Question:
A couple of questions on MasterCard (NYSE:MA). Visa (NYSE:V) benefits from a lot of the same secular trends that MasterCard does; so I am curious why you guys own MasterCard and not Visa. Secondly, if you could comment on some of the recent acquisitions that MasterCard has made, and the strategic and financial rationale, if you agree with those.
John Harris:
Let’s see, why do we own MasterCard instead of Visa? There is not really a good answer. We should have owned both. We should have owned more of both. We should have owned a lot more of both. It is a tremendous mistake for which I bear significant responsibility. So that is the answer to that.
The acquisitions — I have to be honest with you, and this is self-deprecating and not intentionally so — I have had a tough time understanding many of the acquisitions that these two companies have done over the years. Not just MasterCard, Visa also. Visa plunked down a sizeable amount of money to buy a business called CyberSource, which worked for a couple years and now is not working so well. There is an understanding at the card networks that things will eventually change. It has been remarkable and surprising to me how slow the pace of change has actually been and how as threats have emerged, they have quickly gone by the wayside. It just turns out that the network business model is incredibly resilient. But there is some concern — subconscious, whatever you want to call it — that eventually things may change and that the change is going to be driven by technology. So there is a desire on both of their parts, especially when new CEOs took over at both companies I noticed a marked increase in this desire, to try to ramp up the pace of innovation hopefully to head off some of the technological threats that they see on the horizon. The fact of the matter is that Visa and MasterCard have not traditionally been terribly innovative organizations. They were cooperatives for most of their lives and overseen by bankers. That is all you need to know on that subject.
They are doing their best. To be totally honest, they feel like part of being innovative and doing a good job is buying small innovative businesses. Whether any of them have really added anything, there certainly is no perceptible evidence. It is possible that at some point in the future we will find out that MasterCard is able to adapt to technological change because of some small acquisition it did in the past — it is entirely possible, but I do not see any evidence of it. In the past, for the most part the deals the company has done have been so small that they have had a nonmaterial impact on the financial progress of the business. This year that has changed a little bit. MasterCard did a couple of deals that were pretty meaningfully dilutive to its earnings so that the company is going to have the slowest rate of earnings growth it has had this year since we have owned the stock and since it has been a public company — we have owned it for its entire life as a public company. A lot of that is foreign exchange, which is a real headwind this year. Part of it is those acquisitions, which are detracting in a meaningful way from the earnings.
Bob Goldfarb:
As to why we bought MasterCard rather than Visa, we bought MasterCard in the first few days that it went public. We should have kept going, as John said. Visa went public later and it was priced off MasterCard, which was selling at a significantly higher price at that time than when it went public.
From Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb Investor Day 2015 Transcript Part I.
