The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast

Great Growth!

Rakaan Kayali

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Great Growth!

In this episode, we will cover:

  • Intro & Market Conditions
  • Bitdeer and Iris Outperform Peers
  • April Update: Iris Energy Revenue & Valuation
  • Bitcoin Mining Growth & Profit Margins
  • Shift Toward AI & High-Margin Cloud Services
  • Potential AI Deals & Microsoft Comparison
  • Expansion Plans: Childress & Sweetwater Sites
  • Value of Infrastructure & Strategic Positioning
  • Viewer Q&A: Tesla, Bitcoin Strategy, Taking Profits

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salam@practicalislamicfinance.com

ABOUT OUR PODCAST
Our podcast is about helping people ethically build wealth. We cover a broad range of topics, including stock and crypto investing, product reviews, and general financial well-being.

DISCLAIMER
Anything you hear in this video is an opinion. It is not personalized financial advice. Make sure you do your due diligence before making any investment decisions.

assalamu alaikum everyone I hope you are doing well today is tuesday may six and the markets are wait in wait and see mode we're waiting for the fed decision which will be to hold rates as is if the market's pricing is any good and we're waiting trade deals which have yet to transpire. And it's kind of surprising that no trade deals have transpired, like not even with smaller economies, let alone with China. So that is giving investors pause. And right now, you can see the markets are kind of paused in terms of their movement, flat all around. Dow Jones is down half a percentage point. S&P is down point four percent. NASDAQ is down point sixty three percent. The VIX is up slightly. The dollar index is below one hundred. We are seeing a lot less demand for U.S. Treasuries and understandably a lot less demand for U.S. dollars. So we'll see how that shapes up in terms of movers today. Bitdeer had a nice move of five percent. Iris Energy is up five percent as well. So our two picks for in the Bitcoin mining field have increased. really outperformed their peers and continue to do very well. By the way, if you aren't a PIF member, make sure to become one and join our community. Gold is back up. We're now at thirty four hundred. Bitcoin is at ninety four thousand five hundred. Doge is at sixteen cents. But I do expect it to recover, inshallah. I did want to take today's live to go over the April update that we got today from Iris Energy, one of our holdings, as I mentioned, in PIF portfolio. Salamat, amen, nice to see you. The update was, I think, quite good. Great growth across the board. And really, it's important to remember in these times what Jeff Bezos said he experienced with Amazon and the dot com. bubble bursting he said the stock price was collapsing referencing Amazon but the business was growing and so I was not concerned and I think similar things are happening in certain pockets of the market where you have growth you have healthy growth but the stock price is not reflecting that and therefore creating an opportunity. And let's look at the growth here in Iris Energy. So we got fifty two million in monthly revenue. Keep in mind, this is currently being valued at around one point four billion. So if you annualize the monthly revenue, we're talking six hundred million. So it's basically trading at just above two times sales forward looking sales for the next twelve months. um and then if you take into account appreciation and bitcoin and perhaps moving a greater percentage of their business uh to the higher margin uh high performance computing and ai then we may even be trading at less than uh two times um forward-looking sales which may even have a greater margin profile than what we have right now. So this seems to me like, you know, it could easily be we're at one point four billion. It could easily be at five billion in the next twelve to eighteen months. Um, so there's, I think a lot of appreciation, uh, potential here, but let's look at the numbers. So mining capacity for Bitcoin increased to forty X a hash mid month. This is very encouraging, not just for. their Bitcoin mining capacity, but it's also encouraging in terms of the competence of management. They seem to be hitting all of the goals that they put for themselves and they're on schedule. This is something where you get comfort from the idea that, you know what, I'm not really sure perhaps about you know, the macro in the near term, but the management is competent enough that they'll they'll figure it out, as is evidenced by their execution, their steady execution, which has been on time. They're on track for their fifty X a hash goal by June thirtieth. Miners scheduled to ship from Southeast Asia during the ninety day tariff pause and cloud services continue to grow. We did hear uh about a a pivot that the company wants to make from being bitcoin mining first to being sort of gpu as a service ai first horizon one ai data center on track for second half of twenty twenty five and customer and financing work streams progressing So this is something that we're going to need some more color on eventually. I mean, they keep saying they're in talks with customers, they're in talks with customers, but we haven't really seen a deal being done. we need to see that. And I think a deal could get it to that five billion valuation that I referenced in a pretty quick fashion. If you look at Microsoft, for example, they did a deal, a power purchase agreement for, I think, from twenty twenty six till twenty thirty. And the value of that deal was close to ten billion dollars. And that was for ten gigawatts. If you have two gigawatts like Like Iris Energy has one of its sites at two gigawatts. Imagine even a tenth of that contract would be more than what the market cap of the company is right now. Sorry, a fifth of the, you know, ten billion valuation that was put on the Microsoft contract would put us at around two billion, which is more than the market cap of one point four billion, which is what Iris is trading at right now. All right, so looking at Bitcoin mining and the progression there. So February, which is not too long ago, February of this year, they were at twenty eight seven exahash. They're now at thirty six six. So really massive growth here. The Bitcoin mind continued to grow, which is excellent. It went from four hundred