It's been a rough few months for the share price of S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) favourite JB Hi-Fi Limited (ASX: JBH).
The electronics retailer's stock is trading 19% lower than the 52-week high it posted back in March.
As of Thursday's close, the JB Hi-Fi share price was $46.04.
But one fundie is sceptical of bearish opinions on the stock, saying "it's a great example … of the consensus view being one that [could] be wrong".
Let's take a look at what Forager co-founder and chief investment officer Steven Johnson likes about the ASX 200 COVID-19 winner's post-pandemic future.
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This year has been an ultimately downhill rollercoaster for the JB Hi-Fi share price, but the company's earnings have stayed strong.
In fact, it was only last month it posted its preliminary results for financial year 2022. It recorded 3.5% more sales, 6.8% higher earnings, and a 7.7% increase in after-tax profits compared to those of financial year 2021.
They're results that impressed Johnson as much as they did the market. He admitted that, while Forager hasn't snapped up JB Hi-Fi shares as yet, the company has piqued the fundie's attention. He labelled JB Hi-Fi:
A really good example of something that we are looking at at the moment.
This is a stock that is quite well known by the market … but if you go and look at broker consensus for this business, the assumption about the next two years is that its profitability is going to halve, it's going to go right back to 2019 levels.
Indeed, brokers are split on their outlook for the ASX 200 stock and its share price, as The Motley Fool Australia's Bronwyn Allen recently reported.
But Johnson appears to have seen through clouds of doubt to make out a "thesis … that was once the consensus view". The fundie continued:
This is a wonderful business that has a very, very low cost of doing business [and] maybe it won't shrink as much as people think. And it may even grow over the long term like it has for most of the past 20 years.
The JB Hi-Fi share price is currently almost 6% lower than it was at the start of the year. That means it's outperformed the ASX 200 by around 1% in that time. It has also gained 80% over the last five years.
