As I have been updating the Portfolio page infrequently and I made quite some changes in September & October, here is the current portfolio as of October 31st. It can also be accessed via the portfolio page.
DISCLAIMER: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.
Management summary:
Following my post on the disappointing IPO of Birkenstock, I decided to look at 2 more “busted IPOs” that happened more recently, both in Autumn 2025:
Swedish listed Verisure (IPO early October 2025) and Swiss Marketplace Group (IPO mid September 2025). I actually found both of them interesting enough to justify smaller positions.
“Busted PE IPO” from Sweden: Verisure Plc
Verisure, the European leader of Home Security and Alarm systems IPOed in Stockholm in late 2025 and initially looked like a great success with a 20% “first day pop”.
This however also marked the peak of the share price so far, since then the stock has been going down:
The low was reached in the beginning of October with around 8 EUR per share when the initial lock downs expired.
Verisure was IPOed at around 16x EV/EBITDA and is now trading at ~8 NTM EV EBITDA .
This seems to be attractive enough that a few days ago, the FT leaked that another PE, this time CVC is interested in taking the company private again after only 12 months of being a listed company.
Verisure itself looks like a potential “Compounder stock” and has been written up already on a few Substacks, for instance on “Best Anchor Stocks”.
With the CVC rumour however, Verisure for me is rather an early stage “Special Situation” opportunity than a longer term investment.
Shareholder Structure:
One interesting aspect of the current shareholder structure is that the Pre-IPO shareholders are still the dominating shareholder Group. Best Anchor stocks has summarized this quite well:
Verisure is still controlled by its pre-IPO owners. The company listed on 8 October 2025 at €13.25 per share, but only around 26% of the company was sold in the IPO. As of 31 December 2025, the largest shareholders were:
The above simply shows that roughly 70% of the shares are held by investors who will, sooner or later, want to sell (or at least have the option to). At today’s share price, H&F’s stake alone is worth around €3.7 billion, close to half of Verisure’s market cap. The lock-up calendar looks like this:
So basically CVC can negotiate with H&F for 70% of the shares which makes it a rather simple process. A very likely outcome of an negotiation would be that H&F and the other shareholders will need to “roll” part of their exposure into a new deal with CVC which will reduce the required cheque size-
Simplified Special situation calculation
Now one can speculate at what price H&F and the others would be willing to sell. A very simple assumption would be that they want to see the IPO price of 13,25 EUR.
This would equal a premium of around 40% to the price before the “rumour leak” and in line what one has seen in similar Nordic PE buy-outs in the past.
Based on this assumptions, we can calculate a very simple “expected fair value” for Verisure:
Assuming a 50% probability for a deal at 13,25 EUR and a 50% non-deal probability with the stock going back down to 9 EUR, the expected value of the stock would be 0,5*13,25+ 0,5*9 = 11,13 EUR or ~11% higher than the current share price at the time of writing.
One can now try to make more elaborate scenarios but in principle this looks quite attractive, especially as under Swedish rules, a deal could happen rather quickly if the parties agree.
Summary Verisure
For that reason, I established a 1,5% position for my “special Situation” bucket at a share price of slightly below 10 EUR per share. I sized this rather small as it is not clear if a deal is actually happening. If CVC officially calls the deal off, I will sell. If a formal offer is made, I will revisit the position.
Swiss Marketplaces AG
Following my “UK Portal Pain basket” post from late September, one reader actually suggested in the comment to look at Swiss Marketplaces AG (SMG).
After a second look, I actually got more excited about the stock. SMG is the clear number 1 in Switzerland, both, for Real estate and Cars (so like an Autotrader and Rightmove combined), plus they own some smaller comparison sites in Switzerland.
Interestingly, the origin of the two main portals, Immoscout24 Schweiz and Autoscout24 Schweiz was the German Scout Group that sold these two portals in 2014 to Swiss publisher Ringier.
In 2021 then, these two portals merged with their main Swiss competitor TX Markets (owned by listed TX Group) to the Swiss MArketplaces Group.
