2. Visa Inc. (NYSE:V)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 142
Buffett trimmed his Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) stake in Q4 2021 by 14%, and he has held the company in his portfolio since the third quarter of 2011. Warren Buffett owned 8.2 million Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) shares in the fourth quarter of 2021, worth $1.79 billion. Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) is a multinational payments technology company that is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) ceased its operations in Russia and disclosed that 5% of net revenues in 2021 were amassed from Russia and Ukraine.
On January 27, Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) declared a $0.375 per share quarterly dividend, in line with previous, which was distributed on March 1. On December 13, 2021, the company’s board also authorized a new $12 billion share repurchase program.
Erste Group analyst Hans Engel upgraded Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) on February 9 to Buy from Hold. The analyst noted that recovery in international travel will benefit Visa Inc. (NYSE:V)’s transaction volumes.
According to the fourth quarter database of Insider Monkey, 142 hedge funds held long positions in Visa Inc. (NYSE:V), compared to 143 funds in the last quarter. TCI Fund Management held the largest stake in the company, with more than 23 million shares worth $5 billion.
Here is what Artisan Value Fund has to say about Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) in its Q4 2021 investor letter:
“We initiated two new positions in Q4, adding Visa. Visa is a global payments company and is one of the four major US credit card networks (along with Mastercard, American Express and Discover). Visa is accepted at over 80 million merchant locations in 200 countries, interacts with 15 thousand financial institutions and processed 165 billion transactions with $13 trillion of payments and cash volume in the 12-month period ending September 2021. We have always admired Visa’s business, but its valuation prevented it from getting over the hurdle and into the portfolio. As of late, the stock has been caught up in indiscriminate selling as part of a larger unwind trade in a richly valued fintech space. Concerns also exist about Visa’s slowdown in cross-border transactions due to COVID and its net-revenue sharing arrangements with Amazon. This created an opportunity to purchase a very high quality business that benefits from substantial barriers to entry, network effects and several structural growth drivers, including consumer spending growth, the shift from cash to card, increasing ecommerce penetration, market share growth and global expansion. We believe Visa has a long runway for revenue growth as cash and checks continue to lose share. Consumers can’t use cash and checks online, after all. From a “safer” perspective, the company has a rocksolid balance sheet and has a high conversion of net income to free cash flow, which it uses for share repurchases, dividend growth and tuck-in acquisitions.”
