DISCLAIMER: This is not investment advice. The author might own, buy or sell shares without advance notice. The assumptions might be flawed or outright wrong. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
Publishing research is a good way to get constructive feedback. With regard to my Norma Group Special situation post from earlier this day, one friendly person reminded me that there were at least two cases in Germany of big Buy back tenders in the past which had separable tender rights. I didn’t remember them, neither did Gemini.The two cases were:
In both cases, for every share you owned, you “only” got a “partial” tender right, i.e. for Rocket, every share got a right to tender only ¼ of a share. The Rocket internet case was very special, as Oliver Samwer “gifted” his tender rights to activist investor Elliott.
But the principle is clear: In order to tender more than your relative share, you had to buy additional tender rights. You canot just hope that someone doesn’t tender and you will then benefit.
So far, with Norma we don’t know if and how they will offer these separable rights, but this could change and require more active involvement especially when the tender rights are trading.
I just wanted to put this out. I have not sold or bought any shares because of this. I need to research the two cases and potential other cases more closely.
DISCLAIMER: This is not investment advice. The author might own, buy or sell shares without advance notice. The assumptions might be flawed or outright wrong. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
DISCLAIMER: This is not investment advice. The author might own, buy or sell shares without advance notice. The assumptions might be flawed or outright wrong. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
Executive Summary:
Norma Group, a previously PE owned German manufacturer of small connector parts, is planning to use part of the cash it received from selling a division to buy back a significant percentage (>30%) of its outstanding shares via a tender offer at a premium of up to 20% compared to the current share price.
Although there are some moving parts and the overall case turned out to be more complicated than I thought initially, this represents a potential uncorrelated special situation for 3-4 months with an expected (probability) return of around 13% based on my assumptions.
Norma Group Background/Introduction
Norma Group has clearly seen better days. IPOed in 2011 as a previously PE held company (3I), the stock price did well until 2019 before then losing -80% when the stock price reached a low of below 10 EUR per share in early 2025:
Interestingly, according to TIKR, Operating margins had been on a downtrend since the IPO date and EPS peaked in 2017, but until 2019 no one bothered too much:
Norma was active in what they called “joining technology”, mainly connectors and other small parts out of metal and plastics for industrial applications, the car industry and “water applications”. Here a sample picture:
Norma said that they already paid back most of their debt and will keep 70 mn for investments into the remaining business and use the rest to buy back shares.
However, that only partially resolved the Excess Cash problem which leads us to this
The special situation: A 30% (plus) buy-back tender at a (up to) 30% premium
Three weeks ago, Norma announced a 208 mn EUR share repurchase tender at a premium of “10% to 30%” to a certain reference price.
Under German corporate law, in this case the AGM has to approve this decision before the board can formally issue a tender offer. The AGM will take place on July 1st in Frankfurt.
The long stop date for both, the acquisition and the cancellation of the shares is February 27th 2027
The buy back premium will be between 10% and 30% (the management board has signaled that they are going for 30%) compared to a certain “reference price”
The total amount that will be spent is 208 mn EUR in any case
Shareholders will receive a dividend of 0,14 EUR after the AGM in any case
That reference price is defined as follows
Initially I thought that this was referring to the date of the initial board resolution,which would have translated into a reference price of 15,62 EUR, but after an in-depth discussion with Gemini, I think it is the 90 day period prior to actually publishing the offer.
At the time of writing, the current 90 day average of Xetra closes is 16,09 EUR and increasing as long as the share price is at the current 17 EUR as we can see in this chart:
That the upper cap of the buy-back price is 20,87 EUR which is a “fair value” estimate by the Management
This is how this has been derived:
The Management Board has therefore, in preparation for the Capital Reduction proposed to the Annual General Meeting, commissioned a valuation of the Company in accordance with the IDW S1 standard as at 31 March 2026. This valuation resulted in an average value of EUR 20.87 per NORMA Group Share as at that date.
Looking back: How did the first tender offer in March work out ?
In March, Norma made a buyback tender for 16,59 EUR per share for up to 10% of the total share capital.
This was released on February 26th 2026. The closing price the day before was 14,92 EUR per share, so ~10% premium. The offer period ran from Feb 27th to March 27th.
Interestingly, 18,1 mn shares or around 57% of all shares were tendered, which is a lot for such a small tender with a relatively small premium. As only 10% of the shares were available, only 17,6% of the tendered shares were bought back. We will look at this later once again.
Interestingly, as we can see in the chart, the share price reached a high of 17,10 EUR on the day after the end of the tender period. One week later, on April 7th, the share price reached a low of 13,78 EUR, around -20% vs. the tender offer price:
Maybe that had to do with the release of the 2025 numbers on March 31st and the news that the CEO would step down.
