YB new stock pitches (Fri, May 9)

Maravai LifeSciences (MRVI) trades at just 3x guided 2025 revenue with a $550M enterprise value, offering a quality business with substantial upside. The company's base business alone (~$190-200M revenue with 45-50% EBITDA margins) justifies the current valuation, while investors get free optionality from 134 clinical-stage mRNA/gene editing programs using MRVI's proprietary CleanCap technology (30% market share of 447 total trials). This pipeline could generate $600M in annual revenue long-term, with $50-100M incremental revenue possible within three years. The high-margin Biologics Safety Testing segment (75-80% gross margins) provides additional value. MRVI's controlling PE owner GTCR (40-50% voting power) recently replaced management and board leadership, potentially positioning for a take-private transaction at a favorable valuation. Key catalysts include pipeline clinical wins in cancer vaccines or mRNA flu vaccines, activist or GTCR actions, and a return to operating leverage as revenues increase. Despite recent accounting issues ($3.9M revenue timing error and $11.9M non-cash goodwill impairment), these are minor timing issues that don't impact the long-term thesis.

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Snowflake Inc. (SNOW) was re-established in the portfolio after a pullback from February highs due to broader market retreat, CEO transition concerns, and questions about AI competitiveness. Confidence in the company has strengthened following meetings with new CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, whose short tenure has already shown significant impact. Under his leadership, Snowflake has accelerated product innovation for AI use cases, enabling enterprises to utilize leading AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The integration of open table formats like Iceberg allows customers to leverage Snowflake's query engine across datasets 100-1000 times larger than those currently on the platform, while maintaining core strengths in ease of use, governance, and data sharing. Management has improved the go-to-market strategy by aligning product and sales efforts, adding technical-overlay teams, adjusting compensation schemes, and implementing sales enablement efforts to drive customer acquisition and expansion. Sales teams are now incentivized to promote use-case expansion and increased consumption, aligning with Snowflake's consumption-based revenue model. The company operates in the large, expanding data intelligence market that is becoming critical within the AI ecosystem, presenting an attractive growth opportunity.

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Marubeni Corporation (8002.T), a Japanese Sogo shosa trading conglomerate founded in 1858, has diverse business interests spanning power, infrastructure, manufacturing, mining, and food/agricultural products (accounting for half its revenue). The company has demonstrated impressive financial performance with a 10% FCF CAGR over 7 years, reduced its debt-to-equity ratio to 0.70, and achieved an 8.97% ROIC in 2024. Management has outlined a strategy to improve capital efficiency by divesting unprofitable businesses, maintaining a 40% dividend payout ratio (current yield 3.94%), moving up the value-chain to capture greater margins, and expanding into healthcare through acquiring Sumitomo's pharmaceutical business in Asia. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has acquired a high single-digit stake, with Buffett indicating a long-term holding perspective. Using a DCF model with 5% FCF growth over 10 years, 2% terminal growth rate, and 8% discount rate yields a target price of ¥3,650 compared to the current price of ¥2,536 (trading at 8.5x P/E and 1.09x P/B), suggesting Marubeni is currently a value buy.

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