Title: CATL: The $280 Billion Company You've Never Heard Of | Bull vs. Bear w/ Stig, Manish, & Ralph Show: The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires / TIP) Panel: Stig Brodersen (host), Manish Karira (bull case), Ralph (bear case; forensic-accountant CPA) Date: 2026-08-22 URL: https://youtu.be/FWCV_fi5uhc Length: ~1:21:45 Note: Verbal fillers (um / uh / "you know" / tic "like" / stutters) removed; wording otherwise verbatim, INCLUDING the auto-transcript's garbled proper nouns, which are left as spoken/heard. Decoder for the garbles: "CL" / "CTL" / "CSL" / "CHL" / "CITL" / "CAT" / "CATL" / "CO" / "cattle" = CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited); "Robin Zen" / "Zang" / "Zeng" / "Zing" / "Robert Zing" / "Robin Sang" = Robin Zeng (founder/CEO); "Dick Boden" / "stick" / "Stig" / "D" / "Dave" = Stig Brodersen (host); "manish pian" / "manage" / "Manis" / "man" / "Minutian" / "mane" = Manish Karira (bull); "Ral" / "Roth" / "Ro" = Ralph (bear); "Emperor X Technology" / "Amprodex" = Amperex Technology Limited (ATL); "SAP Magnetics" = SAE Magnetics; "EDK" = TDK; "Bokshshire" / "Burkshshire" = Berkshire; "PYD" / "DYD" = BYD; "Maidolf" / "Bernie Maid off" = Bernie Madoff; "Kevin Olirri" = Kevin O'Leary; "Sam Olman" = Sam Altman; "Charlie Mer" = Charlie Munger; "deepseat" = DeepSeek; "CBAMP" = CBAM (EU carbon border adjustment mechanism); "grit" = grid; "mia" = market share; "a,000 gawatt hours" = ~1,000 gigawatt hours; "4% of the world's EVs" = ~40%; "$und00 million" = an undisclosed/unclear figure (~$100M); "3000750" = 300750 (Shenzhen A-share code); "edge shares" = H-shares; "3 to 4%" royalty, "15 12%" margin and "21.8% 8%" are transcription stutters over single figures. 23:12-25:21 is a host ad for the TIP Intrinsic Value Conference and is omitted. The tail after 1:21:12 was a stray next-episode teaser (Berkshire compensation) and is not part of this discussion.
00:00 Being the biggest makes them the cheapest. Being the cheapest makes them the most profitable. And with the scale CTL has, they have been pushing upstream into mining with stakes in the mining company. So they control the raw materials. And they have gone downstream by designing their sales straight into the car platform.
00:18 [music] So for a competitor, it isn't about trying to catch up or one thing. They are chasing a flywheel that just keeps spinning faster every year. [music] Welcome to the investors podcast. I'm your host Dick Boden and today I'm here with my friends relevant manish pian. How are you today? >> Great stick. Thank you for having us. >> Yeah, glad to be here. >> Fantastic.
00:49 And so, manage, you're presenting the bull case for a huge company and perhaps it's a company that the audience doesn't even know about. And so, I'm happy to say that in the first part of this episode, you will give us an overview of the business and then we'll open the floor for a discussion among the three of us about some related things. But anyways, I'm getting way ahead of myself.
01:08 So, let's just jump right into it. Manage, please tell us about the company. >> Thanks, Dave. So this company that I would like to introduce today controls 40% market share in a growing industry. Most people probably have never seen their products. But if you have been in a Tesla or an electric BMW or a Mercedes, there is more than a one-third chance that we were on the vehicle that was running on one of their products.
01:39 The company I'm talking about is CL, Contemporary Amprodex Technology Limited, the largest battery maker in the world. And as of the most recent stock price, its market cap is about $280 billion, which means they are roughly the size of Shell. And my main thesis on CL is that this company is more than a battery company. I think it is fast becoming the backbone of the energy infrastructure. It powers EVs.
02:08 It stores to enable power and now increasingly it's becoming the core power infrastructure player in the AI data centers. >> Manish, I have to admit when I first discussed this company with you when we talked about it, I'd never heard of CL. I wasn't even sure if you pronounced it cattle or CL. What's the founding story about this company? >> Yeah.
02:39 It's not a well-known company in the Western world, but the company has a very interesting backstory. So CL was founded by Robin Zen, who is the CEO of the company. It was started in 2011, but the roots of the company date back to much earlier. So in the 1990s, Robin Zang was working as a technical director at a company called SAP Magnetics, which was a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate TDK that used to make electronic components such as computer hard drives, discs, etc. So Robin Zen saw firsthand the consumer electronics boom that was taking shape in the
03:20 late '90s and the opportunity for the lithium batteries in those products. So he took his first big bet. He decided to quit TDK and along with two other colleagues he founded a lithium battery company called Emperor X Technology Limited or ATL. So that's CL without the C.
03:47 So he founded ATL and at that point they did not have a battery technology of their own and instead they licensed a technology patent from Bell Labs. But that technology had a fatal flaw as the batteries would swell up after repeated charging. And Robin Zen being a deeply technical engineer along with his team somehow managed to solve this issue and turned this defective license into a product that landed them some big customers and the key one being Apple in 2003 when the company started manufacturing batteries for the Apple iPod. So that win cemented Robin Sang's credibility
04:27 and established ATL as a benchmark in the mobile battery world. Now the success of ATL caught the eye of TDK the former employer of Robin Zang and TDK decided to acquire ATL for about $und00 million and also asked Robin Zang to stay on and run the company as a TDK subsidiary. So it was like a full circle for Robin Zang.
04:54 He left EDK to build something of his own and he was now back with them. But now with a large Japanese parent behind them, ATL was scaling its manufacturing and scaled their Apple relationship and started making batteries for the iPhone. And ATL ultimately grew into the world's largest smartphone battery maker. And what is interesting about Robin Zen is that he didn't stop at that.
05:20 After dominating the smartphone battery market, he started to set his sight on the next big wave in batteries, which was batteries for electric vehicles. Robin Zen could see that China was making electric vehicles as a strategic industry and was providing state support to homegrown companies. But this is where there was a problem because ATL was owned by TDK which was a Japanese company.
05:47 He knew that a foreign controlled ATL would not get the same support from the government as a domestic company would. So what does Robin Zeng do? He takes another big bet. He gathers a group of Chinese investors led by himself and his deputy and spun off ATL's EV battery division into a brand new Chinese controlled company called CL.
06:14 Robin Zang and his co-investors took 85% equity in the company and TDK kept the remaining 15%. And that's how CL came into existence. Incredible. And thank you, man. You could say so far so good. But then we having this relatively small company. They're making smartphone batteries, but then all of a sudden in barely a decade, they're powering 4% of the world's EVs.
