value and opportunity

Kabel Deutschland

Man, this looks like I got it really wrong. According to some press articles, now Liberty wants to buy Kabel as well for 85 EUR a share. So there seems to be a bidding war before even the first official bid has been announced.

The interesting point of this “red-hot” news is that Liberty has already once tried to buy the former Telekom Cable network in 2002 but this was not approved by the German Kartellamt.

How realistic is this ? I am not sure. Just in February, the German Kartellamt blocked the takeover of the smaller rival Telecolumbus by Kabel Deutschland itself because even the combination of KAbel Deutschland and the smaller rival was a problem for them.

So what is going on here ? I have no idea, but to a certain extent it looks like one of the best “stock promotions” ever. What kind of M&A process is this when everything “leaks” to the market ?

For some market participants, this doesn’t matter anyway. My “favourite bad research provider” Makor (yes, those guys who use the wrong formula to calculate fair prices after right issues) has the following recommendation viea Bloomberg:

We recommend initiating positions in Kabel shares, as we consider the shares trading about fair value in the context of a possible offer. However, given the strategic interests for the potential buyers (Vodafone, Liberty Media), a premium is probably justified and notwithstanding regulatory issues, a price above Eur 90/sh could easily be justified.

Wow, sometimes the stock market is so simple.

Rhoen Klinikum

Unfortunately, the “Rhoen surprise” did not last very long. Some more details were emerging . It looks like that the boss of the supervisory board (and the guy who wants to sell to Fresenius) decided, that the 5% votes of one of the blocking shareholders were not valid. The result will most likely be a court battle over up to 18 months. So lets wait and see what happens.

Greek GDP linkers

The most recent jump in the GDP linker seems to come from a “research piece” of Deutsche bank which several readers forwarded to me (thank you guys !!!).

Let’s look how the look at the nominal hurdle:

Based on the latest IMF forecasts, the 2011 level of GDP is expected to be re-attained in 2017. By fixing this point, we can then solve for the nominal growth rate required in order to exceed the nominal GDP threshold in a given year. We find that in order to exceed the threshold in 2022 (for warrant payment in 2023) would require a YoY nominal growth rate of 5.0%. A growth rate of 3.6% would be required to meet the threshold in 2024. If recovery to the 2011 level is achieved a year earlier than expected (in 2016) then the required growth rate for the first payment to be in 2023 falls to 4.2%, or rises to 6.3% assuming a year delay. These sensitivities are illustrated in the chart to the right.
Although it is far from certain, it seems reasonable to assume 2023 to be the year when payments commence on the warrants.

Ok, so the basic assumption is that the new IMF forecast from 2012 is now correct, after the initial forecast was completely wrong. Hmm, one might call this “positive thinking” if one wants to be nice.

Their final conclusion (after some “nonsense funky doodle” modeling) is as follows:

The combination of more stable macro-economic assumptions, and reduced default probability now mean that we find the current valuation of the warrants as being broadly justified (relative to the GGBs). Considering our constructive view, the additional beta of the warrants and also the additional ‘yield’, we now find the GDP warrants to be more attractive than the GGBs themselves as a means to take exposure to an eventual Greek recovery. We caveat that such a recovery remains uncertain and will likely be lengthy; implying that any anticipated outperformance of the warrants should be seen as a medium to long-term expectation.

So this conforms my view, that the GDP linker is more like a short-term “beta” play than an intrinsic value” investment as the Deutsche Bank “analysts” only take the IMF projection as fundamental basis and do not add anything new here.

Royal Imtech

Royal Imtech has released a quite bad Q1 report. It looks more and more that larger parts of the company are in real trouble and that the fraud might have been just the “top of the iceberg”. Time to take them of the “rights issue watch list”. As I am not a “fraud-turn around” investor, this seems to be the not the situations I am looking for.