Bruce Greenwald: Warren Buffett says that when he retires, there are three people he would like to manage his money. First is Seth Klarman of the Baupost Group, who you will hear from later in the course. Next is Greg Alexander. Third is Li Lu. He happens to manage all of Charlie Munger’s money. I have a small investment with him and in four years it is up 400%.
Q&A:
Q: I wanted to ask you about BYD. I heard that you thought it was important for them to introduce a model to the US and wanted to know why you thought that.
Li Lu: That might be a better question to ask the BYD chairman than myself. Well, If you are just talking about electric vehicles, you know the key — the heart and soul of the electric vehicle age the heart is the battery. There is the battery, electric motor, and the electric control control panel. The electric motor has been there for 100 years, control system is software that can be improved over time.
The battery is really where you get the biggest appreciation and is what determines the value of the electric vehicle. 100 years before the Model-T was introduced, the competition between electric vehicles and gasoline was not nearly as optimistic. Up and till then, 1/3rd of cars being produced were electric. It wasn’t until Rockefeller got oil extracted easily enough that it worked. Henry Ford was able to make the internal combustion work even though it wasted 85% of the energy. He was able to build the engine and produce automobiles that were cheap enough for people to buy and it took off. That is where you find the real winners.
Now, years later, we know that the way that oil is burned contributes to global warming. If it continues, the planet might still be here but all the human beings might not. Human beings have only been on the planet for a tiny bit of the earth’s history. So there are all sorts of good reasons for electric cars. Battery development has advanced so much that it is now comparable to the price and performance of traditional cars. So now with the help of companies like BYD, the balance is about to tilt towards where performance and price are getting to the level that makes them a desirable alternative. It will be desirable everywhere. Eventually, if you have a car that does all that, it will be sold everywhere.
Q: What about BYD versus others in the industry?
Li Lu: The market will determine that.
Q: Yeah – but why BYD versus others?
Li Lu: Well because we also studied all those other guys. We will see when the winner emerges whether we are right or wrong.
Q: Right – but what did you look at to reach that view?
Li Lu: There are a lot of people who have worked over 100 years making great cars. The technology for building a traditional car has been refined enough to where it can be learned in a short period. The place we are still seeing a curve of continuous rapid improvement is with the batteries for cars. Whoever is leading the charge will have a major advantage. There is really only one company that is a leader in battery manufacturing and automobile manufacturing. There is only one company. To put this together you need a Ford to put that together. So far those two elements need to be put together. It is not an easy process.
Q: We read your profile online. I had a question – do you have any problems when trying to invest in China?
Li Lu: Yeah I do have some difficulty. I did not really see a factory plant at BYD until the end of 2008. I really did not have a better understanding till then. That really causes you to question what it is before you make an investment. With investing, you have to work with imperfect information because you are buying a piece of the future. I did not really get a chance to get more information because the problem in Asia till much later but it did not stop me from making my investment decision. So there is a point, where if you have enough margin of safety– that is why I kept coming back to the elementary concept of margin of safety– you can allow much more uncertainty and unknowns. So the answer of the question is does that stop you from making the investment? No.
Q: So I did some research on lithium ion batteries, and I saw that BYD has a manufacturing advantage with consumer batteries. But I saw that automobile batteries are much more complex. I did not think that the idea of a good consumer battery manufacturer + an automobile maker made much sense. So when Buffett looked at the stock maybe it was a better deal but today it is this dream of vehicles that is really priced in. It does not feel like a good value investor stock. So why would you own it today?
Li Lu: Well that is interesting. One of the most fascinating things about being an investor is that surprises are part of the game. When you get into situations like BYD, you see lots of good surprises. Chuanfu and his team have this fabulous culture, everything people thought they knew turned out to be a few years late. He got into battery manufacturing in that particular way because he really had no other option. He had no money, he only had $300,000 in venture capital funding before IPO and that was it. He raised money in an IPO and Buffett gave him $200M, now they have 160,000 employees. $6-7B in revenues, $500M in net profit. It is amazing. So he has this ability to adapt in a competitive environment. He has demonstrated that ability again again and again. The way he does automation is far cheaper than anyone else and more reliable. He continues to surprise me with his ingenuity, to figure out ways to do something better than everyone else. What he is currently doing is very different than what everyone else has done. At the end of the day, you might look at what he has done.
So how do you look at it as an investor with imperfect information? Well I suggest you look at what he has accomplished. 8 years ago I had no idea they would go into the automobile or laptop or cellphone battery business. So that demonstrates how he is. This investment is not easy to understand because it is changing so fast, at such a large scale. An almost unheard of speed. Their manufacturing capabilities will double soon. This year they will hire 10,000 college graduates, 8 or 9 thousand engineers. The scale is almost unparalleled. So this is why the study of history, of all the great corporations will give you a good insight in seeing what will happen with BYD. I suggested that we start with GM and analyze its performance every 5 years for 100 years to understand at least one aspect of BYD’s business.
Q: What is the difference between being a top political criminal in China versus a hedge fund manager today (referring to the ire directed at Wall Street)?
Li Lu: I don’t consider myself a criminal. I don’t think China considers me a criminal. What I think we are doing today with our investment in BYD in China is really helping China march towards a modern era of prosperity. BYD is providing a solution to both China and the US, to migrate from the past to a way that gets us out of the unsustainable carbon age that we live in. Global warming is a vital concern to every human being, so China is providing a great contribution to everybody with BYD. America has had a great history of invention and here is a great company in China that is about to make a major contribution to human civilization with cheap electric vehicles and solar power.
Ultimately we will have to get our energy from the sun. Most of the energy, even fossil fuels (plants that die and then go into the ground), all originally come from the sun. So if you can figure out a way to take energy from the sun and power vehicles, while using batteries to store it, inexpensively — will really make renewable energy power everything. The combination of those things holds the key to the future of industrial civilization that we are about to embark on. We didn’t set out with BYD with this in mind, it just happened that way. With great companies, it only looks logical in retrospect. Think about how Bill Gates started Microsoft. I don’t think he knew up front that he would take the entire market — at that time it did not exist. It is the same way with our investment in BYD. Ultimately, I think finding an inexpensive way to store energy that we harness from the sun will be a huge contribution for both China and the US, but more broadly our entire civilization.