As mentioned in the beginning, SMG IPOed in autumn 2025 and looking at the stock chart we can see that similar to Verisure, the IPO was the peak of the price range so far:
Compared to the “old parent” Scout24 Group, SMG has performed significantly worse over the past 12 months:
And this despite very solid operating numbers. for the first 6M in 2026, sales were up +11% and EBITDA +17%:
This chart from the 6M results presentation shows how dominant they are in virtually every area in Switzerland:
AI threat
As mentioned in my “Portal Pain basket” post, I think that especially real estate and car portals will not be disrupted by AI agents or similar tools any time soon.
I am more sceptical about travel, but SMG has no exposure to travel.
Shareholder structure:
As in Verisure’s case, the Pre-IPO owners are still the majority owners of SMG:
The biggest investors are the two Swiss publishing Groups TX Group and Ringier. In a recent transaction, Swiss Insurer Mobiliar sold ~7,5% of SMG’s shares at 28,50 CHF per share. Interestingly, TX Group bought ~3% of MSG and SMG itself bought back 1%. According to this article, Mobiliar has agreed to a further lock-up until March 2027 following the placement.
TX Group is now at 34,9%. According to the Articles of Association of SMG, the crossing of the 35% threshold would trigger a mandatory take over offer by TX Group.
So with Mobiliar selling down, there is clearly fear of a stock overhang in the market which might explain the relative underperformance to Scout24. I also assume that General Atlantic, a US based PE investor will not stay forever. Interestingly, also Ringier reduced its stake before and during the IPO from initially 29,5% to the current 19%. Only TX Group seems to have not sold shares, but as mentioned above, bought more.
As a result, the valuation of SMG is for a Swiss stock, quite moderate. At ~19x NTM P/E, SMG is valued in line with Scout24. Leverage is quite low (below 1x Net Debt/EBITDA) and with ~3,4% the stock has an attractive dividend yield for a Swiss stock.
What I find interesting is that SMG clearly has some runway to increase profitability. Scout24 for instance has an EBIT margin of ~50% whereas SMG “only” shows 35%. Especially the “other marketplaces” seem to have some room to improve profitability.
There is clearly the stock overhang especially from Mobiliar, but operationally SMG seems to perform quite well and the Swiss economy is doing better than many of their neighbours.
So the stock overhang “blues” might actually represent a good opportunity to get a quality asset at a reasonable price.
Summary:
Overall I find SMG quite attractive as a potential 4th member of my “Portal Pain basket”. Compared to Scout24 in Germany, I like the better diversification and the exposure to a country that performs much better economically.
Therefore I decided to allocate 2% of the portfolio into SMG at current prices of ~29,50 CHF per share.
I could actually think of making it an even bigger position if they continue to perform well operationally and the stock keeps being depressed because of more selling from some of the large shareholders.
Management Summary:
This is a more superficial look into Birkenstock, a much hyped IPO from 2023 which now trades at 12,5x NTM P/E. Despite still growing at “mid teens”, I could not build up the conviction to start a position, as it is really hard to judge for how much longer the “Birkenstock hype” will continue. I also took a quick look at Dr. Martens, which is a prime example for a broken fashion trend. Maybe not directly comparable to Birkenstock, but still a warning sign.
The 2023 IPO “flip”
Birkenstock, the famous German “health sandal” maker went public 3 years ago. The IPO price was USD 46 (upper end of the range) and already on day 1, the stock dropped to around 40 USD.
Interestingly, the PE investor L. Catterton only bought Birkenstock in 2021. Back then it was estimated that the purchase price was ~4 bn EUR. So IPOing in 2023 is a pretty “quick flip” in PE terms.
In between, things looked a little bit better and the stock reached ~60 USD in 2024. Fast forward to today, and the stock trades at around 32 USD at quite cheap multiples:
TIKR says next year’s P/E is only 12,5x. Looking at the financials, we can see that since 2023, both sales and profits increased significantly, however, things have been slowing a little bit lately.
L. Catterton, the Private Equity arm of LVMH owner Bernard Arnault still owns 43% and Arnault’s family holding, Financiere Agache another 6%, but they have been selling shares. A few weeks ago in August, L. Catterton sold shares for around 1 bn EUR, of which Birkenstock bought back a relevant amount.
