How about a company that has better operating margins than Apple? Way better. That’s TPL, the best company you’ve never heard of–according to a long excellent story about the company by Aaron Gell at Business Insider. Oh and those margins–consider Apple’s at an impressive 30%. And then consider TPL’s at 90%! That’s the kind of thing that makes a stock grow 41% a year, which TPL has done since 2009. TPL stand for Texas Pacific Land Trust and that’s all it has–land. Which it slowly sells off a little at a time–it has just a little under a MILLION acres left. (TPL started with 3.4 million after the railroad went bust more than a century ago.)
Here’s Gell on the strange beauty of TPL from an investor’s viewpoint: TPL “manufactures no products and provides no services. It has never released a killer app or built a game-changing innovation, and it controls no patents. It maintains no factories, facilities, equipment, machinery, or inventory, nor does it carry any other meaningful expenses, aside from eight employees occupying a modest 27th-floor suite in a bland office tower in Dallas’ City Center. It has no competitors, no liabilities, and no debt.”