06:37 How does something like that happen? Yeah. So, CL has developed some key competencies which have led to this massive growth such as their strong focus on R&D, their vertical integration and the manufacturing scale advantage. And we can talk about these drivers in more detail later. But I believe there is one important factor which I think has been a key driver behind the rise of CL and that is their relationships with key customers during their growth phase.
07:09 and two of them really stand out. The first one was with the German automaker BMW. So back in 2012, BMW wanted to build an electric vehicle and wasn't happy with any of the batteries on the market. They first approached BYD and BYD declined to provide batteries to external customers. So BMW took a gamble and gave this relatively unknown EV battery company CL a critical contract to be their battery supplier in China. And it wasn't a purchase order from BMW.
07:45 They basically embedded their engineers inside CL's facilities to co-design the battery for their EV. And I think that education in German engineering and a stamp of approval from a global automaker is what puts CL on the map. So that was their first key relationship that gave them an initial recognition that they can make high performance batteries for a demanding customer.
08:11 And if BMW gave CL the credibility, it was Tesla that gave them the global stage. Just a quick backstory. So when CL was formed in 2011, there was another EV revolution happening in the US. Tesla had gone public and they had signed Panasonic to be their battery suppliers for their Model S cars.
08:37 CL did not enter Tesla's supply chain roughly a decade later around 2020 when Tesla entered China and started sourcing batteries from CL and that's when the growth of CL went vertical. So just to give you some numbers. So in 2020 CL's revenue was roughly about $7 billion and in 2025 just 5 years later their revenue jumped by more than eight times to more than $60 billion. And it's not just the growth in revenue.
09:07 The scale of CL's battery production today is hard to picture. The company is on track to deliver close to a,000 gawatt hours of battery in 2026. And to just put that in perspective, that's enough electricity storage to power all of Singapore or the city of New York for about a week. Today, Robin Zang is sometimes called the invisible king of the global battery supply chain. He still owns about 22% of the company and the founding team holds over 35%.
09:41 So this is a founder controlled, deeply technical, R&D focused company with skin in the game and I believe with a very long time horizon. >> Wow, man. If I could add one thing there, we as values investors always are looking for a company led by a founder who has more than a minor stake. In other words, they have skin in the game.
10:09 And it's clear that Zing has a personal stake in the game. And I read that the estimates is greater than 53 billion is his personal state. And another point about Zing, he made a culture of giving back to his community. He grew up very poor. He was from a very small city in China and the manufacturing facilities of CL are in a city of about 400,000 but it's located very close to his hometown.
10:43 He's expressed his desire to give back and reward loyalty and those are great attributes of a leader that we're always looking for. So what's the competitive advantage manish that allows them to have such a high market share? Why aren't competitors catching up with them? >> Yeah, well CL has been number one in EV battery market share for nine straight years.
11:13 Its nearest rival is BYD at around 16% market share. Now most listeners would know BYD. It was Bokshshire's famous investment in China led by Charlie Munger back in 2008 and that investment returned roughly 20 times before Burkshshire fully exited last year. Today BYD is the largest EV maker in the world and it's vertically integrated meaning they make their own batteries.
11:40 They do sell some batteries to others but the vast majority is consumed by their own cars. So in a way they are a competitor to CL and in a sense they are not. Where PYD and CL do compete with each other is in the R&D space. Both companies want to be seen as the leading edge of battery technology. For example, this year in March BYD came out with a battery that charges from 10% to 97% in about 9 minutes. And a
12:11 month later, CL came out with a competing product that goes from 10% to 98% in under 7 minutes. And in this R&D competition between Cat and BYD, the Chinese lead over everyone keeps widening. And the third largest player in this sector is the Korean LG Energy Solutions. They have roughly about 9% market share. So, this isn't a close race.
12:44 CL is about two and a half times larger than the nearest rival. I always feel a bit torn about whenever I'm looking these mages up because I think it very much also depends on who's the protagonist in the story, right? Sometimes you'll be looking at someone who has very low market share and you're saying, "Wow, look at all this growth they have had because they have such a small market share.
13:11" Then of course you also have the other side of the spectrum where you have someone like CSL that has 40% you're saying wow they have to lead because they have all this mia whereas others would say they have so much to lose I guess but what allows them to have such a strong lead in terms of of mia and why aren't competitors catching up.
13:33 >> Yeah so I would say there are probably three main reasons for that. I would say the first one would be scale economics. So if you look at CL and you see a checklist like they are the cheapest producer, they have the biggest R&D budget, the best technology and you might assume that the mo is one of those. But I think the moat is that these advantages feed each other and create a flywheel.
13:57 Being the biggest makes them the cheapest. Being the cheapest makes them the most profitable. That profit funds a large R&D budget which helps them build the best technology and win more customers which makes them bigger still and with the scale CTL has they have been pushing upstream into mining with stakes in the mining companies so they control the raw materials and they have gone downstream by designing their sales straight into the car platforms.
14:28 So for a competitor, it isn't about trying to catch up on one thing. They are chasing a flywheel that just keeps spinning faster every year. I believe the second advantage they have is the customer switching cost. Now you might think that how can batteries have high switching cost. Well, once a battery is engineered into a car platform, it's designed years ahead of production and has to pass through a variety of safety, crash, and durability testing before a single car gets shipped.
14:58 So, a design win isn't a one-year order. It's logged in for the entire life of that platform, which is typical about 5 to 8 years. And that creates a sticky predictable revenue. And CL has the broadest set of customers in the industry. Tesla, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen and nearly every Chinese EV maker except DYD. So the switching cost creates another advantage.
15:26 And the last one that I will talk about is the product complexity especially in the energy storage space. So a grit scale storage system looks like a giant block of battery but a single gawatt hour installation can contain on the order of several million individual components and in one of the interviews Robin Zen mentioned that it contains more components than a Boeing 747.
15:55 These storage systems are built to last more than 20 years. So the reliability bar is very high and that makes them hard to manufacture at scale. So I would say that scale economics, switching cost and product complexity are the three main sources of competitive advantage for them. So manish CHL being the largest battery maker I'm almost inclined to say that the market or at least institutional investors must understand this competitive advantage or at least so I would like to think but we also say that institutional investors are the one
16:30 swinging the market and yet you see these crazy fluctuations of what 80% on average for the largest companies so perhaps they do and perhaps they don't but in any case the angle we are looking for are what are the drivers that overall the market has not fully appreciated. So why is the market not pricing right now in your opinion? >> Yeah.
