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Friday, September 18, 2026

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@evantindell

Evan Tindell on X

Finally got a chance to go through the $UMG earnings... Obviously, a disappointment on revenue growth and margins, which saw the stock drop like 20%. Subscription revenue was 6.7% organically, and the street was looking for >9%. So, a big miss. Still, I think things should improve. Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube music have all raised prices this year, and a portion of that will go to UMG. CFO Matt Ellis said on the call that these prices and "better market share to start the third quarter" make them "cautiously optimistic" (really sticking his neck out there!!) that growth will improve in H2 of 2026. Interestingly, Warner Music $WMG managed to grow revenue 12% in CC and adjusted OIBDA by 24%, so clearly this is a UMG-only problem, at least for this quarter. $UMG trades at 14x earnings on a NTM basis now... this seems pretty reasonable if not downright cheap for a company that has grown EBIT from EUR 1b in 2019 to around 2b today (11% organic EBITDA CAGR). We own this through Bollore, which currently has an NAV of just above 11 EUR by my calculation vs a last price of under 4 EUR. Notably, JPM thinks new AI tiers in Spotify and Apple Music will drive ARPU growth of 300 bps per year. Their price target was 48 EUR prior to the recent earnings release...
@convequity

Convequity on X

Himax and the parallel optical bet $HIMX sits in two places in the optical stack: micro-lens arrays that route light into fiber, and a more speculative but potentially transformative position in microLED-based CPO. The microLED idea inverts the industry’s core assumption. Instead of fewer, ever-faster InP laser channels, it uses hundreds or thousands of simple low-speed lanes (4–10G each). High-speed SerDes and DSP largely disappear, energy drops below 1 pJ/bit, and the continuous-wave InP laser is eliminated entirely — replaced by GaN microLEDs from the display supply chain. Reliability improves and failures become graceful rather than catastrophic. Reach is limited to a few meters and the fiber-bundle ecosystem is still immature, so the technology is confined to short-reach scale-up. It remains pre-revenue and more debated than it was a few months ago. Yet the process know-how from Himax’s high-density display drivers maps unusually well onto this architecture. The stock is up ~55% YTD but down ~18% QTD, and currently trades around 31x EV/FCF and 10x EV/GP. For anyone who still sees a meaningful path for CPO — and views the microLED route as high-upside optionality rather than pure speculation — the current levels look like a reasonable place to build or add. We go deeper on the microLED architecture and its place in the broader optical stack in Part 4 of our Photonics series at Convequity.

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QNT: The 100× Question

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Enerflex LTD

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Research Roundup Vol. LII

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Monte Independent Investment Research

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