nPLUG Comps set. Data source: S&P Capital IQ\n\nEV/EBITDA comps valuation. Data source: S&P Capital IQ\nWe must admit, valuing PLUG is not an easy endeavor. We have attempted to use a DCF framework on PLUG, and our results looked out of this world, as the revenue and EBITDA consensus estimates on Plug Power are highly optimistic. We wanted to err on the side of caution as the company still has much to prove. Furthermore, even using a comps framework is challenging as its peers are also trading at sky-high and highly disparate, complicating our analysis in the process. Even when we used an aggressive approach and valued PLUG based on its estimated FY23 EBITDA, we derived an implied fair value of $30.40 (at the mid-point), with an implied EV/Fwd EBITDA of 88x, which by no means is a conservative valuation, assuming that PLUG can meet all its estimates successfully through FY23.\nThat leaves us with a potential upside of 15%, based on its last closing price, which is by no means cheap for an aggressive valuation approach, as well as for a highly speculative stock in our opinion, which we will usually factor in a minimum margin of safety of at least 30%, implying that we will not pay more than $21.3 for the stock. Therefore, the stock looks overvalued right now.\n\nKey balance sheet risk metrics. Data source: S&P Capital IQ\n\nWeighted average diluted shares outstanding. Data source: S&P Capital IQ\nMoreover, while the company has shored up its balance sheets through multiple offerings to cope with its massive accumulated losses of over $2B, and while its debt position looks manageable for now, this has come at high costs for existing shareholders as weighted average diluted shares outstanding increased at a CAGR of 25.8% from 2016 to the latest quarter, which we think is a key risk that investors must be ready to bear in mind as PLUG continues to \"work its magic\" to commercialize its technology for sustained mass adoption in the future.\nPrice Action and Trend Analysis\n\nPLUG stock price action (weekly).\nAs we explained earlier, PLUG stock has had a clear uptrend bias since early last year, and buying interest seems to continue supporting the stock at the current price level. Therefore, aggressive investors who have a high conviction of PLUG's Green future could certainly find an opportunity to add at the current price level, which is also slightly undervalued when considering our aggressive valuation approach and without the minimum 30% margin of safety.\nFor us, even though we think PLUG's future certainly looks exciting, werate PLUG at neutralfor now.","kind":null,"is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":false,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":1},"commentList":[{"id":889941157,"gmtCreate":1631106791379,"gmtModify":1676530468986,"author":{"id":"3569586413767440","authorId":"3569586413767440","name":"HoeMeng","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/204cb10cf0f04fed8899705e7a54ea54","vip":1,"crmLevel":6,"crmLevelSwitch":1,"authorIdStr":"3569586413767440","idStr":"3569586413767440"},"htmlText":"Buy","listText":"Buy","text":"Buy","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":2,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/889941157","repostId":1175056416,"repostType":4,"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"comments":[{"id":5796878,"gmtCreate":1631126297924,"gmtModify":1663233574325,"authorId":3581299219229724,"author":{"id":3581299219229724,"idStr":"3581299219229724","authorId":3581299219229724,"name":"SRT","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/2c4dbc9d7745f5494368eb3ffad10380","vip":1,"crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"individualDisplayBadges":[]},"repliedAuthorId":0,"objectId":889941157,"type":1,"supId":0,"prevId":0,"content":"Ridky","text":"Ridky","html":"Ridky"}],"langContent":"EN"}],"hasMoreComments":true,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":34,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":2,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false}}