The current Tender: What we don’t know
As I have outlined above, we know certain things about the tender already, but not everything. The main variables that we don’t know are as follows:
What will be the ultimate premium & share price at which the tender will take place ?
Although they state that the buyback will happen at a range of between 10-30% above the reference price, certain wordings indicate that they will go towards the high end. The most telling sign is the wording in the supplement to the AGM invitation
“The price clause described in section 2.2 enables the Management Board to offer shareholders a repurchase price closer to the intrinsic value of the share.”
For me, this is a very strong indication, supported by their largest shareholder, which will join the Supervisory board, that they will aim for the upper end of the range or close to their “fair value”.
Just to show the numbers:
With 16,09 as reference price, the low end of the range would be 17,70 EUR per share, whereas at the high end would be 20,87 (capped by the “Fair value”).
What will be the acceptance rate of the tender ?
If we assume the 20,87 as the ultimate tender price, this would translate into 208 mn/20,87 EUR = 9,97 mn shares which represents 31% of all shares or ~35% of all shares ex current treasury shares.
So if all shareholders tender fully, the minimum acceptance rate for every shareholder should be 35% (around 2x the acceptance rate from the first offer)
Another assumption is that Teleios, the 17,15% shareholder, will not want to lower their stake when they simultaneously join the board. So if we assume that they tender only 35% of their shares, we can assume that another 17,15-(0,35*17,15%)=11,2% of shares will not be tendered for sure.
This translates into a “worst case” acceptance rate of around 40% for the scenario with the maximum purchase price.
On the other hand, it is also very likely in such cases that not everyone tenders. I will solve this issue by creating several scenarios and weighting them with my subjective probabilities. More on this later.
At what price will one be able to sell the shares that are not accepted in the tender
This is clearly a tricky one, but it is also necessary to assume that one in order to be able to calculate an expected return for this special situation.
My assumption here is that one should at least get the current reference price of 16,09 EUR per share. I will share some thoughts on the potential value of the “stub” at the end of this post.
Actual timing of the offer
To be honest, I am not 100% sure how fast they can execute after the AGM approval. There might be some regulatory requirements (entry into the company registry) or maybe some of the usual suspects will try to blackmail the company with legal challenges.
But my assumption would be that the tender offer period starts in August and will be concluded in September. So from today, the time required for this to fully play out will be 3,5 to 4 months.
AI excursion: Analyzing the potential tender rate and resulting Acceptance rate
One main element that one needs to estimate is the percentage of shares that will actually be tendered. I have mentioned in the beginning, that in the first tender, 57% had been tendered with only 10% available, resulting in a relatively small acceptance percentage of 17,6%.
Based on empirical evidence, a higher premium increases the tender rate, but a bigger tender size relative to the outstanding shares increases the acceptance rate.
I asked Gemini to analyze tenders from the past years and estimate a regression. Interestingly, tender ratios are often quite low and acceptance rates much higher than one would normally think.
This is what Gemini estimated for a 30% Tender with a 30% Premium vs. a 10% Tender with a 10% premium both, in the US and Europe:
According to their regression, a 90% Acceptance/Allotment should be expected and only 30% of shareholders would tender. Now this sounds to good to be true and the first tender of Norma earlier seems to have been already a clear outlier.
So looking at historical data clearly helps but in any case one has to make one’s own assumptions for this case.
Overall; I do like to use AI models as a sparring partner especially in these Special Situations. Although one needs to get used to its “cocky” behaviour, I do think the discussions and additional analysis improve the process and hopefully, in the long run over many transactions, the outcome.
Return estimation based on a 30% premium to the reference price:
So now we have everything to estimate an overall expected return, of course based on all the assumptions I described above.
Here is my return estimate based on the 30% premium (capped at 20,87 EUR) and on a current share price of 17 EUR (including the dividend and 16,09 selling price for not tendered shares):
So 13,3% “expected return” over 3,5-4 months is not too bad given the current 2,25% short term interest rate in EUR.
Of course this is based on my assumptions that I have laid out above and different assumptions lead to different results.
Many of the uncertainties will go away over time such as:
The AGM will take place on July 1st. After the AGM we will know if someone wants to play games with the tender offer or not and how a realistic time table will look like
Once, the legal requirements are met, the management will formalize the offer and we will then know the actual premium
Finally, after the end of the tender period, we will know the final acceptance rate and then also the share price for the shares that can not be tendered
What happens at the low end, a 10% premium ?
This would of course be less attractive but one needs to consider the following: Norma intends to spend the full 208 mn, so the assumption here would be that they buy back more shares and the acceptance ratio will go up. The minimum acceptance would be 47%.
