All Danish Share – the Grand Final:
After looking at all 175 Danish companies, it’s time to consolidate. From the 175 companies, overall 34 made it onto the preliminary watch list which looks as follows:
And on we go relentlessly. Another 10 randomly selected Danish stocks, with only 16 more to go. This time, 3 of them made it onto the preliminary watch list. Enjoy !!
151. Nordea
Nordea is a 36 bn EUR market cap “full service” bank and asset manager active in the Nordics. As many other Scandinavian financial institutions, Nordea is doing quite well compared to its European peers, managing ROEs of around 7-11% over the past 10 years.
The longer term share price development is nevertheless quite disappointing, showing little to no value creation:
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
The company:
Royal Unibrew is a Danish Beverage company that I “discovered” during my journey through all Danish shares some weeks ago (too expensive back then but “watch”). I had also seen them some months ago in the Profitlich&Schmidlin portfolio.
The company is mostly active in Scandinavia and the Baltics where they have offerings in all areas (including a contribution agreement with Pepsi), whereas in some countries (France, Germany, Italy), they are running a focused niche strategy. Despite the name, Beer is only around 35% of their offerings (as of 2021), the other 65% are mostly non-alcoholic drinks from soft drinks to water and energy drinks.
Exmar was a special situation that I entered in August, following a surprising significant asset sale (a LNG liquification platform called “Tango”)
Yesterday evening, Exmar reported Q3 numbers including the final numbers on the ENI transaction. A few points that I found important:
The share price has done quite well. At the time of writing, Exmar traded at 10,20 EUR per share, an increase of almost exactly 1/3 vs. when I entered the position and even better in relative terms:
Background:
Hypoport has been one of the sore points in my investing history. I have been looking at this company several times, quite intensively in 2013 but never “pulled the trigger”. Hypoport has been a “FinTech” before this expression has been used. The business is not so easy to explain and comprises 4 different segments with several companies within these segments.
Recently, the share price of the company has been hammered after they gave a profit warning, despite having decreased already -75% from their peak before that profit warning. Time to look at Hypoport again.
Business:
This is clearly the flagship product of Hypoport although it doesn’t seem to be well understood or known. Europace is a B2B market place that gathers different mortgage offerings and combines these offerings combined with other useful tools to professional advisers who then actually make the deal with retail customers.
Intro:
Knorr is a company I have been looking into now for some time. It is one of those “hidden Champions” that Germany is famous for. As I drive by their HQ on a regular basis, I decided to have a deeper look into them.
History:
Knorr Bremse has a very interesting history. The company was founded in 1905 in Berlin and for a few years, BMW (in its original form) was actually a subsidiary of Knorr. In 1985, Karl Herrmann Thiele, who initially joined the company in 1969, took over the majority from the Knorr family and developed the company into a Global Player. The company is now headquartered in Munich and only went public for 80 EUR/share in October 2018.
Karl-Herrmann Thiele
Thiele died quite surprisingly in early 2021, the heirs still own around 59% of the shares via a foundation.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Never trust any anonymous dude on the internet. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!
Panic Update:
As to be expected, my last “panic post” marked more or less the (short term) peak in Natural Gas and Electricity prices in Europe. Since then, prices have gone down more than -50% from the peak. Nevertheless, prices are far from normal and sustainable. Governments have already proposed action in the form of intercepting the markets.
In the recent days, I have seen more and more “models” that seem to tell us that Germany/Europe is fine for this Winter and after that everything will be smooth sailing (LNG terminals, French deliveries etc.), despite the Russian completely halting NS1 deliveries last week and not reinstating them based on phony reasons.
I actually started to build a model myself but then decided to focus on the big picture instead. As I argued on Twitter, the one big variable that will determine how Europe is doing will be the temperature.
However, independent how this winter will be, Natural Gas will be a scarce resource in Europe for some years to come. Even in the (low probability) case that there will be a quick end of the Ukraine conflict, Europe will not and cannot go back into the Russian dependency. On the other hand, switching to LNG at acceptable prices will take a few years until enough liquification, gasification and transportation capacity is available.
This recent article in the FT quotes the boss of Shell:
“It may well be that we have a number of winters where we have to somehow find solutions through efficiency savings, through rationing and a very, very quick buildout of alternatives,” he said. “That this is going to be somehow easy, or over, I think is a fantasy that we should put aside.”
Another German language article quotes several Oil and Gas executives that it takes at least 3-4 years until Russian Gas can be fully replaced.
So my base case for the coming 3-5 years will be: There is not enough Natural Gas (ex Russia) available in Europe and Gas and electricity will remain very expensive in Europe.
The only real option: Decrease Demand
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Never trust any anonymous dudes on the internet. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!
Background:
Readers of my blog know that I like Special situations where a company, that has been flying under the radar, (unexpectedly) sells an asset that is worth potentially more than the market cap of the whole company. In these cases, it often takes some time until the market fully realizes what has happened.
Sapec was a good example, Exmar is a recent case that is still ongoing.
3U Holding – Weclapp
The current case is a small cap from Germany called 3U Holding. 3U was IPOed in the bubble days of the Dot.com boom in 1999. Other than many of its peers, its core communication business was quite solid. They sold their Communication business in 2007 and since then acted like mixture of Holding company and Family Office for the founders who own ~34% and effectively control the company.
Background:
With European Gas and Electricity prices trading like “Meme stonks”, it is time for another “panic post”. As always, these posts are mostly for myself in order to better structure my thoughts and educate myself and should not be seen as any kind of advice.
Just to quickly revisit the last post from part 3. One of my predictions back then with regard to the economic impact (unfortunately) aged quite well:
One explanation that I have read is that Russia and Ukraine are only 2% of Global GDP, so a “loss” of these countries is no big deal. Personally, I do think that this is not a very useful number. Russian oil and gas is powering a significant amount of European (and Global) GDP. A supply disruption from Russian oil and gas would impact a much larger share of GDP globally and might make Covid-19 supply chain disruption like a toddler party.
Turmoil in European Gas and Electricity markets:
The fact that European Gas and electricity markets face absolute mayhem has now clearly reached the headlines. I have stolen two Charts from Twitter(@Schuldensuehner), one showing electricity prices until yesterday, and one natural gas:
Background:
Play Magnus is a stock some of my readers my remember. I initially invested (speculated) in October 2020 at 16,5 NOK per share, but sold quickly after my initial timing was really bad with a loss of around -20%.
I then bought again in November 2020 at a higher price (~17 NOKs) . I then managed to sell around 1/3 of the position close to the high at 38 NOKs per share. This year, i sold the remainder of the position shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine to manage portfolio volatility. Overall, I made 0,5% on the whole trade (pre taxes, pre costs) which clearly shows that my trading skills are not very good.
I still followed the stock as I liked the business, the management team and thought that at some point in time this could be interesting. Actually I just talked this Monday with a friend that at prices below 10 NOK, the stock looks interesting.
The stock chart shows how volatile the ride from Play Magnus was since its IPO:
value and opportunity 