16:52 So the competitive advantage that we have discussed are pretty well understood by the market. But what I think is underappreciated are two new growth engines that are still in the early stage of their life cycle and I believe the market hasn't fully underwritten them. The first one is the power infrastructure for the AI data center.
17:19 So AI data center cross enormous spiky workloads that power grid cannot smoothly deliver. So if you picture an AI data center, you have tens of thousands of GPUs all computing in parallel and then they pause for a split second to synchronize and then they fire another compute cycle. This massive parallel cycle creates spikes in the power demand.
17:42 sometimes swinging hundreds of megawws in seconds. But the legacy power grids are not designed to ramp up and down fast enough to follow these compute spikes. That's the gap that CL batteries fill in. They sit in between this spiky compute loads and the steady power grid. They absorb these surges in power in between. And as the total power demand continues to climb at these data centers, the appetite for this kind of a storage buffering grows with it.
18:10 I have done quite a bit of research on data centers lately and hopefully that's one of the topics we'll cover in a future podcast to put a little bit of insight into what a data center storage means to CL. The data center industry estimates that by 2030 just a little over 3 years from now that data centers will require twice as much power.
18:38 That is they will need 200 gawatts of continuous power. And to put those continuous power plots into perspective, think about this. One gawatt of continuous power is required for the city of Seattle, Washington or San Francisco, California. 10 gawatts of continuous power is required for the city of New York or the city of Los Angeles.
19:12 200 gawatt of continuous power is required for the state of California. All that additional power from the data centers require storage to furnish that clean steady power that you talked about. That is truly mind-boggling when you think about this. >> Yeah, it's quite mindboggling for sure and CL is already the world's number one energy storage supplier and I think that two things make it even more attractive play.
19:46 First is that the storage segment carries higher margins for CL than the core EV battery business because of the complexity and the durability requirements that we talked about. And the second point which I find more interesting is that CL isn't just selling batteries to these data centers. It is now systematically assembling a full stack energy ecosystem for the storage through power distribution inside the data center.
20:13 They are even buying into the power equipment makers and servicing the entire energy stack. This I think has the potential to transform CL from just an energy storage supplier to a strategic infrastructure partner for the entire AI compute buildout. And the second potential growth engine which I think is still in the early stage that can have a huge upside for the company is the licensing model called LRS which stands for license royalty and service. So CL is effectively locked out of owning a factory in the US for geopolitical reasons.
20:53 So rather than fight it out, they have found a workaround where they get into a licensing deal with an American company and it's the American partner that builds, owns and runs the manufacturing plant while CL just provides the license of its technology and collects a royalty fee.
21:17 So CL and Ford recently did this licensing deal for the Ford's Michigan battery plant and in that Ford owns the plant land equipment and hires the workforce. CL has no equity and only offers battery chemistry and technology and gets a royalty fee in return. CL hasn't disclosed the economics of the licensing fee. But if it is in the 3 to 4% range that these deals are typically done at then that's a very high margin capital light income and that framework can extend beyond EV batteries to even data storage for the AI data storage compute that we talked about. Well, you're exactly right. And the royalty
21:59 and licensing fees can be a gold mine. If anyone has watched the TV show Shark Tank, Kevin Olirri, who's also known as Mr. Wonderful, one of the venture capitalists, he frequently offers to invest, but not for an equity stake. He's looking for a royalty or a licensing fee. And there's a big reason for that.
22:26 as you pointed out it can be a huge return on the investment without the big investment in brick and mortar. >> Yeah. So the important point here that I want to highlight is that this is still in the early phase. The model is under scrutiny by the US lawmakers. So CL obviously feels that this is a win-win solution for both parties but the geopolitics has many dimensions and it's not yet a short win but if CL can scale this LRS framework in the US the high margin royalty revenue can provide a big boost to the stock price I'm going to stop interrupting you except to say that the scrutiny by the US lawmakers is a big
23:12 big butt. And I'll talk more about this later. For now, let's suffice it to say that a licensing deal of 3 to 4% of revenue would be wonderful, but it could easily get wiped out by the simple stroke of a pen. [Host ad for the TIP Intrinsic Value Conference, New York City, Saturday September 19th — omitted; see 23:12-25:21.]
25:21 Well said, Ralph. With that in mind, let's dive into the financials. Now, let's talk about some of the risk that we might see in the numbers. Just here at the very top as we're looking at the income statement. I see the revenue was flat from 2023 to 2025. How did that happen? >> Yeah. So, let's get into the fun stuff.
25:46 So, starting with the revenue being flat from 2023 to 2025 that you mentioned stick. So the biggest cost for CL is the raw materials that go into the battery which currently is mostly lithium and lithium prices became dramatically cheaper over the last couple of years and CL passed those savings on as lower prices to its customers. So the company sold far more battery volume made more profits but the headline revenue barely moved.
26:19 And the second point that I want to highlight in the financials is that there is a big mismatch between their net income and the operating cash flows. So last year CL earned about 11 billion in profit but it generated close to about $20 billion in operating cash flows. So that's nearly double. This high operating cash flow allows the company to spend on capex, margin acquisitions, return cash to shareholders through dividends and buybacks and the company still managed to have higher cash balance on their balance sheet.
26:50 After all of that, the reason why operating cash flow is so much higher than the profit is because CL has a large negative working capital, meaning that it sells through its inventory and collects money from customers months before it has to pay to its suppliers. So in effect its suppliers are its largest lenders funding the growth for CL almost interest free and this is similar to Amazon's playbook they get paid on e-commerce sales today and pay the suppliers much later and let that float fund the flywheel but this is where the risk also resides there is
27:31 a limit to how much you can stretch your payables and the Chinese authorities are asking large firms to start paying theme suppliers sooner. So for CL that likely means that part of their interest free float might unwind and a period of readjustment in how it funds its growth.
27:58 I don't think it will break the model because much of CL's payables are to large suppliers which are outside the theme rule that the authorities are pushing for. But I would say it's still a real headwind to watch out for. >> Yeah, Minutian, there's a big debate around China's state involvement in domestic champions and how subsidies have helped companies like CL and BYD.
28:26 Does CITL have any government golden share or would it succeed without state support? >> Yeah, so let me just talk about golden share a bit. So golden share in China is basically like a special management share typically given to the state or a government fund and the main purpose is for the state to have some kind of regulatory oversight on the company.
28:51 It does not impact the day-to-day operations of the company, but the state gets some veto powers and is mostly used for companies in the social media space where you want to have some control on what content gets distributed to the general population. So talking about CL, CL is a founder controlled company with no publicly disclosed golden share. And yet like virtually every strategic Chinese manufacturer, it did benefit from state support early on.
