Is PDD Holdings (NASDAQ:PDD) A Risky Investment?

Legendary fund manager Li Lu (who Charlie Munger backed) once said, ‘The biggest investment risk is not the volatility of prices, but whether you will suffer a permanent loss of capital.’ It’s only natural to consider a company’s balance sheet when you examine how risky it is, since debt is often involved when a business collapses. As with many other companies PDD Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:PDD) makes use of debt. But is this debt a concern to shareholders?

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Generally speaking, debt only becomes a real problem when a company can’t easily pay it off, either by raising capital or with its own cash flow. In the worst case scenario, a company can go bankrupt if it cannot pay its creditors. However, a more frequent (but still costly) occurrence is where a company must issue shares at bargain-basement prices, permanently diluting shareholders, just to shore up its balance sheet. By replacing dilution, though, debt can be an extremely good tool for businesses that need capital to invest in growth at high rates of return. The first thing to do when considering how much debt a business uses is to look at its cash and debt together.

See our latest analysis for PDD Holdings

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As you can see below, PDD Holdings had CN¥5.18b of debt at September 2024, down from CN¥16.0b a year prior. However, it does have CN¥308.5b in cash offsetting this, leading to net cash of CN¥303.3b.

Zooming in on the latest balance sheet data, we can see that PDD Holdings had liabilities of CN¥180.0b due within 12 months and liabilities of CN¥8.29b due beyond that. Offsetting this, it had CN¥308.5b in cash and CN¥13.9b in receivables that were due within 12 months. So it actually has CN¥134.1b more liquid assets than total liabilities.

This surplus suggests that PDD Holdings has a conservative balance sheet, and could probably eliminate its debt without much difficulty. Succinctly put, PDD Holdings boasts net cash, so it’s fair to say it does not have a heavy debt load!

Better yet, PDD Holdings grew its EBIT by 132% last year, which is an impressive improvement. That boost will make it even easier to pay down debt going forward. There’s no doubt that we learn most about debt from the balance sheet. But ultimately the future profitability of the business will decide if PDD Holdings can strengthen its balance sheet over time. So if you want to see what the professionals think, you might find this free report on analyst profit forecasts to be interesting.

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