Looking at the shorter term share price, this sale by L. Catterton clearly did not infuse a lot of confidence in other Brikenstock shareholders which leaves the share price very close to all time lows:
Interestingly, according to their latest investor update, sales are still strong and growing in the “mid teens”, both in their own retail channel (DTC) and wholesale:
In contrast to other more high end luxury brands, the exposure to Asia and specifically China seems to be rather limited.
One point one has to give L. Catterton is that they managed to increase sales by +50% within 2 years as this chart from the IPO prospectus shows:
The problem of course was that the valuation at IPO which, in true PE fashion was north of 20x EV/EBITDA, was clearly too high. Now, at a much compressed 8x NTM EV/EBITDA, this looks more reasonable.
This Chart from TIKR nicely shows how multiples have been compressed since the IPO:
Will the Birkenstock “Fashion Trend” continue ?
A big issue is clearly if the “Birkenstock fashion trend” will run out of steam at some time.
Originally, Birkenstocks were nerdy “health sandals” often worn by office workers in technical professions like engineers or programmers.
When I was a student, I did an internship at Siemens and I remember that a lot of the engineers had (white) Bikenstocks at their desks in which they changed in the morning and would walk around all day in the office. That looked quite odd especially with those who actually wore a suit.
This is a picture of a classic Birkenstock sandal:
And if you ever were on vacation with a lot of Germans in the summer, this look might be familiar to you:
Birkenstock became fashionable in the Mid 2010s. Before that, especially in the US, Birkenstocks were considered “hippie style” but that changed when Birkenstock teamed up with famous design labels to create more fashionable versions.
Interlude: Dr. Martens – the famous example for a footwear fashion brand that is not so fashionable anymore
A famous example for an explosive run-up and spectacular drop of an iconic shoewear brand is UK footwear brand Dr. Martens.
Dr. Martens was IPOed in January 2021 by PE shop Permira, which owned the company for 7 years. As we can see in the chart, after the first day “pop”, the stock went south pretty much soon thereafter and has now lost -85% from the initial IPO price:
Looking at the financials, we can see that Dr. Martens only managed to show 2 more years of double digit growth after the IPO before sales declined significantly and profits even more so:
That’s clearly not enough if you IPO a company at 20x EV/EBITDA which Permira did. Interestingly, Permira still owns ~38% of the company.
Reading the 2022 annual report, where they show 18% sales growth, the growth story still seems to be intact:
In 2023, lower than anticipated growth was blamed on the botched transfer of a US distribution center:
In 2024, the sales decline was blamed on cautious wholesale customers:
However, looking at the previous year report, one could already see that wholesale had declined and the brand only grew by opening a lot of new stores.
There are a couple of articles on why Dr. Martens became unpopular especially in the US. Overstocking after Covid and heavy discounts is one reason, but also moving the production from the UK to Asia is often mentioned (although that seemed to have happened long time ago in the early 2000s).
There seem to have been challenger brands like Solovair and Blundstone. Solovair boots interestingly seem to be manufactured in Dr. Marten’s old factory in the UK.
Their latest report from May 2026 still shows a decline in sales but a certain recovery in (adjusted) profits:
So turning around a once hyped but then struggling footwear brand is clearly not that easy.
It doesn’t help that a lot of other footwear brands have very weak stock charts, too, with the exception of Crocs:
Back to Birkenstock:
Overall I find Birkenstock quite interesting but it is clearly not an easy stock. For full transparency, I am not a “Birkenstock person”, I have never owned a pair and will most likely never own one. But still, it could be a potentially interesting “broken IPO” story as long as growth remains in the mid teens.
My gut feeling tells me that Birkenstock is less “fancy” than Dr. Martens and compared to Dr. Martens for instance, Birkenstocks are still produced in Germany, not in Asia.
However, there are already a lot of similar smaller brands that sell similar shoes for much lower prices than Birkenstock, for instance this one or even Sandals that are manufactured in German prisons.
Dr. Martens clearly shows that when a trend breaks, it can take a very long time to recover, if at all.