29:25 The biggest support that CL received was the restriction that functionally locked out foreign competition from the China support program and gave CL a captive domestic market to scale up. It wasn't until Elon Musk negotiated Tesla's entry in China in 2019 that the state scrapped the restriction and allowed foreign competition to come back in. And I believe the second support that CL received was it came in the form of these consumer purchase subsidies that help create the EV demand in China. So these subsidies are also now fully phased out at the end of 2022.
30:03 But what is worth mentioning here is that the mindset which is at the top of the company. So at the peak of the subsidy boom in 2017, Robin Zang sent his staff a famous letter in Chinese which roughly translates to if you stand where the wind blows even a pig can fly. His point being that a strong subsidy tailwind in the captive home market can make even a mediocre company look great.
30:34 And his message was a warning to his team against the dependency on a subsidy and to build a cost and technology advantage that could help them win globally without the state support and that warning got tested for. So, China removed the restrictions of foreign competition and the competition came running back in. LG, Panasonic, they all came back in.
31:01 So, basically the wind stopped and CL still holds a leading global share in the EV battery market and they earn margins which are above the best of the industry. So, the point here is that Robin Zang didn't confuse a policy support with a durable advantage. He instead used the government support as a temporary support to internally build a system that now gives them a long-term competitive advantage.
31:33 Now for the other side of the story because no thesis survives without the bare case. Beyond the risk that we talked about though, are there any more worth putting on the tape before I get up there? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first one which I think is the biggest for CL is the geopolitical risk. So CL is effectively world out of the US market which is the second largest market for EV batteries. The company is on the Pentagon's list of companies that work for the Chinese military.
32:08 This is something that the company has contested hard. Robin Zang has sent executives to Washington to make the case but so far without success. So CL counter to this restriction is the licensing model that I talked about and as an example that the Ford partnership in Michigan where CL licenses its technology rather than owning a manufacturing facility and in return collects a fees on that license. I think it's a clever way to circumvent the restriction and it's a template that CL could
32:43 repeat with other partners but having said that as I mentioned it's still in the early stage and it's not a done deal yet so the risk is still very real and something investors need to watch out for let's go deeper mane on the license royalty and service I think you called it the LRS model LRS is often been spun as an asset like growth.
33:11 In reality, it may be better spun as a defensive capitulation. By surrendering direct ownership and customer relations to Ford and GM, CL is admitting that direct Chinese ownership is politically toxic under the US Inflation Reduction Act. Accepting a mere 3 to 4% royalty fee turns that invisible king you mentioned into a low rent IP landlord.
33:44 This model makes CL what I would call a ghost in the machine vulnerable to a stroke of the pen where the US regulators can sever the IP at any time and leave CL with zero physical assets to reclaim. Not only a stroke of the pin loss by handing over the blueprint for highdensity packs to Ford and GM, not only are you handing over the blueprint, CL is training the very competitors who seek to exclude it.
34:19 Let's call it LRS leakage. You're right. It's a threat that is very real. Yeah, totally agree. As the LRS framework evolves, this will be an important aspect to watch out for. After all CL itself learned the manufacturing skills from other players such as BMW. So, it's definitely possible for us manufacturers to learn from CL.
34:48 Although with the high R&D focus that CL has, they are constantly moving up the technology curve, but then training competition can still be a threat to watch out for. I would say the second risk that I want to put on the table is the price war at home. So, China's battery and EV sector has seen a brutal price war. So much so that Robin Zang himself has publicly asked the industry to stop computing purely on price.
35:19 The counter here is that the growth in the energy storage segment especially the AI data center demand that we discussed. It is a new higher margin faster growing segment where CL is number one and the company is moving into a full stack power storage solution where the competition is less intense. Again, storage is not immune to price pressure and it's per unit prices are falling too, but it's a higher margin than the EV batteries business and it's still in the early stage of the growth curve.
35:53 And the third risk that I would talk about is the technology disruption risk. Now, battery technology is improving at a very high rate. As a rough rule, every two years the energy density in the battery packs climbs by about 20%. And to add to that, there is faster charging, longer battery life, better cold weather performance, and the innovation spans battery chemistry materials, cell designs, etc.
36:20 So the danger here is that the new chemistry such as the solid state or the sodium ion batteries or something else leaprogs the existing LFP and the NMC batteries that CL is dominant today. And the counter here is that CL spends more on R&D than anyone in the industry. The company isn't relying on any single chemistry.
36:48 It is already developing and scaling sodium ion batteries in parallel. So the bet here is that whatever the next innovation is, CL is likely working on it too. So the risk is real. But my view is that the disruptor and the incumbent may just turn out to be the same company here. >> Man, I agree. Before we talk about valuation, let me jump in and amplify some of those risks and present a little bit more on the bare case for CL.
37:22 The bull case celebrates volume growth as a sign of dominance, but a forensic look at the numbers reveals a treadmill effect. Recall I'm a forensic accountant in that pun I intended. In a recent fiscal period, CATL reported a 21.8% growth and shipped gigawatt hour volume. Yet the topline revenue contracted by 9.7%. This price deflation acted as a massive 130% drag on growth.
37:57 This happened because CATL's long-term agreements utilize raw material indexation. The company is contractually obligated to pass manufacturing efficiency gains and commodity savings directly to their OEMs. CL is running exponentially faster to stay in the same place financially. So it's surrendering its pricing power to maintain utilization.
38:30 Also, the recent 15% profit margin expansion achieved while the revenue was shrinking is a mathematically temporary windfall. It's not a new baseline. It doesn't indicate technological superiority. Rather, call it a cost wedge profitability flu. What an investor will likely see is that 15% net profit will regress to a tighter 11 to 12% historical bands. Last year, CATL reported almost two times as much cash flow as profit.
39:05 This two times delta exists because CAT uses its dominant position to squeeze suppliers by holidays payable outstanding. Essentially, it's an interest free loan from its supply chain like you said at Amazon. However, the Chinese authorities have already now mandating that large firms pay themes faster.
39:33 As this interest free loan is called in, CATL's funding model will face a painful readjustment, stripping away the cash used for buybacks and dividends. The interest rate floats like that enjoyed by Buffett and other insurance companies will go away. Although yours truly believes that the energy storage system is a cyclical buffer to slowing EV sales, the ESS, the energy storage system, is sensitive to utility capital budgets, to global interest rates, and to AI spend.
40:10 This ESS buffer can be viewed as a high beta on the global micro environment. Uncontested expansion may slow. Being the largest, they're the biggest target for all the competitors. They may be the slowest mover towards solid state disruption. And they have the most to lose from the next generation chemistry, unless of course they invent it.