Also, there would be more value for the stub, but I will stick with the 16,09 EUR as selling price for the non-tendered shares. The probability of the acceptance rates also needs to be adjusted upwards.
Based on these assumptions. my return expectation looks as follows:
So at the low end which is basically almost the worst case, I would have a return of ~2% based on a current share price of 17 EUR. Only in the worst case, when basically everyone tenders, there would be a small loss.
So based on my assumptions, the situation looks like a pretty cheap “option” on a potentially higher acceptance ratio.
Some thoughts on the “Stub”:
If we assume that the tender gets through and that the shares will go back to 16 EUR per share, we will have a company that has around 18,7 mn Shares outstanding at a market cap of 18,7*16= 300 mn EUR if they pay the 30% premium
They plan to have a net cash position of 70-90 mn EUR by the end of 2026 according to their Q1 presentation, so EV would be between 210 and 230 mn EUR.
For 2026, Norma expects 820-830 mn EUR in sales and a 2-4% “adjusted EBIT margin” which would translate into ~16-35 mn in “adjusted EBIT”. At the midpoint, this translates to 25 mn adjusted EBIT or an EV/Adjusted EBIT multiple of 8,4-9,2x.
In the case of a 10% premium and a 16 EUR share price, the market cap would be ~270 mn EUR and EV/EBIT between 7,2-8,0 x EV/EBIT.
Not “dirt cheap” but not expensive either. In the second half of 2026, they plan to present a “2028 strategy”.
I think despite the relatively unexciting business, the valuation of the stub is cheap enough that I think that from a fundamental side, the downside risk is limited to a certain extent after the execution of the tender. Of course, if there is an overall market crash, no one cares about fundamentals anyway.
One important point here: For the time being, I am not planning to bet on a turn-around.
For me this is a Special Situation investment and I will exit once the tender is settled.
Technicalities:
This is an interesting detail from the invitation to the AGM
To the extent technically possible with reasonable effort, tender rights trading (Andienungsrechtehandel) is to be established.
The shareholders’ declarations of acceptance are taken into account according to shareholdings by tendering the tender rights attributable to the shareholding as well as any additional tender rights acquired from other shareholders.
So this means that there might be a mechanism that similar to a capital increase with subscription rights, in this case the tender rights might be split of from the shares and traded separately.
I haven’t seen this before and if this is implemented, it could create a special situation in itself, if those rights might trade higher or lower than the intrinsic value. So from that perspective there might be an additional “option” to improve the outcome
Timing option
As we have seen in the example of the fist tender, during the official tender period, the shares had already approached the tender price. Depending on how this is structured, I will definitely make sense to tender rather late in order to keep the option of selling the shares at a decent price before the execution of the tender.
If we have separate tender rights, then the opportunity will be mostly in analyzing the tender rights as mentioned above.
Summary:
At the current price of 17 EUR, I do think that the upcoming tender offer of Norma Group offers a decent return to park some cash for 3-4 months at an expected (probability weighted) return of 13% (not annualized).
Even at the low end, under my assumptions one would be able to make a 2% profit and the very worse case would result in a small loss (less than 1%).
For a special situation, I think there is also a lot of additional optionality baked into this whole process which in my opinion outweighs the uncertainties.
There are still a couple of moving parts and the tender is rather complex, so my overall allocation to this is rather small at 3% of the portfolio.
I will watch this very closely and I might increase the position if the price goes down or if new positive information comes in and the price stays low.
What I do like is that the risks are very specific and not much correlated to the overall market, which makes it attractive for the “opportunity” part of the portfolio.
I guess that also the complexity of the offer creates an opportunity here.
DISCLAIMER: This is not investment advice. The author might own, buy or sell shares without advance notice. The assumptions might be flawed or outright wrong. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
This is a 12,5% increase (ex dividend) from the initial offer. Less than I expected but it seems the board off DCC is already happy with this:
Having carefully evaluated the Revised Proposal together with its advisers, the Board of DCC considers that the financial terms of the Revised Proposal are at a level which the Board of DCC would be minded to recommend to DCC shareholders should a firm intention to make an offer pursuant to Rule 2.7 of the Irish Takeover Rules be announced by the Consortium on the same financial terms, and subject to the satisfactory agreement of the full terms and conditions of any offer and satisfactory agreement and execution of definitive transaction documentation.
Just to be clear here as a reader asked why the price did not directly jump to the offer price.: KKR hasn’t made a formal offer yet. This is so to say the “pre-discussion”.
Looking at DCC’s long term share price, the offer price equates roughly the share price DCC had 10 years ago:
Looking at the historical P/E, we can also see that 2026 was the period in time when people thought that DCC is a 24x NTM P/E business:
As DCC’s board seems to have already accepted the bid, the only further upside would be now a counterbid from another PE fund or a strategic buyer.