The comparison of Dr. Martins and Birkenstock is also a great use case for an AI analysis/report. In this case, I asked Claude to research the similarities and differences between Birkenstock and Dr. Martens and I have to say that the result was quite interesting.
This is Claude’s summary:
I would certainly not base any investment decision on this, but it confirms my feeling that Birkenstock is not exactly on the same trajectory as Dr. Martens a few years earlier. But clearly there is a risk that they might not grow at 15% for many more years, which the current share price seems to expect as well.
A big learning in any case is (and this is no surprise) that you should avoid investing into PE sponsored IPOs of some hot footwear brands at a valuation of 20x EV/EBITDA or more.
The PE guys definitely know when to sell and as an investor, you should not try to outsmart PE guys at an IPO. Maybe there is one out of 10 that is doing really good, but the probability is slim.
When you look at Private Equity portfolios which often have average valuations of 16-18 x EV/EBITDA, it is clearly not a surprise that IPOing or selling them at these valuations are not easy.
For Birkenstock, I will watch the company but at the time of writing, I could not build enough confidence to start a position despite the quite attractive valuation.
I think especially the massive sales of L. Catterton just a few weeks ago does not create a lot of confidence that growth will remain at mid teens levels for that long.
DISCLAIMER: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
Management Summary:
Rubis, the French listed Fuel distribution company, represents a potentially interesting Special Situation investment, despite (or because of) the current negative sentiment towards French stocks.
On the back of strong earnings momentum (6M earnings +18%), Rubis has almost no exposure to France and has recently announced to undergo a structural transformation from a disadvantageous SCA structure (similar to a German KGaA) to an ordinary stock corporation.
For normal shareholders, this is hugely positive despite a planned compensation for the former controlling shareholders. In addition, this opens up M&A opportunities which had been rumoured about for some time.
The share price so far has not reacted, most likely because of the perceived problems in France which in my opinion creates an opportunity for the opportunistic investor. The time that will be required until a potential M&A transaction will occur, will be nicely compensated through a 6% dividend yield.
Rubis Background
Historically speaking, Rubis is a rather young company, having been founded only in 1990 by a gentlemen called Gilles Gobin and then grew rapidly through many acquisitions, often buying small subsidiaries of large international energy companies.
Rubis is a company that I came across several times in the past. It has a very interesting mix of businesses and geographies, but due to corporate structure issues (SCA, more similar to a GP/LP structure than a normal stock corporation) I never considered investing.
Effectively, the heirs of the founder through a 2,3% share holding were controlling the board and on top of that was able to charge a significant royalty on Rubis’ profit (in 2025 this was approx. 30 mn or 10% of Rubis net profit). The formula seems to give them a percentage of the annual share price increase but capped at 10% of the net income.
At the time of writing, Rubis is valued at around 3,6 bn market cap and trades at a relatively modest ~10,7 x NTM P/E which is clearly impacted by this unusual arrangement:
Looking at the long term chart, Rubis shareholders have done Ok including the dividend but the share price is significantly below the peak of around 60 EUR from 2018.
Rubis is French listed but has very little exposure to France
As there is “blood in the streets in Paris”, it is worth mentioning that Rubis sales have a pretty unique breakdown:
~50% of sales are in Africa
~40% in the Carribean
~0nly around 10% in Europe
The business as such is a mixture of fuel and LPG distribution, Renewable Energy and interestingly Bitumen distribution. Bitumen is a byproduct from refining oil and is used among others to create asphalt by mixing bitumen with sand and stones.
Rubis is the biggest Fuel distributor in Kenya which according to some sources is their biggest single market. This is a split of the fuel distribution business from their website:
This chart from the 2025 annual results nicely shows the extremely unique geographical footprint of RUBIS:
The Renewables Energy business is a result of the 2022 acquisition of a French Renewables company called Photosol, which was widely criticized as too expensive.
Rubis also owned a terminal business, but sold that in 2024 to JV Partner and Infrastructure fund I Squared capital.
So in a nutshell, Rubis is not impacted much by the current situation in France.
Financing wise, they seem to have restructured their debt financing “just in time” in late 2025 with a syndicated loans facility that seems to have a 5 year term.