and fifty nine in February to five hundred and seventy nine in April. This is excellent because it means the share of the overall network is growing. They're growing faster than before. They're competitor miners and they're doing that in an environment where mining is at its hardest levels that it has been historically. So that's very good. Revenue per Bitcoin, we did see a dip in the price of Bitcoin in April. So for April, it was eighty six thousand. Still pretty respectable. That's not in any way in the company's hands. Eighty six thousand electricity at twenty four thousand. So their hardware profit, which is basically the revenue from Bitcoin minus electricity, came in at thirty six million. And then you add to that. So the hardware profit margin, seventy two percent. I don't really like looking at that number because it doesn't take into account depreciation, which is really everything that is involved in Bitcoin mining in terms of expenses. But they're just looking at electricity costs. Their margin was seventy two percent. AI cloud services still, you know, very, very small at two million. It is growing. So in March it was one point six. In February it was one point two. So we're headed in the right direction. But this has the has the opportunity to be doubling from month to month once they have the infrastructure in place to do it. And the hardware profit margin on that is ninety eight percent. So ninety eight percent versus seventy two percent. I would much rather them being be in the ninety eight percent business than the seventy two percent one. And that's what they said they want to be. So I expect a shift here. And with that shift, a change in the margin profile for the business. And with that change in margin profile, a change in the valuation that investors are assigning this business. Management commentary, we're proud to have expanded our manning capacity to forty exahash, remain on track for fifty exahash as we said. Our Horizon One project scheduled for twenty twenty five commissioning represents a key catalyst for Iron's entry into AI data center. It also lays the foundation for scalable liquid cooling deployments across our broader platform. We talked about their Bitcoin mining margins. They're mentioning EBITDA of five hundred eighty eight million. Again, I don't like looking at EBITDA because it doesn't take into account depreciation and amortization, depreciation being the big one. Revenue grew for AI cloud services, twenty seven percent month over month. Fleet near full utilization. So they're going to need to really expand their fleet probably an order of magnitude in terms of their Nvidia GPUs. AI data centers, customer and financing work streams progressing for Horizon One. That's fifty megawatts. With the range of structures under consideration, I just want a deal to be announced. So we understand that this is not just a theory, that this is actually something that can be implemented. So they need to get on that, working collaboratively with suppliers to manage tariff impacts. Childress is basically four out of the five phases are done. Five hundred megawatts now fully operational. Phase five includes an additional one hundred fifty megawatts. So Childress will have a total of seven fifty megawatts. And they're on track for H-II second half of twenty twenty five commissioning. So that's exciting. Sweetwater one will have one point four gigawatts. That's energization is on track for April twenty twenty six and then Sweetwater two. energy energization late twenty twenty seven that will have six hundred megawatts. So if you just look at the Sweetwater locations on their own, they have two hundred gigawatt, I'm sorry, two gigawatts of power. And that's already. I mean, they already have the the power to energize those sites. And their arrangements to energize those sites. And so, you know, if someone wanted to offer a similar product, it would take years for them to acquire the land, acquire the energy that they need and build the infrastructure. So as AI is increasing in terms of its use and it becomes it consumes more and more energy. Sites like what Iris Energy have in places like Sweetwater, which I think Texas will be a big hub for these hyperscalers, the value of these locations and the cash that can be generated from them will be quite substantial. All right, this is their... geographical locations right now. So as we mentioned, Sweetwater in Texas, Childress is in Texas as well. And then we can see here in the growth, data center growth, and they are currently. So we're here for the first half of, in twenty twenty five, we should reach eight hundred and ten megawatts. So everything seems to be on track for this company. I look forward to when they ink that first deal with a customer, a hyperscaler, hopefully. That will really, I think, help the case for its stock. With that being said, let's go to questions very quickly. Salamat, everyone. I'm not really comfortable with Sukuk's. They seem like basically interest-paying contracts. No, Hamid says, will the Robotaxi event make or break Tesla stock? There's been a lot of events in Tesla's history. None of them have made or broken Tesla stock. Some of them bullish, some of them bearish. It's a toss-up what the Dune event ends up being, but I think the general trajectory of the company is a good one, Yunus says. um for iris and bitdeer versus btc I do expect faster appreciation I do expect them to act you know when things go really well for bitcoin I do expect him to act as a leverage play on bitcoin Uh, should we start selling bit by bit while going up? Are we in the era that every moment in the market can collapse? I do think that taking profits is always a good idea. And so, um, you know, bit by bit is the way I would do it. Obviously you want to, you know, uh, while you're, uh, while you're on your way up, you want to take just enough profits so that you're okay. Um, if it goes down, but if it goes up, it continues to go up, you're also okay with the position that you kept remaining. And obviously, when we reach that sell price target that we have, then you start thinking about maybe even closing out the position if the valuation gets too extreme. So with that being said, leave a like if you enjoyed this live, become a PIF member if you aren't a member already. Until next time, make sure to take care of yourself. Assalamualaikum and peace be upon you all.