Unfortunately, however, Buffett doesn't talk about moats. Morningstar, the world's top ratings agency, summarizes the five manifestations of a moat as intangible assets, conversion costs, network effects, cost advantages, and scale effects, which can serve as an important reference for us to understand business moats.
Intangible asset moats include brands, patented technologies, and government authorizations. On the surface, these have little **** in common, but as economic moats, their role is essentially the same, that is, to allow companies to have a differentiated position in the marketplace .
1, brand moat
Brand moat is mainly manifested in two aspects, the first is the brand premium.
Brand premium ability, is to see whether consumers are willing to pay a higher price for the product. Most of this product is the pursuit of differentiation strategy, which can meet the needs of consumers at a higher level. For example, the high-end brand Maotai, perennial prices continue to rise, but consumers are still willing to pay for it, this enterprise has a clear brand premium moat.
Another form of brand moat is brand search capability.
Most of the products of this type of enterprise are standardized products, and peer differentiation is not obvious. If the price is too high, consumers will switch to other alternatives. If this corporate brand is y rooted in people's minds, people in the market in the face of a wide range of similar consumer products, will not hesitate to choose the company's products, which shows that the company has a brand search moat, such as the beverage industry, Coca-Cola, dairy industry, Yili shares.
2, patented technology
The second intangible asset moat is patented technology, a company has others can not copy the technology, can make the enterprise in the market to obtain strong competitiveness. For example, Microsoft in the computer industry and Pientzehuang in the medical industry. Many Japanese enterprises salivate over the secret formula of Pientzehuang, but they have not studied its preparation method for decades, and this unique technology is the guarantee that Pientzehuang is hard to find in the market.
3 、Government Authorization
The third intangible asset moat is government authorization. This kind of moat generally appears in the energy, telecommunication and financial industries. For example, each of us can not live without the bank, although no special technology, is through the deposit lending to earn the difference in the business. However, in our country banks can not open just want to open, government authorization for its construction of a very high threshold, so that the company with such a license can long enjoy the returns from special resources.
Switching costs are the costs we pay when we change a product or service. This cost is not only in terms of money, but may also be the cost of time, effort, and amount of labor.
Banks are typically an industry with a switching cost moat. If our payroll card is tied to one kind of bank, basically all of our businesses, Alipay, WeChat, Taobao, and brokerage businesses are also tied to that one bank card. Even if other banks offer more favorable terms, we basically will not choose to change to another bank's services, because we need to do too much work for this.
This switching cost moat is more commonly found in industries such as banking, securities, and corporate finance software systems.
A network effect moat is where the value of their product or service increases as the number of users increases.
The most typical company with a network effect moat is Tencent. Tencent is a communication tool, when everyone is using WeChat, even if there is a better communication tool than WeChat, if you are surrounded by friends and relatives do not use it, then the product is not much value for you.
This network effect moat, once formed, will be very strong. Now the average daily user of WeChat has reached more than 700 million people, any one wants to launch another communication tool to replace WeChat, its premise must be able to establish a network of users of comparable size with this, in the face of such a huge project, the vast majority of competitors can only be discouraged.
In 2018, Tencent made the list of the top 10 global brands with a brand value of $178.9 billion, which shows how powerful this network effect moat is.
This network effect moat is commonly found in internet companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, and DDT.
Cost advantage is significant in industries where price determines consumer purchasing decisions. This moat is common in industries that produce standardized products that are highly substitutable.
The cost advantage moat comes from four main sources, advanced process advantages, favorable geographic location, distinctive resources, and scale effects. Because the scale effect is our most common contact with the moat, dedicated to a separate part of the introduction.
1, optimized processes: optimized processes with the enterprise can significantly reduce the cost of products, which for a certain scale of enterprises, can form a temporary moat.
This optimized process allows companies to temporarily lead competitors, but this process can still be copied by competitors, and thus can only be a temporary moat.
2, superior geographic location: common in the resource industry upstream and downstream companies. Because the long-distance transportation of resources requires high transportation costs, if the distance is far, even if other companies have cheaper prices, after long-distance transportation, the overall cost is no longer advantageous. Therefore, for companies with a unique geographical location can enjoy the protection brought by this geographical advantage.
3, unique resource advantage: If the enterprise has a mineral resource is lower than other resource producers' extraction costs, then there is no doubt that the enterprise will have a strong competitive advantage. This is also a relatively strong moat, because often these mineral resources can not be copied.
The scale effect is a kind of cost advantage moat, this kind of moat is the most common moat, we analyze as a separate part. Scale effect moat is mainly reflected in three aspects.
1, the larger the scale, the lower the unit cost
The cost of the product on the one hand from the fixed costs, on the one hand from the variable costs.
For a factory, whether it is to produce 1 product, or to produce 1,000 products, you need to pay the same rent, workers' wages, utilities, equipment maintenance fees, these are called fixed costs. In contrast, the cost of raw materials required per 1 product processed is variable, showing incremental changes with the number of products processed.
In this case, as the factory processes more products, the lower the unit cost of the product, the more competitive in the market. This scale effect is common in the industrial raw materials processing and production industry.
2, a strong channel network
To be able to produce something is a kind of ability, so that consumers can buy anytime, anywhere is another kind of ability. For example, why Coca-Cola can long dominate the beverage industry, deep into the market capillary channel capacity is one of its core competitiveness. In the remote villages of our country, you can even see Coca-Cola products in the only kiosk in the village, which is Coca-Cola's powerful channel capability.
This large-scale channel network is extremely difficult to replicate, and it is often the source of an ultra-wide economic moat. For example, Jingdong spent ten years to build their own logistics system. 2012, Tencent also saw this market, want to do the same way to smash money to do their own logistics, but found that Jingdong spent ten years to build this channel capacity, Tencent, as well as the need to spend many years to build up, Tencent after a number of attempts to finally give up their own logistics ideas, and Jingdong to form a strategic cooperation, to give the logistics market to Jingdong to do. The logistics market to the Jingdong to do.
3, niche market
The scale advantage of the niche market does not lie in the size of the absolute scale, but in the size of the relative scale. Even if a company in the absolute size is not big enough, as long as a localized in the market over its competitors, as can form a strong competitive advantage.
For example, if you have 1000 people in your neighborhood, you only need one supermarket to meet people's daily shopping needs. Therefore, the only supermarket in this neighborhood bosses to guard the size of the store can also be a prosperous life. But if you also open a supermarket in this neighborhood, the result may be to end up with two stores can not make money. As a result, this supermarket has the moat of a niche market.
The niche market moat is simply that the market size is small, large capital does not care about it, small capital to go in can not make much money. Instead, existing companies in this market can enjoy the competitive advantage of this scale for a long time.
Intangible assets, switching costs, network effects, cost advantages, scale effects, these five aspects are Morningstar's summary of the economic moat. When we analyze companies, we need to use historical data to find out where the company's true competitiveness lies, and how long it can maintain that competitiveness?
The nature of capital is the never-ending search for wealthy havens that deliver higher returns. As long as the industry is profitable, competition will follow. Only companies with a wide moat can count their money comfortably in the midst of fierce competition.