I am not sure how probable that is, but maybe not 0% either.
Such rumours are actually not rare in these situations. Sometimes they are launched by hedge funds who might not want to wait until the offer is executed but get out close to the offer price long before that. In other cases, the rumour actually becomes true.
Wise Plc – What is the potential impact of the AML issue
I think what is important to know is that the subsidiary in Belgium is not a tiny little subsidiary but basically handling all Euro transactions for WISE. I guess this has regulatory reasons.Unfortunately, Wise doesn’t report what percentage of its volumes have one leg in EUR, but it is clearly a very significant currency.
The size of a potential fine
The question that I had and tried to solve with AI is the following: Suppose Wise is “guilty”, what would be the fine they would have to pay and what or the other consequences ?
In reality, without making this to sound harmless, these kind of AML issues are not that rare, so there are precedents.
Here is what Gemini is saying:
the maximum charge from a criminal perspective (if guilty) in Belgium is “only” 1,6 mn EUR
the maximum penalty from an administrative side could be up to 10% of sales or in Wise’s case around 190 mn EUR
In practice, the fines often seem to be a level of 1% of the volume. So overall, Gemini estimates the fine to be in the range 5-10 mn EUR. Which would be not so much.
Indirect costs: More compliance
The more critical part could be cost increases through additionally required Compliance functions. Gemini estimated that total compliance costs (which the estimate at 260 mn GBP at Wise) could increase by 30%, which would be around 80 mn GBP/100 mn EUR per year, which would be quite significant.
I think that is maybe an over-estimation, as so far, this only concerns the European operations. but still, 10-30 mn EUR per year could be realistic.
A further risk is that more compliance also maybe means less customer satisfaction and slower growth.
If we take May 29th as a reference, where the share price was at 9,35 GBP, as of the time of writing, the share price is down ~1,15 GBP or -12%. In monetary terms, Wise lost more than 1 bn GBP in market cap.
Payment in general has a difficult time in 2026
Another aspect is that payments in general are not doing that well in 2026. I have collected a small peer group here where Wise is still one of the better performers:
So where does that leave us with Wise:
For me, it is currently too early to say if and how this could impact Wise in the future. The share price drop clearly prices some pain and AML is always a risk for money transfer businesses, but I am not 100% sure if now is the time to increase the position. So I personally will wait for the next 2 or 3 quarters to see if growth keeps up and maybe add then.
If the share price falls significantly from here, I would rather sell and watch.
Last week I mentioned in the comments on the blog and on Twix that I got some “bad vibes” and decided to liquidate my Rocket Internet position even before the planned SpaceX IPO next week.
There were overall 3 things that kind of spooked me and let me to take the profit (+30%) instead of waiting the one more week. Here are the 3 items:
I mentioned initially, although it was not part of my investment thesis, that there might be a chance of a special dividend. Now it has become clear that there will be no special dividend. However, it also became clear that Rocket Internet intends to limit information flow to shareholders even more in the future which is clearly not positive
SpaceX: Another news item that spooked me was that SpaceX is aggressively pitching via German brokers for German retail investors. German investors had never access to US IPOs before. Some might find this positive, I find that rather “surprising” and potentially a hint that demand is not high enough for Elon’s appetite.
Another surprising event was the “surprise Capital increase” from Alphabet/Google. Interestingly, this represented the largest capital increase of all time at 85 bn USD but there was only very limited coverage about it in the financial news and mostly about Berkshire’s participation. But more on this later
Overall, I decided that the “easy money” was now made with Rocket internet and I was able to sell at around 25,80 EUR per share, netting a profit of 30% within 5 months, which is clearly one of my better “Special situations” investments.
I am not 100% sure that the share price increase was driven by SpaceX, maybe the rapid increase in the value of the Kalshi stake helped as well. I am not sure if there are a lot of other “plays” to benefit from KalshI’s incredible growth.
One could argue that I left some upside on the table here but the success of this investment is almost 100% depending for some time on someone else paying me more for the shares that I paid for, which is something I don’t feel too comfortable for a special situation investment.
Overall, I was clearly lucky with the timing on this one.
2. More SpaceX thoughts: Hyperliquid Perps and Damodaran
As mentioned above, we now know that Elon loves Germany so much that at the time of writing, German retail investors can now access this IPO via 8 or 10 different retail brokers.
According to some sources, in order to compare apples to apples, one would need to discount the price by 10% to make it comparable to the actual SpaceX shares. That means on this “grey market”, a synthetic SpaceX share only trades at ~153 USD, above the 135 USD “sticker price” but inside the 135-162 USD bookbuilding range.
Although no one knows for sure if this has any relevance, it is at least a reference point and it seems to be traded quite liquid.