40:35 With subsidies from the Chinese government gone, recall the pig in the win, CO faces a gravitational pull not seen since 2011. Some of those gravitational pulls include one a utilization risk with new plants in Hungary and Germany. CL has a massive fixed overhead.
41:05 Any minor slowdown in European EV adoption due to subsidy cliffs will leave this capacity unabsorbed turning growth assets into margin anchors. Commodity concentration. Despite the vertical integration, CAT remains a shadow commodity trading house. Its stock price may be viewed by bears as a proxy for lithium and nickel volatility, not a reflection of R&D prowess.
41:38 The European protectionist wall, the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism, CBAMP, acts as a targeted tax on Chinese cells and a key founder, key man. CL is inextricably tied to Robert Zing's personal standing with a 22% ownership, deep ties to Beijing. Any shift in his political standing represents an existential unhedable risk for shareholders. And I will remind folks about Alibaba. >> Thanks, Ralph.
42:10 These are valid risk. >> I'll get off my soap box now. [laughter] >> Go ahead. >> Yeah. No, I agree. I think these are valid risk especially the geopolitical risk linked to European protection and anybody investing in China has to be comfortable with taking on the geopolitical risk that's something which is always there for the other ones let me try to address them one by one so the first one is the utilization risk linked to the fixed overheads at these overseas plants in Hungary and Germany so it is true that a slowdown in the European EV industry will
42:48 have some impact on CL. But I would also say that being the lowest cost producer, CL might be better placed in managing the downturn compared to the competition. We have seen subsidies getting removed in China resulting in overall EV slowdown but the dominance of CL in China has continued.
43:15 Now with regards to your point about commodity price volatility linked to the lithium prices basically so the company is actively developing new battery chemistries such as the sodium ion batteries as a response to this very risk. So sodium as opposed to lithium is widely available. The issue currently with sodium batteries today is that the energy density is lower compared to the lithium based batteries.
43:43 But again as that technology improves this could be a good hedge for CL against the commodity price volatility and finally on your point about keyman risk that again is a very real risk. Robin Zen has been the key driver behind the company and is the largest shareholder. I am less worried about a shift in the political standing because first of all CL operates in a sector that China wants to grow.
44:18 So they have a strong mutual alignment on that and secondly Robin Zang maintains a low profile and rarely speaks in public. So the chances of him rubbing the regulators or the state authorities the wrong way is quite low. But again, it's a valid risk and something I would categorize as low probability but with potentially high impact and very difficult to hedge. Now, let's get to the fun stuff.
44:43 I think you already said, man, that we were getting to the fun stuff, but I wanted to talk about the valuation. So with all of this kept in mind, how do you think about the current valuation and is it a buy right now? >> Today with the current stock price for shares trading in Shenzhen, CL's market cap is around $280 billion.
45:09 And with the cash sitting on the balance sheet, the enterprise value, which is what you actually pay for the operating business, is close to $250 billion. Now against a $14 billion of operating profit over the last four quarters that's about 18 times multiple EBIT and if you look at the PE multiple that's roughly trading at about 21 times which I think for a global leader like CL is neither demanding nor cheap.
45:37 The company has a high return on invested capital of around 17%. And a return on equity of about 25%. So there is a good enough chance that the operating business roughly doubles in value over the next 5 years. And if the multiples remain where they are, you can expect about 15% annual return before you add a dividend yield of another point or two.
46:08 So to summarize, it's a dominant cash generative business with high returns on capital that can potentially double the value of the business in 5 years. There are obviously both upside and downside cases. We discuss about the growth engines around AI data centers and the licensing model. If they surprise on the upside, then the returns can be even more meaningful.
46:33 And the downside case is that the domestic price war intensifies and the LRS model doesn't scale in the US due to geopolitical tension. >> Most of the listeners are probably based outside of China. So how can a non-Chinese investor buy the stock? Manish, isn't it listed in two places? >> Yeah. That's correct Roth. So CL is dual listed. The A shares trade in China with the ticker 3000750 and the edge shares trade in Hong Kong with the ticker 3750.
47:12 So same company, same one share, one vote, same dividend per share. But if you look at the stock price and after adjusting for the FX rate, you will notice that the Hong Kong shares trade at a big premium of roughly 30 to 35%. to the mainline China shares and that's actually opposite to the norm. Normally for a dual listed Chinese company is the mainland Asia that trade at a premium because Chinese domestic investors face capital controls and they cannot really buy in Hong Kong.
47:47 So their demand gets concentrated into the local listing. But for CL it's the opposite case and the reason is pure supply and demand. So the Hong Kong float is relatively small and the demand from global investors is quite high. The Hong Kong and Chinese shares are not funible meaning that you can't buy in one market and convert and sell it in the other market.
48:13 It's a bit like TSMC whose US listed shares have long traded at a premium to the domestic Taiwan shares. So if an international investor if you have access to the Chinese shares then that is a cheaper way to get access to this business. Some brokers provide access to domestic Chinese listings using something called the northbound stock connect but this is usually limited to the institutional investors.
48:45 For smaller retail investors, Hong Kong shares are the only option. These are freely accessible to everyone, but you will have to pay a premium to own them. Now, CL has been widening the Hong Kong float. So, after the Hong Kong IPO in 2025, they did a follow on placement in 2026. And yet, the global demand was so high that the premium hasn't compressed much.
49:11 My personal view is that in the long run, Hong Kong shares should trade at a premium of about 10 to 20% range using TSMC as the reference. So TSMC has averaged at around 15% premium, but how and when that gap will compress is hard to say. >> Yeah, we've covered a lot about CL here. If you had to boil it down and distill it to a single bottom line for an investor looking at a stock right now in mid 2026, what's the takeaway? >> CL is not just an EV battery play.
49:48 It has the potential to become the backbone of the future energy infrastructure and increasingly for the AI data centers. It is not without risks. You have to be comfortable with the geopolitical friction. And if the AI storage growth continues and the LRS licensing model proves scalable, then there is a very real compelling story for this business.
50:14 So without taking any sides, I don't want to get here too much up between a bull and a bear. I have to say still reading up on CSL, I was more excited about batteries that were not for vehicles, but really for stabilizing power grids and AI data centers. And in my past, actually in my very first job out of college, I was working with power grids, which I never thought would come in handy ever, but here we are 12 years into running the investors podcast.
50:44 And apparently now it makes sense that that was my first job. And I'm amazed by how many technological changes you've seen within power grids. And I know for most people they're probably turning the light on and off or whatever, but for someone who's looking at it from the nerdy inside of power grids, it's almost like the laws of physics have changed over the past 15 years.
51:08 And even before everyone talked about AI, you have these sophisticated tools that could pretty well predict demand supply and you need that to stabilize the growth. So one reason why coal and nuclear have been used or are still being used for electricity generation is because they had such a low marginal cost but also because they refer to what is base load.
