What opportunities has Aziz seized lately?
June 11, 2026
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7 min
Aziz Hamzaogullari, Founder, Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager of Loomis Sayles’ Growth Equity Strategies Team (GES Team), has a long-term, private equity approach to investing. He holds a business for 8-10 years on average and in a typical year would only buy one or two new companies, though periods of heightened volatility can throw up more opportunities than normal. In this Q&A we asked Aziz about the new additions to his portfolios as well as updates on some of his current holdings that have been making headlines lately.
Loomis Sayles is currently celebrating its hundred-year anniversary and the GES Team its 20th.
OpenAI has become one of the largest customers to some of your largest holdings. How do you model out their ability to make good on their commitments to companies you own, like Oracle?
AH: We have owned Oracle for almost 20 years now. In that timeframe, Oracle has been written off many times. Oracle is now approaching the cloud business from an infrastructure perspective. They're not just selling the infrastructure, they're also selling the database and applications that go with it which are high margin businesses. And it's very true that OpenAI is the largest customer for Oracle, as is Microsoft. Actually, Microsoft, which owns 22% of OpenAI, also has roughly 30-plus percent of their backlog related to AI infrastructure build tied to OpenAI.
We are buying the core Oracle business, which is the database and applications, at a discount to our estimate of the intrinsic value that comes from those two businesses, despite the fact that it is growing at 20-plus percent for the first time in 10-plus years.
OpenAI is not the only driver of AI. So even if OpenAI only takes 50% of the capacity from Oracle that it has said it would, the remainder is fungible, so Oracle can sell it to someone else. But the other important thing is that people need to understand each data centre is around $50 billion. And of that, 65% of the cost is GPUs and networking equipment that are sold by NVIDIA. And you buy that at the very end. So you build the shell of the factory and then you buy your chips at the very end. So if this slows down, they can simply say, "I'm not going to build the next data centre, or the third or fourth or fifth data centre." This is not happening all at once.
And lastly, Larry Ellison owns 40% of the company. So similarly, in 2022, people were worried about Meta spending too much on the metaverse, we reminded people that he [Zuckerberg] would be impacted more than anyone on this earth. Stock price matters to these guys, not only because of their own wealth, but because that's how they pay their employees. We believe that OpenAI actually is a real company. They're growing, so is Anthropic. These are big disruptors. We believe that Oracle is really well positioned. And we're buying all the upside for free. We are not paying for, at this point, any AI-related profit or revenue. So that's why it's a large holding for us, and we still have a substantial position in Oracle.
In your Global Growth Fund you bought Ferrari. Are you worried about buying a company that has received a lot of negative press lately?
AH: In the case of Ferrari, actually, it’s the opposite. We have been looking into Ferrari for a long time and this recent period of share price weakness gave us the opportunity to buy it at what we believe is a significant discount to its intrinsic value.
The competitive advantages for Ferrari are, number one, they have a very powerful brand - in terms of scarcity, like Hermes and its bags. There's a substantial brand power, proven by pricing power, market share, and residual car values. This is a 75-year-old business and 90-plus percent of the Ferraris that have ever been sold since the beginning of the company are still out there.
So when we look at this business in terms of brand, this is not another car company. People are not buying this for transportation to the grocery store or for the daily commute to work. The average demographic of Ferrari is a person 50-plus years old with not only money, but also time on their hands. They have a 35% market share of the ultra-luxury auto market. The cheapest Ferrari starts at $200,000 plus, but their newest car, the SF-90, is roughly $4 million and then it wouldn't be unusual for customers to spend at least a million dollars on top of that $4 million to customise a car. And the car is already sold out.
And on top of that, every Ferrari you see that's racing on the track, once that car is retired after a year of usage or whatever, they put it into an auction for Ferrari owners. And then whoever wins it doesn't take the car home, they ship it to Ferrari headquarters, and the only time the owner uses it is on the racetrack. And when they want to race in Austin, Texas, they get the car shipped to them, they drive it for a week and they ship it back to Ferrari, and they pay all the costs. So, a typical car depreciates 40% to 60% of its value in the first three years. A Ferrari holds its value because of that scarcity.
And in the supercar market, which is the $300,000-plus market, they have an incredible position. They still get 5% of the revenues from F1 because of royalties and their contribution to F1. The whole market has grown at around 7% and the ultra-luxury market also grew at 7%. We expect that growth to continue. This is not a volume story. They're not like Porsche going and trying to sell many cars in China. Enzo Ferrari, who started the company, said, "My philosophy is to sell one car less than the market will bear." Their goal is not volume growth. It’s really through pricing and mix that they're going to get future growth.
We got an opportunity to buy the company because of the short-termism of the market. People are worried about when the production of the SF-90, their new car that's already all sold out, will take place. It will take place over the next two/three years, and then the revenue will hit the income statement. We took advantage of that reluctance by other shareholders. And of course, now we also have the Middle East, which is around 5% of their sales, most of which they are going to be impacted by that too and finally there has been the negative reaction to the release of their new electric vehicle. But all of these are short-term headwinds that provided us the opportunity to buy a great company like Ferrari at a substantial discount to our estimate of intrinsic value. Don’t forget we hold a company for, on average, 8-10 years so we are very comfortable with this purchase.
The deal between Netflix and Warner Brothers didn't work out. Does this change your view of Netflix?
AH: We were visiting the CEO and the rest of the management team of the company in California right after they announced that they wouldn't go through with this deal.
The reason why we like this company is that it's a scale business. Netflix has 300 million-plus subscribers. They make more money than everyone else combined - actually, everyone else is losing money in streaming except Disney. Netflix has spent $120 billion in cumulative investments in terms of content generation since 2015. They generated 14,000 hours of content, which is twice the next five competitors combined, and this creates huge barriers to entry.
You're not going to get subscribers unless you have content. To have content, you have to spend. And it's not just the quantity, it's the quality. When you look at measures like Emmy awards or other awards, Netflix is number one in high-quality content production. And on top of that, they have very attractive financials because of the scale. They have around 20% margins while everyone else is losing money. And we believe that over the long term, they're going to have mid- to high-30% range operating margins.
It's a founder-led business, like 50% of our portfolio. In terms of growth, they have substantial growth left, especially outside of the US. One thing that they really disrupted in the streaming market is that most US companies would produce in the US and export to the rest of the world. Netflix was very smart in understanding that they can generate local content that addresses the local market. This is very, very difficult to do. Actually, when you talk to other companies, this may take 10 years-plus.
And on top of that, they have 300 million subscribers so they know what we are watching and can give us more of what we want. This technology isn't available to anyone else. Actually, I talked to Disney's CEO two years ago, and he talked about how difficult this is to do, how difficult it's to replicate. He was very open about it. We believe that there's substantial pricing power left. In the US, you're paying the equivalent of a movie ticket price and you're getting 14,000 hours of content. I think it's a great deal. In Europe and the rest of the world, the pricing is much lower, and there's also a substantial number of places outside of the US where the penetration is still quite low.
In terms of the deal, we like the fact that they basically said, the moment Paramount increased their stake in terms of price, they dropped out of contention within a day. They said they liked this content, but only at a certain price.
Interview conducted on 2 April, 2026
