Lee Ainslie (Trades, Portfolio), founder and managing partner at Maverick Capital, added 261,323 shares of The Priceline Group (PCLN, Financial) at an average price of $1,194.56 during the first quarter.
This is a 20,273.20% increase from the 1,289 shares Ainslie owned at the end of 2015.
The Priceline Group is a provider of online travel and travel-related reservation and search services. The company offers consumers accommodation reservations (including hotels, bed and breakfasts, hostels, apartments, vacation rentals and other properties) through booking.com, priceline.com and agoda.com brands.
The priceline.com brand also offers consumers reservations for rental cars, airline tickets, vacation packages and cruises. It offers rental car reservations through rentalcars.com. It also allows consumers to easily compare airline ticket, hotel reservation and rental car reservation information from hundreds of travel websites at once through KAYAK.
The company recently acquired OpenTable, a provider of online restaurant reservations. It believes the online restaurant reservation business is complementary to its online travel businesses and that both OpenTable and its travel businesses will benefit from adding OpenTable to The Priceline Group.
The Priceline Group has a market cap of $63.09 billion, an enterprise value of $66.03 billion, a P/E ratio of 24.99, a P/B ratio of 6.99 and a quick ratio of 2.45.
The Priceline Group was originally founded in 1997 but did not officially offer its IPO until 1999. The company initially offered 10,000,000 shares at a price of $16 per share with a total offer amount of $160,000,000. Since the company had its IPO, the value of the stock has risen 29% annually.
The Priceline Group is also traded in Germany, Chile, Mexico, Switzerland and the U.K.
Ainslie may have purchased a stake in The Priceline Group for the following reasons:
- The company has reported outstanding financial results over the previous decade. The Priceline Group has improved its revenue growth (25.50%), EBITDA growth (48.50%), operating income growth (57.20%), free cash flow growth (49.90%) and book value growth (39.10%).
- The Priceline Group reported $55.5 billion in gross bookings in 2015.
- The company is trading below its intrinsic value which is $1,446.19, according to GuruFocus. This provides an 11.93% margin of safety for Ainslie.
- The Priceline Group has multiple streams of income including rental cars, airline tickets, vacation packages as well as OpenTable, which consists of reservation revenues (reservation fees paid by restaurants for diners seated through OpenTable's online reservation service), subscription fees for restaurant reservation management services and other revenues and damage excess waiver fees, travel insurance fees and global distribution system reservation booking fees, in each case related to certain of its travel services.
- The company has a Beneish M-Score of -2.43 indicating that it is not a manipulator.
- The company has 19 years of experience in its industry.
Below is a Peter Lynch Chart for The Priceline Group.
Ainslie founded Maverick Capital in 1993. Before that, he was a managing director at Tiger Management Corporation as a "tiger cub" learning from and working alongside guru Julian Robertson (Trades, Portfolio). Ainslie is a University of Virginia graduate with an M.B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Ainslie is also very active in philanthropy as he is on the board of directors for The Robin Hood foundation. The Robin Hood Foundation is New York's largest poverty-fighting organization. It has raised more than $1.95 billion for goods and services to provide hundreds of soup kitchens, homeless shelters, schools, job-training programs and other vital services that give New York’s neediest citizens the tools to build better lives.
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