51:32 So we use electricity all the time and so it's very predictable and which is very useful and you always have so and so much that you need of course you have different times during the day where you need more electricity for example generally more during the day than during the night but then you also even during the day you have whenever you wake up before you go to work and then there's a peak period then you come back from work and you fire up the TV and you
51:59 cook dinner whatever and so you can predict that pretty comfortably what's going to happen. So you can more or less see that demand of electricity on a curve and then you have supply and as the world has started to rely more on renewables that energy has become somewhat more intermittent because you're looking at something like solar you don't always know clouds in the sky how much and or the wind blowing for that matter.
52:27 And then to the latter if you're thinking about something as simple as wind and you're thinking well you just need to blow and the more blows the more electricity you generate that is directional correct but you also have something called cutout speed. It's roughly 90 km an hour and above that the turbine pitches with the blade it just stops.
52:47 I think that's probably the easiest way to think about it. So it's not a linear curve. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. But of course from a purely physics perspective you have bigger issues than just predicting demand supply. And for the longest time with renewables the issue has been that you can't store the energy because from the moment the wind hits the turbines blade electricity has to be used the moment that it's being made.
53:11 You can think about it as it's a pipe and not a bucket. And then there's another dimension and sorry for geeking so much out here but the longer it has to travel the more transmissions it has to go through then it also uses some of that power. Anyways I got too carried away here but of course with today's battery technology much of that is changing and it will continue to change in favor of better storage.
53:39 So you're looking at a company like CL that would benefit from the underlying tailwind, no pun intended. Even if we look beyond the AI data centers but of course the data centers accelerate the need for batteries and if you're looking at electricity you also have several issues the most important the one that we're probably most aware of as consumers is grid stability and so you need the right frequency perhaps you heard that the frequency we use in Europe is 50 Hz it's 60 Hz in the US and it's for purely historical reasons that you have
54:15 different frequencies. The story is that in the 1890s the German company AG they picked 50 Hz because it fits the metric system better and then in American Westinghouse they went with 60 Hz part because they literally observed that lights flickered less at 60 Hz. So that became the standard.
54:42 And for someone who travel around Japan a bit, I can't help myself but mention that Japan they ordered German equipment in Tokyo, but then Osaka in the southern part they ordered American. So actually to this very day, Japan runs on two different frequencies. In the northern part it's one in the other it's another. And it's purely by accident. It started 130 years ago and is still going on today.
55:05 And so you can't share that power unless it runs through really expensive converters and it's actually quite complicated. And of course you don't have the same issue between Europe and the US because they have their own power grids and even within those regions you actually have a ton of smaller power grids all patched together.
55:23 It's actually kind of freakish whenever you really get to study how the power grids work. But I'm telling this story because I find it to be a microcosm of how much randomness we're facing. But it's something we still have to act on today. And it's important because every power plant and every appliance needs to be in sync. If supply and demand fall out of balance even for seconds, the frequency drifts and if it drifts too far, the way that the grid protects itself is through what we call blackouts.
55:52 So it's very severe whenever something like that happens. And this is actually my long-winded way of talking about AI data centers in particular because I think the complexity of that from a power grid perspective is that if I can use the analogy of a stadium. So picture a stadium with 70,000 people and then a person here is a GPU.
56:16 So everyone is talking, eating, walking around at random. and all of that randomness. You can think about this like it all blends into a steady hum. That's a normal data center. But then you have an AI data center. So that's not just 70,000 people doing their own thing independent of each other. It's 70,000 people who watch the same game. So everyone cheers at the same time whenever there's a goal.
56:41 And it's not a steady hum. It's cheering and then back to a steady hum. And the grit isn't built for that. And so remember what we talked about before about predicting yes we're coming back from work and then we go to sleep it's a very gradual decline that is not the way the power grids has to work today but that's the way that they're being built and you can't just build a new power grid that's not really how it works in theory yes in practicality it's very complicated very expensive and all kinds of issues we probably shouldn't go into it today here
57:12 but what is amazing about the CL batteries is that they sit between the data center and the grid and it absorbs those shocks and an AI data center is you could say it's even worse than a football stadium because you might get a few goals throughout those 90 minutes but then whenever you train a model it will take you weeks to train a model and then you have this cheering and then steady hum and it happens every second or two so it's incredibly tiresome for the grit to work with and so of course manage everything I just said I guess
57:45 just proves that someone is going to sell a lot of batteries It doesn't prove that it's going to be CL necessarily is going to be the winner. Now the storage market is growing faster than CTL's storage shipment. So competitors are taking their share right now. But why and very much putting the spotlight on you here.
58:05 Why does CHL win the market and not just participate in it? >> First of all, that's a very interesting way to explain the battery use case for an AI data center especially with the World Cup just concluding. Well, with regards to your point about storage market growing faster than CL's storage shipment, that is true.
58:31 Even though CL is the number one player in energy storage space and the segment grew installations by roughly 30% last year, but that was below the overall industry growth rate of close to about 80% if I'm not wrong. I believe one key reason why this segment did not grow at a faster rate for CL last year was because of capacity constraints. So CL's utilization rate last year was around 97%. Meaning that they sold pretty much what they could produce.
59:01 Now this year some of those constraints should ease up as new manufacturing capacity comes online. So it will be important to see if CL can start regaining market share in this segment. In fact, if you look at the latest quarterly result, CL's energy storage sales for the first half of 2026 grew by about 88% year on year and the storage volume nearly doubled year on year.
59:29 So this gives some data point around the CL's potential market share position in the energy storage space. Thank you for painting some color around that, man. The other thing I wanted to talk about is battery leasing. And I'll admit that whenever I first read about this, it sounded a bit strange to me.
59:54 Well, at least in Europe and North America, this is somewhat novel idea. In China, it's already happening at scale. And so, the concept is simple, actually very smart, I should say. You buy the car, but not the battery. and you subscribe to the battery and like I mentioned the first time I was like what you don't buy a battery anyways I started to think about it in a different way and I was thinking okay so this is sort of like whenever you have a phone plan and you don't pay the $2,000 upfront for the phone you pay monthly and then
1:00:24 whenever the phone gets old you swap it for a new one and whenever I thought about it like that I was like oh okay that makes sense and so it's the same idea except the batteries is roughly a third of the price of electric car. Historically, it's even more.
1:00:44 So removing it lowers the sticker price significantly and allows for more people to enter the market. And then there's swapping. So instead of I'm going to say charge for hour. I think you already mentioned man is actually today you do it much faster. But anyways, you drive to a station and then very short period of time you have a machine that change the battery.