Another interesting source is the attempt of a valuation by Prof. Damodaran. What I like about Damodaran is that he at leasts tries to put values on these kind of situations and is very transparent with his assumptions. I know most tech bros laugh about these attempts but I think avery serious investor should read what Damodaran writes because there is always a lot to learn.
In a nutshell, Damodaran values SpaceX at about 100 USD per share. The ain changes to his initial, pre prospectus valuation is that he increased the margins for the Space and Starlink business, but significantly decreased the expected margins for the AI business.
“My biggest shift is in my estimated target margin is for the AI business, where the dynamics that are pushing gross margins down, i.e., increased competition and high costs of delivering AI services, will persist; my estimated operating margin drops from 45% to 25%. “
Damodaran is also smart enough to mention that in the first days after the IPO, valuation clearly doesn’t matter at all. But within the first 12 months or so, even for SpaceX, reality will need to be met somehow.
For me however the main take away is the significantly reduced margins for the AI business which leads me to the:
Surprising 85 bn USD Capital increase of Alphabet
Being a Corporate Finance/Treasury guy by training, the news that Alphabet is raising 85 bn USD via a capital increase really surprised me.
According to the FT, this is the largest capital increase in the history of capital markets, the second largest was Petrobras in 2010 at around 70bn.
The financial press focused mainly on the 10 bn stake that Berkshire Hathaway took as part of the package. To be honest, this is a very small amount of money for Berkshire’s current size. It is also hard to really judge how good of an investor Greg Abel actually is.
The interesting thing about this capital increase is that so far, at least in the ~40 years that I follow stock markets, capital increases in size only occurred in the following situations:
Primary share portion in an IPO
Emergency capital raising in a crisis ( e.g. Banks in the GFC)
Major M&A transaction where the acquiring company pays with new shares (Paramount)
In Google’s case, clearly none of the three situations applies. According to TIKR, Alphabet still has net cash despite ~100 bn in bonds outstanding. So in theory they could issue a lot more debt.
I heard the argument that Equity is “cheaper” than debt as the interest rate on a debt offering would be 5% whereas the “earnings yield” at the current 30x P/E is “only” 3,3%. However this does not reflect the tax shield from interest and especially not the fact that Alphabet’s earnings will most likely increase for the foreseeable future and that very soon that “earnings yield” for the issued shares will be much higher than the current 3,3%.
This is the main “justification” of Alphabet for the capital raise besides a 30 bn additional tax bill:
If you read this carefully, it is clear that they could still fund the 2026 Capex more or less with operating cashflow, but already in 2027, they plan to spend much more than that.
The really interesting thing is clearly: What are their plans beyond 2027 ? My best guess is that they plan with even larger investments that are not offset by operating cash flow.
But even so, why not wait until 2027 or so when they have a clearer point of view ? And I think here comes something into play which in my old Corporate Finance days was the golden rule of financing: “Raise when you can, not when you must”.
I think the Alphabet guys might have seen SpaceX’s announcement, they know that OpenAI filed for an IPO and that Anthropic will come to the capital markets as well.
As large as the listed capital markets are, there is only so much appetite for capital increases. Maybe they even fear a significant market correction which would require them to issue a much larger number of shares for the same amount of money.
Funnily enough, there were rumours that even Meta seems to think about raising large amounts of capital to fund their AI Capex programs.
One other factor that might also play a role here is that both, Private Credit and Private Equity which have been offering significant amounts of capital so far fight with redemptions themselves and are potentially overallocated to data centres already.
To me it is pretty unclear where all this is going. However one thing now is clearer to me:
The capital required to scale up this technology is larger than even the latest and best funded players like Google expected.
In my opinion, this means that it is very unlikely that we see 5 companies scaling this in parallel on their own (Alphabet, Meta, OpenAi, Anthropic & SpaceX). 1,2 or even 3 of those players might fold at some point in time or would need to collaborate really closely with someone like Microsoft or Apple to stay in the race. Or get help from the Orange guy in some sort.
Scrutinizing Data Centre Infrastructure orderbooks
For ordinary investors this might also mean to better scrutinize order books of companies that are supposed to profit from a further AI build out and trade at high multiples themselves.
At the moment, it is enough if a company releases “AI data centre” contracts to justify sky high multiples. I guess going forward, maybe even sooner than later, one really needs to understand from which counterparts those contracts are. Because not all of them might be actually turn out to be valuable.
In any case, as someone who loves capital markets, this is a great time to be alive and witness what is going on at the moment.
