We recently published a list of Billionaire Seth Klarman’s 10 Stock Picks with Huge Upside Potential. In this article, we are going to take a look at where GDS Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:GDS) stands against other billionaire Seth Klarman’s stock picks with huge upside potential.
Seth Klarman is a legendary name in the hedge fund space. He entered Wall Street straight out of college, where he worked as an analyst for Mutual Shares Corporation. Klarman then proceeded to Baupost Group, where he has been ever since. Like most hedge fund managers, Klarman has a set of principles that guide his investment decisions. Most of these principles were captured in a 1991 book titled “Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor.”
Klarman has established himself as the foremost proponent of value investing. In fact, this is the central theme of the 1991 book. He advocates for removing emotions from the investing process and seeing opportunities for what they are.
He writes: “Successful investors tend to be unemotional, allowing the greed and fear of others to play into their hands.”
In an interview with the Harvard Business School, Klarman insisted that he is unwilling to abandon value investing for other approaches. He maintained that “value investing is intellectually elegant. You’re basically buying bargains. It also appeals because all the studies demonstrate that it works. People who chase growth, who chase highfliers, inevitably lose because they paid a premium price. They lose to the people who have more patience and more discipline.”
No wonder Baupost is one of the best-performing hedge funds in the world. The fund might have lagged behind giants like Third Point and Elliot in the 2015-2024 period but the ability to stay true to a decades-old strategy and still turn up gains is impressive. Last year, the fund culled approximately 20% of its investing team to try and steer the ship towards larger gains. To this, Klarman commented that “with a somewhat smaller investment team, we have increased the level of energy, focus, accountability, and collaboration.”
And these efforts are already bearing fruit. By December last year, the fund had gained 10%, the first double-digit return since 2021, according to Bloomberg. In other words, after 42 years in the game, Klarman is still able to turn his investment fortunes around. That is why it is prudent to see what stocks are in his portfolio, especially those with a huge upside potential.
Our Methodology
For this list, we combed through Baupost Group’s Q4 2024 SEC 13F filings. We focused only on shares in companies and excluded interests in ETFs and options. From the result, we ranked the stocks in ascending order based on analyst price targets and selected the top 10 companies with the highest upside potential (as of April 29).
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
GDS Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:GDS) develops and operates high-performance data centers, mainly in China. It provides data center services like colocation (space for servers), managed services, and private connections to public clouds. It also offers hybrid cloud management and outsourced data center solutions.
In Q4 2024, GDS Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:GDS) reported a 9.1% year-over-year net revenue increase to RMB2,690.7 million (US$368.6 million) for continuing operations. It stated that the growth came from the ramp-up of its data centers. For the full year, net revenue grew 5.5% to RMB10,322.1 million (US$1,414.1 million). Adjusted EBITDA rose 13.9% to RMB1,297.7 million in the quarter, with a margin of 48.2%.
GDS Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:GDS) executed a landmark transaction on March 10, 2025, which resulted in monetizing a 70% equity interest in certain data centers to a private REIT (P-REIT). The transaction was at an enterprise value to EBITDA multiple of 13 times and yielded net cash proceeds of RMB500 million at closing. This move aligns with the company’s asset monetization strategy whose aim is to reduce its net debt to 5-6 times EBITDA over the next 12-24 months. On March 20, 2025, JPMorgan raised its price target for GDS (NASDAQ:GDS) to $34.00 from $7.50. The analysts maintained a Neutral rating.
Overall, GDS ranks 1st on our list of billionaire Seth Klarman’s stock picks with huge upside potential. While we acknowledge the potential of GDS as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than GDS but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