1:01:05 I should say to be clear, most Chinese EV drivers are still charging at home. But for someone driving to the grocery store, swapping is a nice to have, I guess, but certainly not a need to have. But I've learned that there are already several thousand swap stations across the country. And of course, then you have taxis and trucks where the vehicle earns money every hour it moves. So swapping becomes perhaps more the fault.
1:01:28 I don't know. But for those drivers, time is money. And so time at a charter is therefore also lost income. And I guess what I found interesting as an investor is how this could potentially change CL's business model. They stop being a company that sells your battery once and instead the battery stays in the pool at CL and his partners own and operate and they never lose the battery. It comes back.
1:01:58 It gets checked, get reused and eventually recycled and so CL owns the whole lifetime of the asset and so you as a user which is very nice you don't have to worry about the battery getting old and I think going back to this example here with someone with an iPhone for example we all know the feeling we bought this expensive gadget but also a gadget can't be without then after a few years you're like oh my god the battery is just terrible right and So, Apple needs new money.
1:02:27 We need to buy a new one, whatnot. And so, with an EV, the same problem knocks thousands of dollars off the car's value. But then under this model, that's not their problem. It's not the consumer's problem anymore. And of course, capitalism is brutal. We always talk about that here on the show.
1:02:51 But the batteries are heavy, stations are expensive, the automakers have to agree on standards. So I'm not saying by any means that battery leasing is just a free lunch but manage you're the bull. So how big could this become? >> Yeah. So battery swapping is popular in China and CL has close to 2,000 stations and growing. The company builds modular battery packs that are co-developed with major Chinese automakers.
1:03:17 So it basically locks in the customers and the cost of setting up the network is shared with various partners. So it is not CL alone taking the entire cost up front. The advantages of battery swapping as you mentioned are cost and time. Right? So the average swap time is less than 100 seconds. So taxis and heavy commercial vehicles can be on the road for longer with low down time.
1:03:44 The risk here is that with the battery charging time coming down, the time advantage might not be that significant especially for smaller vehicles. But what CAT is also doing is that they are adding superchargers to these swapping stations. So the same station can cater to both a battery swapping as well as fixed battery vehicles.
1:04:12 And I think this is where the scale of CL both in battery packs and charging network can help them to provide a faster payoff for these stations. Thank you, man, for that color. One thing I realized as I was diving deeper into CHL was that they're not just making different types of batteries. To your point before this episode, it takes stakes in other companies and so far more than 150.
1:04:37 Now, one of them is Deep Seek and this might be my understanding of the Chinese market, but whenever I looked at all their investments, that was the one that stood out to me and perhaps many of our listeners would know that name. It's China's AI darling if you want.
1:04:55 It was this is the lab that shook everyone in Silicon Valley here in early 2025. They're building this frontier model on the cheap. And in June, they took outside money for the first time. So it was roughly 7 billion at a valuation above 50 billion USD. CHL itself put in 700 million. I should say for the record that these numbers come from press reports.
1:05:18 These are all private deals similar to whenever you have between say Microsoft and OpenAI there are certain reports but it's not like an official document you can just go in and see these are all the terms. So anyways the rationale is straightforward. AI centers that we already established they're power hungry. CL are investing in a future customer to the point before and that's just a Chinese phenomenon.
1:05:37 You have Nvidia committed more than $40 billion dollars to equity stakes in 2026 and of course I can't help myself but scrutinize how that carousel works where they're taking different stakes in each others that seems to be some kind of voucher thing. Anyways, I don't want to digress, but it is kind of interesting how this ecosystem is built around the biggest tech companies, not just in the US, but also in China, but they also do it differently.
1:06:04 If you look at the biggest tech companies compare the strategic stakes to their market caps, actually Chinese companies hold roughly 10% of their market cap, whereas Americans, it's only 4%. Now, in China, they've been doing it for the better part of 15 years. The stakes are also broader too like supply chains looking at mines customers as we saw there with deepseat political alignment American big tech companies at least for now looks a little lighter it could change this certainly went heavily in for the past 18 months and most all of it was
1:06:35 specifically in AI and of course then you have a lot of this on paper prices meaning whatever the latest funding round would tell it to be so that gives you some kind of distorted numbers but still gives you a way to perhaps be directionally correct. Now man, you talked to us about CTL trading at around 18 times operating profit.
1:06:57 How do you treat these 150 plus stakes? Did you give them any value and should investors see CL as a battery maker with a side portfolio or is the portfolio even a part of the mode? Yeah, I think the CAT's investment portfolio is more strategic than financial. It helps them to achieve vertical integration.
1:07:22 It spans upstream mining companies to downstream automakers and power infrastructure player in the energy storage system. Their investment in deepseek I believe is a part of their AI data center integration play. Although I think investing in a foundational AI model lab is going to the extreme end of vertical integration. In terms of valuation, it is tricky to value these investments because most of them are private and depending on their stake, they are treated differently from a financial accounting point of view. I believe the simplest way to look at it is to see the long-term equity investment line
1:08:00 item on their balance sheet. So as of last quarter this number was about 11 billion. So slightly less than one time operating profit. So when we look at 18 times the operating profit I did not account for the value of these long-term investments. But if we include them at book value then it drops to about 17 times.
1:08:26 But I would categorize these investments more as a competitive advantage play through vertical integration and less as a financial investment play. All right, Manis and Ralph, this was what we had planned here for the bullbear thesis here. I wanted to ask you here before we transition into the final segment.
1:08:53 You both presented your case, but do you have any concluding remarks? I don't know, man. Have you become more bearish after speaking with Ralph or perhaps you even converted Ralph? I don't know. >> Yeah, it'll be interesting to hear from Ralph. What does he think I'm thinking to hear the other side of the argument, as Charlie Mer has said that you have to argue the other side better than the other player.
1:09:19 So I think understanding the bare thesis is extremely important and seeing whether you are missing anything. Capitalism is brutal. So it's always a learning game and this was a fantastic episode. I really enjoyed it and would love to hear what Ral thinks about this business. It was extremely enlightening to me when they sh like I said at the beginning cattle cat I didn't know which way to go there but I do now and I learned so much about batteries that I didn't know and it is I think as Stig pointed out the industry has changed and so much has changed and what we've learned and where we're going. It's the same way that my
1:10:08 education started coming about when I got thrust into a data center and learning about data centers. So, it's truly amazing and I believe it's like so many of the people I hear talking about AI and I heard Sam Olman yesterday in a podcast saying the world has changed. It is totally different.