Let’s start with the most disappointing update first: EVS Broadcast got slammed down after their Q1 trading statement:
I think three items spooked investors, including myself:
First, after confirming the guidance, both in the CEO and CFO statement, the press release suddenly contains this sentence in the Outlook section:
“In particular, the current situation in the Middle East may affect full-year revenue performance and could lead EVS toward the lower end of the guidance range. At the same time, given the strength of the pipeline and the opportunities currently identified, we believe there remains potential to offset this impact through execution in other areas of the business. “
Second, once again they mention that the 2026 year will be “back loaded”, i.e. investors will have little visibility how things will develop until the end of Q4.
Longer time EVS shareholders know that they always guide cautiously, but 2026 as an “event year” should have been a very good year and now it looks that it will not be materially better than the year before.
Anyway, at the moment I am clearly not increasing my position in EVS, rather the opposite. It was one of my larger positions and I think unless something changes (like maybe a big share buyback program), I will remain rather cautious.
Jensen Group
Luckily enough, my second Belgian stock, Jensen Group, is the exact opposite of EVS. Once again they started with a great quarter into the year and are “firing on all cylinders”.
The numbers look fantastic, the only question is why net income only rose by +10%, but maybe there was a tax effect:
They keep buying back shares ( a new 10% buyback program has been approved), book-to-bill is >1 and despite a new all time high, the stock is still cheap as earnings grow as fast as the stock price goes up.
There is currently Absolutely nothing to complain with this company besides the fact that investors think that 11xP/E is the right valuation for such an outstanding company.
Wise Plc
Wise Plc finally listed on the Nasdaq and as a consequence, I do now have a Nasdaq listed share in my portfolio. The share price went up before the listing and actually reached its peak on the day of the listing on May 11th, only to drop significantly in the aftermath:
The listing for me was not the ultimate reason to invest, but of course it is interesting to see how much the stock dropped directly after the listing.
Although not exactly so, this resembles a little bit wehn Ferguson (Wolsely) moved its primary listing to the US in March 2022. As we can see in the historical chart, the stock outperformed significantly before that move but then underperformed for some time thereafter:
Sunbelt rentals (the former Ashtead) also so a drop in relative performance a few days after its listing in the beginning of MArch 2026, but that is most likely due to the start of the Iran war:
Anyway, from a fundamental side, there hasn’t been any change with regard to Wise’s prospects, so no action there.
Interestingly, the Canty family now has ~88% of the shares and is extending the offer to all other shareholders. Interestingly the 500 EUR are almost the all time high from 2021:
Installux is an interesting case study insofar as the family clearly had very little incentive to show to the outside how good the business actually is. Their long term mission was clearly to get full control of the company. Amiral really had a lot of patience here.
At the end of the day it shows that if you invest into shares like Installux, timing and patience is really everything. You either have to get in when they are extremely cheap or be lucky to be there when the family finally wants to gain full control.
On the positive side, the Canty family never did anything fishy and the final offer seems kind of fair.
DISCLAIMER: This is not Investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
A lot has happened since I published my Rocket Internet write-up from the end of January. Just as a refresher: I found Rocket Internet interesting, despite some Governance issues as the “sum of the part” value was significantly higher than the share price back then and that it offered some relevant & discounted exposure to Elon’s SpaceX IPO.
But before we start, I would recommend to click on the following link and get David Bowie’s Space Oddity as a nice background sound for reading this post:
My time horizon for this would be either the (Rocket) AGM or the actual SpaceX IPO. On Polymarket,the odds are 60% for an IPO before end of Q3 2026
Compared with two other “SpaceX Proxies” that I mentioned, EchoStar & Alphabet, Rocket actually did quite OK if we look at the chart:
The real Space Superstar: OHB SE
However, the real “Performance Rocket” would have been another German stock called OHB:
OHB, a German/Bremen based Satellite manufacturer went parabolic despite having a really small free float after KKR acquired a significant portion of the minority free float at 44 EUR in 2023. Initially they wanted to delist but then kept the listing.
The main reason for this increase seems to be that OHB is included in a very popular ETF called Tema Space Innovators ETF with the great Ticker NASA.
This ETF is one of the fastest growing ETFs ever and currently has a 5% allocation in OHB. At around 1,4 bn AUM, that’s around 60 mn EUR in OHB. As most of the OHB shares are held by the founding Fuchs family and KKR (together ~94%) and some specialized “Squeeze out” players, there seems to be a pretty hard squeeze on the few remaining shares.
I also guess that you cannot short OHB shares. Operationally, OHB has been doing okayish, but nothing that would justify a 130x P/E.
In any case, this is a monster deal for KKR who (obviously) plan to exit while its “hot”. I am pretty sure that after that exit, OHB will be one of those “Christmas Tree” charts that we know from the Covid times.
Back to SpaceX
Elon seems to target a valuation of 1,75 tn USD, that would be the upper range of what I assumed in my January sum-of-the part valuation. However, “old” SpaceX shareholders from the beginning of the year have been diluted by ~20% after the “merger” of SpaceX with XAi, so we have to take this into account.
