value and opportunity

After a “Near death” experience with Sistema, I am nevertheless still interested in companies with significant Russian exposure as a “counter-cyclical” EM play, however preferably with less “Oligarch” risk. A very interesting company with a significant Russia exposure is ITE Plc, the UK-based company. According to Bloomberg

ITE Group Plc is an international organizer of exhibitions and conferences. The Company provides
its services to customers in a variety of commercial and industrial sectors, including travel and
tourism, construction, motor, oil and gas, food, security, transport, telecommunications, and
sports and leisure.

The good thing with UK companies is that usually some blogger has covered the stock already. WIth ITE, this is the case as well. Among others, there is a very good Seeking Alpha post, from the Portfolio 14 blog and als the Interactive Investor covers the stock.

I agree with all posts. Organizing exhibitions is good business:

+ you don’t need a lot of capital (negative working capital due to prepayments)
+ once an exhibition is established, it creates a network effect which is relatively difficult to duplicate
+ although the business fluctuates with the cycle, costs are to a certain extent variable
+ it’s a nice b2b business, connecting a large number of exhibitors of with a large number of interested visitors
+ despite or because of e-commerce, personal contact in the form of trade fairs etc. seems to become even more important
+ the company has no debt

The “catch” is of course that most of their exhibitions take place in Russia and the former GUS. Clearly, not the easiest part of the world to be at the moment.Looking at the past 16 years since their “reverse IPO” in 1999, we can see that the business has suffered in downturns such as the Russian default but always recovered. However, mostly due to the weak ruble, comprehensive income in the last few years was mostly lower than stated income:

Year	EPS	Compr. Income	In% of EPS
29.12.2000	0,03
31.12.2001	-0,13
31.12.2002	-0,01
31.12.2003	0,03
31.12.2004	0,04
30.12.2005	0,07
29.12.2006	0,07	0,07	99%
31.12.2007	0,09	#N/A N/A	#WERT!
31.12.2008	0,09	0,09	97%
31.12.2009	0,13	0,11	86%
31.12.2010	0,10	0,12	121%
30.12.2011	0,13	0,10	82%
31.12.2012	0,13	0,13	98%
31.12.2013	0,14	0,09	64%

The valuation looks quite cheap, especially the EV/EBIT and EV/EBITDA ratios for such a business with high (historical) growth rates:

P/E ~9
EV/EBITDA 5,9
EV/EBIT 7,0
P/B 4,4
Div. Yield 5,0%

After reading some of the reports, I found a couple of things I didn’t like:

– focus on “headline” profits, excluding amortizations and “restructuring charges”
– Management fully incentiviced on “Headline profits”, not ROIC or ROE etc..
– Falling knife Stock chart
– one of the biggest “rainmakers”, Edward Strachan retired a few months ago.
– trade fares and exhibitions often have a time lag of 6-12 months to the general economy. So the worst in Russia for ITE might come only in the next few quarters.

Peer Group

There aren’t that many “pure play” trade fare /exhibition companies listed but I tried to compile a list to the best of my knowledge. Two of the companies listed below (Kingsmen & Pico) are actually more supliers to exhibitions than promoters/organizers:

Name	Mkt Cap (GBP)	EV/EBITDA	EV/EBIT	P/E	P/S
ITE GROUP PLC	434,5	5,3	7,0	9,9	2,2
TARSUS GROUP PLC	198,7	7,7	12,0	16,4	2,6
UBM PLC	1267,5	9,6	14,4	9,9	1,7
MCH GROUP AG	237,8	7,2	13,9	11,9	0,8
FIERA MILANO SPA	182,0	156,0	#N/A N/A	#N/A N/A	0,9
KINGSMEN CREATIVE LTD	87,1	5,9	6,4	10,9	0,6
PICO FAR EAST HOLDINGS LTD.	182,6	6,7	9,6	11,2	0,7

If we look at P/Es, most of the companies trade relativelly cheap at around 9-11 times earnings, but long term ROE and margins at ITE are clearly a class of its own. The big question is: Can they sustain those margins in the long run ? Many of the listed peers as well as the unlisted ones like Deutsche Messe tried (at least before the crisis) to get into the Russian market.

The problem could easily be that ITE is too profitable. Past average net margins of 20%-25% are far higher than any of the competitors. Deutsche Messe for instance, which aggressively expands into EM earned a net margin of 3% in 2013. Clearly, It is not so easy to kick out ITE, but if the difference in margins is so big, at some point in time competition will begin to bite. although it’s not easy to establish a succesful trade fair or exhibition, it is relatively easy to start one. So yes, there is a network effect but the barriers to entry are still relatively low. A good example for this can be seen currently at TESCO in the UK. For quite some time it looked that they are protected by their dominant position and had margins 2 or 3 times higher than their continental peers. But once the competitors like Aldi and Lidl, who could only dream of such margins in other markets, were big enough, margins for the leader deteriorated pretty quickly.

Valuation

Based on what I described above, I would make the following assumptions:

– going forward, net margins will be lower than in the past. In the past they achieved margins of 20-25%, I will calculate with 18% (thats what they made in 2012 and 2013)
– in order to reflect the additional risk in Russia, I will require more return. My normal requirement would be 15%, here i need 5% more or 20% p.a.

So if I assume that in 3 years time, ITE will again do the same amount of sales as in the FY 2013, this would be 0,80 GBP per share. At 18% Net margin, they would then earn around 14,4 pence per share. A “fair” P/E for such a company could be around 15. So the 3 year target price would be 14,4*15= 2,16 GBP.

However, in order to earn my 20% p.a. , I need to discount my target: 2,16/ (1,2)^3 = 1,25 GBP. This is however a lot lower than the current price of 1,70 GBP

So for me, under those assumptions, LTE is not a buy, I would buy once the price is at or below 1,25 GBP per share.

Summary:

It really took me some time with ITE Plc. I really like the business model of trade fair /exhibitions. Although cyclical, it seems to be good business with a certain protection. For ITE however, I fear the worst is yet to come. With the oil price plunging and the “Russian situation” unchanged, including more potential trade sanctions etc., the next year will be even harder than the last for ITE.

I would stil buy them if they are cheap enough, which, at the moment they are not. They would need to drop a further 30% in my opinion to make them really intersting and compensate me for the additional risk. I will however try to look at some other similar companies going forward. Especially Pico Far East and Kingsmen looked interesting at first sight.

It could easily be that I am too cautious due to my losses with Sistema (“Recency bias” ?), but at the moment I rather make the mistake of being too conservative.