1:10:32 And then I heard a scientist speaking about a week ago and saying that this is the greatest time in the world to be alive that so many things are happening and I'm in complete accord with that and getting into something like CL and speaking about this and learning about it just really excites me. I'm like Stig. So many things have changed and we are right in the middle of that change and I just want to say to you Manish thank you for bringing this to us and giving us such a great education about it and I really dug deep to try to get a bare case going here to say these things. >>
1:11:18 Thank you Ro. Thank you so much. I have to say I really enjoy this bullbear format and I should say that one of the reasons why we decided to go this route is perhaps it's our own biases I don't know but very often whenever you are bullish about a company you end up speaking with other people who are also bullish and so you end up in the same echo chamber and you pat each other on the back and everyone agrees that we're all so smart because we are invested in the same company and so having someone who is the bear but also has the permission to I wouldn't say
1:11:53 rude but you're someone if people are excited about a stock you generally don't want to be the guy who's like well you're probably all wrong it's like that guy doesn't get invited back right so giving someone in this case Ralph the permission to be the bear and you ask the critical questions and I think that's just so incredibly important so thank you Ralph for playing along and who knows I don't know if you want to play bull next time or if it's more on to be the bear, but just want to say thank you for providing such a compelling
1:12:22 bear case. >> Well, I appreciate that. And I would say that for the audience listening, you think of a CPA that I am and a career that I've spent as being a CPA and the work that I've done there is being no. It's always saying no. But I look forward to being the bull. >> Fantastic. All right.
1:12:49 So before we let the listeners go, I just wanted to say that if anyone are interested in hearing more from Ralph, he'll be speaking at the tip intrinsic value conference in New York City. That is on September 19th. And Ralph, what will you be speaking about? >> Well, of course, Stick, I am going to be speaking about investments, but more importantly, I'll be sharing the story of how investing actually became my third career. My first career as I mentioned was a traditional CPA.
1:13:20 I prepared financial statements, audited financial statements, tax returns, consulting and then that led into my second career as a forensic accountant. And that's where I investigated all these financial shenanigans, partners cooking the books, massive Ponzi schemes like we all heard about Bernie Maid off and multi-billion dollar bank frauds.
1:13:46 And so if you name the fraud, I've probably investigated it. But people often ask me if tracking down the frauds uniquely prepared me for a career in investments. And honestly have to tell them no. It was a helpful foundation certainly, but it wasn't until I found a community of lifelong learners like the ones right here in tip that I truly learned how to dig into the fundamental analysis of a business.
1:14:23 I met people like Manish who really gets in there and digs into the economic modes and figures out what makes a business genuinely investable and that just really excited. So blending my past careers with the new one has been an incredible education for me in learning how to invest and the people I've met along the journey have become forever friends. That evolution and then the frameworks I've picked up along the way.
1:14:47 That's exactly what I'm going to be sharing in New York. >> That's fantastic. Thank you, Ralph. We'll make sure to link to the conference in the show notes. We also have a bunch of other cool stuff. We have a dinner with William Green and bunches of other activities there. So, you can read more about it on our website.
1:15:08 But Ralph, I want to sneak in one more question and it's probably I don't know if it's the fascination. It probably doesn't say something nice of me that I become fascinated whenever you mention Bernie Maid off or it's because I watch the documentary on Netflix. But for someone who have seen the worst of the worst, I can't help but ask like the people who have committed these sins, do they repent? One of the things and I only know this from the documentary, it was almost like mater specifically it was almost like relieved whenever it all blew
1:15:41 up in a way kind of like he wasn't carrying this huge burden on his shoulder. I don't know can you say from seeing so many things so much fraud is there any I hope it doesn't seem like I'm glorifying anyone I'm just curious to hear is there any kind of way of saying this is the common denominator or is it just it's also very different >> no I think it's a common denominator stick one thing I learned very early in my career as a forensic accountant was that so many of the People are start off as just purely a narcissist
1:16:18 and we all know what a narcissist is. I won't go into the psychology there, but they're also sociopaths. And so when you study somebody like Maidolf who interfered and injured so many people, how can they do that? How can they feel that way? It takes a really good sociopath to be that kind of person.
1:16:47 And so in my study and looking at companies, to me, one of the most important things I look at is management because I've investigated these bad guys. So I look for that bad trait and what they look like and how they frame themselves. So as I study these companies now, I really want to get behind and learn about management. And I know that Warren Buffett said, "If you've got a choice between management and industry, you pick the industry." Well, I think that's true, but I put a big butt on that.
1:17:19 And that is that the reason I put the butt on there is because I think it goes together. I think even if you've got a great industry like we do now in the AI and what's going on, but you still have to understand management. You still have to understand their motives and what they're going for.
1:17:43 So I do a lot of background now and my education in forensic accounting helped me there but I do a lot of background study about management and about these people how they treat their employees what their culture is and which like Robin at CL he's giving back to his community. He wants the people in his community to thrive and grow. Most sociopaths and narcissists don't feel that way. They don't care about other people.
1:18:12 They care about number one. And so I look for those things. So there's a lot to unpack there. If we've got a couple more hours, I could talk for a couple more hours and I'll try to synthesize and get it compact for our presentation in New York. But I really look forward to sharing some of those stories and some of the ways that got me into this world of investing which I truly love it. Is fantastic. >> That's wonderful. And Ralph, we have to do that sometime.
1:18:44 We have to put you on the spot and then for you to tell us all of those stories. It sounds fascinating. I wanted to give the audience the opportunity to connect with you if they want. How can they do that? Well, I still have a LinkedIn page. I think it's linked to my firm, which I formally retired a year ago, but it's still linked there. So, I have a LinkedIn page, and you can also email me. [contact details omitted] >> Fantastic.
1:19:21 Thank you, Ralph. I also wanted to mention that not only do we have the event in New York City, we also have an event in Q1. We're still finalizing on the exact date, but it will be sometime in Q1 in Singapore exclusive for mastermind members and manage is going to be hosting that on behalf of TIP. And again, we'll be talking a ton more about that in the next quarter episode between the three of us. But manage, where can the audience engage with you? >> Thanks, D.
1:19:51 This was wonderful and I look forward to the Singapore event with the mastermind members and those who want to connect with me. You can find me on LinkedIn. My profile ID is Manish Karira and I look forward to connecting with you. >> Thank you Manis and thank you Jens. I look forward to inviting you back here for next quarter's episode and like we talked about perhaps we should turn the tables.
1:20:18 Perhaps you're going to be bare next time and Ralph, you're going to find an amazing companies and be bullish. >> Yeah, CPAs are not always negative. I can promise you. >> Fantastic. >> Yeah, great. I look forward to taking the opposite side of the argument. >> Thanks for listening to TIP. Visit the investorspodcast.com [music] for show notes and educational resources. [closing disclaimers omitted]