Rob Forker of Polen Capital Management presented his in-depth thesis on Kakaku.com (Japan: 2371) at Wide-Moat Investing Summit 2019.

Thesis summary:

Kakaku.com is an e-commerce company that owns and operates different websites. Its two primary assets, kakaku.com and tabelog, each have dominant market share positions in favorable industries and can grow at attractive organic growth rates and generate strong free cash flow. Kakaku’s management team has a successful track record of allocating capital to R&D and strategic and opportunistic M&A. Rob views Kakaku.com as a “flywheel” company; with the passage of time, the enterprise should get stronger and the competitive moat should widen.

Listen to this session:

slide presentation audio recording

About the instructor:

Rob Forker joined Polen Capital Management in 2018. He is the lead portfolio manager of the International Small Company strategy. Prior to joining Polen Capital, he worked for ten years at Loomis, Sayles & Company with six of those years dedicated to the Global Opportunities Fund as a senior equity analyst and four years as an equity analyst in central research. Before business school, Mr. Forker worked at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers on the institutional trading desks. He received his B.A. and M.B.A. from the University of Virginia. Mr. Forker is a member of the Boston Economic Club.