In recent years, Microsoft's market share of cloud spending has been making impressive gains. Its market share is now only ~11 percentage points behind Amazon. This chart shows the power of Microsoft Office 365.

"As spending on cloud services continues to rise inexorably, Amazon's worldwide market share increased by over a full percentage point to almost 34%. Google also saw a meaningful uptick in its market share during the quarter. Amazon, Microsoft and Google combined had a 65% share of the worldwide market in the quarter, up from 61% a year ago. In aggregate all other cloud providers have grown their revenues by over 150% since the beginning of 2018, though their collective market share has plunged from 49% to 35% as their growth rates remain far below the market leaders."

It will be exciting to see how the cloud market develops over the next years and if Microsoft $MSFT will continue to gain market share.

$MSFT $AMZN $GOOGL $IBM $BABA

I just posted a deep dive on Costco. In the deep dive, I break down the company's ROIC and find out how Costco will continue to create value for its shareholders.

Some questions answered in the post:

As always, there is a valuation to consider as well.

I just posted a deep dive on Costco. In the deep dive, I break down the company's ROIC and find out how Costco will continue to create value for its shareholders.

Some questions answered in the post:

As always, there is a valuation to consider as well.

In the second issue of Equity Ideas, I looked deeper at Deckers Brands $DECK. The owner of niche footwear brand HOKA. HOKAs' revenue is up 3000% since FY14, going from ~$30M to roughly $900M today. That's a 30x increase, or 6x since 2018, in a very competitive category.

Deckers' history is fascinating due to their strong turnaround after 2017. In 2017, an activist hedge fund attacked Deckers, but the management defeated the activist with its initiatives.

Management initiatives called for a long-term target to reach $2 billion in revenues, increase the operating margin to +13% and improve the return on invested capital above 20% by FY 2020. All of which they delivered ahead of time in FY 2019. Since the accomplishment in FY19, the company has continued to improve: the operating margin increased by ~200 basis points and maintaining a healthy revenue growth with a return on invested capital well above 20%.

The company acquired HOKA ONE ONE (pronounced "Ho-Kah Own-ay Own-ay") in 2013. This is the company's most lucrative bet on weird. You can read more of HOKA's promising future here.

The first issue of Equity Ideas covers one of the best Swedish serial acquirers of recent years.

Here are the most impressive metrics from Lifco:

Check out the Substack if you're interested in Nordic serial acquirers. I plan to cover another Nordic serial acquirer in my upcoming Substack post!

Hey everyone! My name is Markus, and I publish Equity Ideas @ Substack. My goal with Equity Ideas is to bring in-depth equity research to Nordic and U.S. companies. Coming from Sweden, I saw a growing interest on #fintwit regarding Nordic companies and decided to start writing.

Easily convinced by @eggplant to join @commonstock. Hopefully, I can bring some exciting research on Nordic companies you never heard of or interesting insights into U.S. companies.