Hamish Douglass strutted his tech bona fides on stage this week with an attention-grabbing performance that drew headlines following his claim that "Uber was one of the stupidest businesses in history".
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Beyond FANG: Magellan's favourite tech stocks
Magellan boss Hamish Douglass shows it's not just venture capitalists who can take on tech stocks, and payment systems have caught his eye.
His other prediction: "The probability of Tesla surviving in the long term [is] actually pretty low as well."
Such claims could be construed as coming from a technology disruption denier. Anything but.
Douglass, who co-founded global share fund Magellan, is a disruption disciple, having moved away from a devotion to a range of international consumer companies that he now sees as dinosaurs.
He is not alone. There are other investment managers, some of whom hitched themselves to the technology investment train years ago and have ridden the rise in the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Douglass grew Magellan by investing in leading global stocks - some of which he now considers are becoming victims of technology - the likes of Procter & Gamble and US retailer Target.
But standing before a conference this week and declaring Uber is likely to be broke in 10 years, Douglass is marketing his firm's credentials as one that has evolved.
The message he is actually trying to convey is two-fold. First, that investors shouldn't be swayed by big or familiar tech brands such as Uber and Tesla. Rather, look under the hood at the business model because some just don't stack up.
All tech is not good tech. And just because they are big today doesn't mean they are safe investments.
Tesla, despite producing only a small number of cars, is worth more than Ford, and Uber is now valued at $US68 billion ($91.6 billion), having raised billions from investors in what Douglass likens to a Ponzi scheme.
Tesla and Uber currently operate business models that are based on driving cars when Douglass sees driverless cars as the future of consumer transport. He believes Google is ahead in the race for autonomous vehicles.
The other plank in his investment thesis is to beware of companies that are currently churning out big profits but will become victims of technological disruption down the track.
Staying with this metaphor, he thinks that when driving your investment portfolio, you must be looking into the distance and not in the rear-view mirror. Say five or even 20 years down the track. We know that the companies that dominate the US market today - such as Amazon and Google - were relative minnows 10 years ago.
The trick to investing in new-economy companies is predicting winners in the midst of a technology-based revolution in which the rate of change is exponential and disrupters can become disrupted.
By way of example, Microsoft demonstrated last year it could translate the whole of Wikipedia from English to another language on its Azure platform in a 10th of a second.
"We are entering a period in history over the next 10 to 20 years where there are going to be fundamental challenges and disruptions to many business models in the world," Douglass says.
"And [while] people have been saying that is not delivering any productivity gains, I would argue strongly that's because we are sitting between two industrial periods in history."
The previous revolutions was about industrialisation and globalisation and the one we are seeing today is the digital revolution, he says.
The industrial revolution and later globalisation led to massive productivity gains, which have now been well and truly harvested. The new era of disruption will be just as momentous.
We have already seen early signs in industries like media and music, but Douglass argues this is but a small taste of what is to come.
"We would argue if we look 10 to 15 years out, we are going to have disruption of scale similar to what we saw in [the] industrial and globalisation revolutions."
"If you go to human knowledge, it has never really been automated but we are within five to 10 years away from software programs written to truly automate human knowledge and what is missing is computer understanding of natural language."
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos believe we are five to 10 years away from computers being able to understand everything that's written in Wikipedia, not just translate it, he says. It would be a massive breakthrough in artificial intelligence.
"Once that happens, the big revolution will be able to attack service and knowledge-based industries at scale ... we can add manufacturing like 3D printing which could completely change the paradigm of manufacturing and where goods get manufactured in the world."
So what about the Amazon effect? We are already seeing the value of retailers across the globe being re-rated down on the back of the impact of Amazon.
Douglass says that even a company like Procter &Â Gamble, with one of the most formidable line-ups of consumer brands on the planet -Gillette, Pampers, Tide - which has historically traded at a long-term multiple of 20 times earnings, will be, in the the future, subject to mass disruption by Amazon.
"They [P&G;] have been so powerful because their business model has been supported by traditional advertising, which has largely been television," Douglass says.
And the world's largest advertiser works in partnership with the big retailers like (US) Woolworths and Tesco.
So what traditional companies are safe from the technology onslaught?
Try Coca-Cola, McDonald's and even Starbucks and Nike, he says. People still eat, drink and exercise.
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