I am sure that Matt Levine will write and say much smarter things than I do about the SpaceX IPO, so here are just some observations:
The S1 prospectus contains some really nice pictures of rockets
Overall, SpaceX is clearly much more resembling a giant “Elon Venture Fund” than a normal company. I think I read this in one of Matt Levine’s newsletters about Tesla. Elon has assembled a relatively loosely connected group of companies (XA, Twitter, SpaceX, Starlink, maybe Cursor) with which he can more or less credibly jump on any new hype that will come his way.
Like the VC giants Sequoia or A16Z, he has two talents: To raise funding and to attract (a certain type) of tech people with which he can at least create the appearance of riding the next big thing.
If Ai hits a brick wall, Elon finds something else like maybe Quantum computing or he will merge Neuralink into SpaceX or become the Number 1 in obesity pills.
His hardcore fans are not looking for earnings but to ride the next hype
A lot has been already said about the “total Addressable Market” figures from the deck which equal the US GDP.
The great thing about both, the socalled “Space economy” and also AI is, that both at the moment seem to have indefinite TAMs. Mathematically, even a small slice of something indefinite is worth an indefinite amount of money.
So that’s clearly much better than something like earth bound EVs where there is a clear ceiling or humanoid robots that just don’t work and where the Chinese are obviously much better.
I am pretty sure, Cathy Wood or someone similar will come up with an “analysis” that SpaceX is worth 100X from wherever it is trading.
A nice contrarian take can be found at the “Wertegang” Substack with the nice title : SpaceX is a Zero. Here, my friend Dirk argues that the SciFi bestseller “The three body problem” clearly shows that reaching to the stars is pretty risky from a cosmic perspective (Dark Forrest theory). But I am pretty sure that if needed, Elon will also promise to manufacture Pocket Universes in one of his Gigafactories.
What I am really curious about is, if Elon manages to really hype two companies, Tesla and SpaceX at the same time. Also, how will the typical “Elon retail hardcore supporter” react ? If he/she is a real Elon fan, he/she will have all of their money already in Tesla (plus maybe some more). But of course, they want to have SpaceX exposure, too. So will they sell their Tesla shares to get a 50/50 allocation ? I think this will be interesting to observe.
Anyway, the SpaceX IPO is great financial entertainment and might only be topped by an OpenAI IPO in autumn.
Rocket Internet Update
In the meantime, Rocket Internet has “published” its 2025 annual report. Interestingly they did revaulue their participations upwards to a certain extent. After a loss of -550 mn EUR in 2024, they now show a profit of 750 mn EUR. It seems that the letter from Scherzer AG to the auditors did have some effects.
If I would be in the Microcap Stock promotion game, I would maybe post something like: “Hidden Perfromance Rocket trading below NAV at 3x P/E ratio”, but economically the shown profit is pretty meaningless.
On the negative side, there will be no large cash distribution and Rocket seems to intend to make the company even less transparent going forward.
In any case, I updated my valuation sheet, including some “bug fixes”. Again, this is a quick and dirty exercise and definitely not investment advice !!!
Here is the new sheet:
The main changes that I made were some haircuts on Software companies andTraveloka and adjusting Kalshi and SpaceX for the most recent values. For SpaceX I incorporatedthe 20% dilution from XAi and a new range of 1750 to 2000 mn USD as valuation. For Kalshi I used the 22 bn valuation and implying a further dilution of 10% from the YE 2025 number.
This is a quick comparison between my old and the new exercise:
We can see that the Upside NAV is more or less the same at 53 EUR per share vs. 54,5EUR despite the “haircuts” applied to Software, but the downside valuation is singinifcantly higher, mainly because of the expected valuation of SpaceX at theIPO and the recent Kalshi round which was only a rumour in January.
The upside to the NAV is of course lower, as the shares gained ~+30% since the write-up.
As mentioned in the beginning, I will keep the shares until the IPO hoping for some more irrational exuberance around the SpaceX IPO. Unless I’ll change my mind earlier 😉
A little bit similar to DCC, EQT tried at first a low ball offer, but had to increase that offer 3 times within a time frame of ~ 4 Weeks.
This is how the bids developed per share
1st April 10th: 51,50 2nd: 54,00 3rd: 58,00 4th May 13th: 60,00 plus 1.07 final dividend accepted
So from the first to the final bid, the bid price increased by almost 20%. Interestingly enough, after rejecting the third bid, EQT threatened to walk away but obviously didn’t.
What I find quite interesting is, how volatile the share price behaved after each rejection, it traded down significantly below the bid price after each round.
Another interesting point to mention is that at the time of writing, the Intertek share price trades more than 10% below the bid price. A certain discount is normal, but this looks quite wide as I do think that the deal is relatively certain to close.
So Intertek might itself be an interesting “Merger Arbitrage” situation.
So what does this mean for DCC ?
Looking at how things worked at Intertek, one should expect some volatility around further bids from KKR and maybe several rounds of rejection and threats to walk away.
I would expect that, as with Intertek, an overall 20% uplift on the initial bid would do the trick which would be an offer of ~70 GBP/share. For anything below that, most shareholders would just point at Intertek. But as in the Intertek case, one should not expect that DCC will then directly trade up to the bid price.
If the DCC price overshoots my 70 GBP target in between, I would maybe sell a part of the position.
DISCLAIMER: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!
Summary
In this update post, I look at two of my French stock positions, STEF SA and Gerard Perrier. For STEF, I reduced my position by 1% of the portfolio because of problems with the integration of newly acquired companies. In contrast, I increased my Gerard Perrier position by 1,5% of the Portfolio as business is accelerating and they seem to have made some very good acquisitions in the Defense/Aerospace and Digital space.
STEF SA
Stef is a company that I analyzed and wrote about 2 years ago. In essence, I considered it a cheap but reliable infrastructure-like cold-storage company with a great track record that is consolidating several European markets. For such a “compounder”, the price looked very cheap at around 8xP/E.
However, things turned out a little differently than I thought. While 2024 was a little bit weaker than 2024, 2025 saw a significant decline in EPS to a level of less than 50% of the 2023 earnings.
According to the 2025 investor presentation, this was a combination of one-time effects (Tax France, VAT Italy) and slower than expected integration success in its recent acquisitions.
The dividend was cut to 2,70 EUR from 4,15 EUR the year before (and 5,10 EUR in 2023). This is understandable from a company perspective but somewhat unfortunate for investors.
Analyst estimates seem to expect a recovery in 2026 and the following years according to TIKR:
Share price wise, the stock is almost exactly where it was when I wrote up STEF. Interestingly the US peers did much worse:
Both US peers are extremely highly leveraged (8x EV/EBITDA) and therefore very vulnerable to negative economic developments. However, also STEF’s net debt to EBITDA ratio increased from 2,5x in 2023 to 3,5x in 2025. Still manageable but if interest rates increase, this will represent another headwind for them.
My conclusion at this stage is that Stef clearly has over-extended itself with its acquisitions in the neighbouring countries and has not been able to integrate them successfully so far.
Management mentions that things should “normalize” in 2026 and Q1 revenue looked ok, but experience shows that the full integration of the newly acquired company can take much more time.
Although I am not ready to throw in the towel yet, I do think that my initial 5% allocation (currently 4,5%) was too high and reduced the position by 1% of the portfolio to ~3,5%.
The positive aspect of this story is clearly that I bought cheap enough which protected me against a significant loss of invested capital.
Gerard Perrier
On the surface, Gerard Perrier is a little bit similar to Stef insofar as 2025 was a year when earnings went down slightly:
Despite still growing sales, EPS was -8% lower than in 2024. 2024 again was more or less unchanged from 2023.
In Gerard Perrier’s case however, the explanation is not that they didn’t integrate new acquisition but a temporal weakness in their Energy segment which comprises mostly the servicing of the French nuclear fleet.
This is the translation (from Gemini) from G. Perriers report:
“The activity of the Energy division (ARDATEM, TECHNISONIC), which includes services for the nuclear sector, saw its production decrease by 8.2%, falling from €89.8 million to €82.4 million. This slowdown is mainly explained by the transitional effect of the reduction in reactor outages and maintenance activities at power plants this year, as well as by a rationalization policy of nuclear operations in France, although the sector remains on a positive dynamic in the medium term.”
As we can see, especially the “Installation Maintenance” and the Aerospace/Defense segments are doing well.
What I found interesting is that there was almost no reaction to this news in the share price:
What I do like is that their recent acquisitions look very interesting. With N-Cyp they acquired a small specialist company for industrial cyber defense, with OFATEC they get access to the Data Center market and with the acquisition of the three companies AQLE, SOMALEC et SOMALEC SUPPLY they strengthened their defense/aerospace segment, including components for the Ariane Space missile program.
Another data point that I found interesting is that G. Perrier has still around 230 open positions as per their web site:
Most of the jobs are open at Ardatem (137), the Nuclear service company, which seems to imply that they expect a lot more work going forward. Overall, I do think that Gerard Perrier offers a very attractive return/risk profile especially on the basis of the currently accelerating business numbers, therefore I increased my position from a previous 3,5% weight to 5% of the portfolio. The additional 1,5% were bought at an average price of around 83 EUR per share.
value and opportunity 