As the business is very cash generative, it looks like that they are also not affected by the recent widening of French spreads as they don’t have to issue debt for the next few years.
The catalyst: Corporate structure change
Now however, things seem to change and quite quickly: Rubis intends to become a “normal” company, most likely under the pressure of some prominent investors, such as the Bollore Group. My friend Graouilly has written about it here.
From a technical perspective, the former “GP” will receive an extra 12% of newly issued shares as compensation for giving up his special rights that included a royalty on Rubis’ net profit.
Rubis has scheduled an extraordinary shareholder meeting for December 9th where these changes including the capital increase shall be approved.
There seems to be some resistance among the larger shareholders that the compensation is too generous, but any lower compensation amount will be a positive for shareholders.
Share price:
Looking at the share price, we can see that Rubis is up ~11% YTD, which is in line with earnings growth that had been +18% for the first 6 months:
What I find interesting is that the share price didn’t react a lot on Monday’s surprise announcement, although all in all, this is quite positive for shareholders:
Similar cases in the past:
There was a very similar case in the past in France: Lagardere underwent the “same procedure”, also driven by behind the scenes activism from Boloré. The GP in that case got compensate by a share capital increase of ~8% but the shares jumped 10-15% after the announcement.
Subsequently, Lagardere was taken over by Vivendi by Vivendi and Lagardere Shareholders did quite well.
A somehow similar case was Fresenius Medical Care, where Fresenius transformed FMC from a KGaA to a normal AG because they wanted to deconsolidate FMC and FMC subsequently performed quite well.
One can only speculate why Rubis didn’t move at all, but my guess is that the current riots in France and general Caution with regard to French stocks clearly plays a role here.
Good earnings momentum
Higher fuel prices are almost always good news for distributors and Rubis is no exception here. After decent Q1, 6M numbers looked really good an dthe increased their guidance for 2026 significantly:
Investor base
Over the past few years, some prominent investors have disclosed stakes in Rubis:
The largest shareholder, Patrick Molis is a French Business man active in logistics who started a first position in 2023/2024. He had been openly activist in the company for some time, demanding among other things a complete overhaul of the board.
At the same time, Vincent Boloré disclosed a 6% stake. Boloré is especially experienced in African businesses. He also seemed to have been involved in Rubis in the 1990ies and seems to know Molis from a couple of previous interactions.
The billionaire Dassault family seems to own its stake already a little bit longer since 2017 or 2018. I didn’t find a lot about Ronald Sämann but he also seems on board since 2023/2024 and was actually part of the supervisory board until early this year.
Graoully has some more information on this eclectic group of shareholders in his post.
In any case, I assume that those shareholders will most likely not just sit around and be happy to collect dividends but they will continue to press for change and even more so once the structure is cleaned up.
What would a PE buyer do with Rubis
Already in September last year, there were relatively specific rumours that PE firm CVC and energy trader Trafigura were interested in taking over the company.
As we have seen with my previous portfolio company DCC, especially LPG and fuel distribution are highly attractive businesses for PE companies as these businesses are stable, can be leveraged and there is still ample room for consolidation.
In Rubis’ case, those two businesses would be clearly the main targets. The Renewable business would most likely be sold to a more specialised renewable fund or energy company, although right now, there are quite some renewable assets on the market.
That leaves us with the Bitumen business for which the natural buyers would most likely be competitors like Colas or the Swedish guys
My “sum of parts” estimate for such a scenario would be at least 50 EUR per share based on recent transaction multiples including DCC. Although one has to mention that Rubis’ geographic footprint makes this analysis a little bit more difficult. For those more exotiv locations, the number of buyers is clearly smaller, however potential growth in these countries is also much higher than in saturated markets.
A quick win of any “activist” would in my opinion be to spin off the renewables business and leave the Fuel and bitumen business together which would be a veritable cash machine. This could also lead to a decent rerating of the stock.
Return expectations
Other than a direct M&A “arbitrage” situation, the current situation at Rubis is a little bit more fluent.
My base case looks as follows: I look at a time horizon of 18-24 months. Within this time horizon I expect to:
My estimate for a Pivate Equity “take out value” would be around 45-50 EUR per share.
So my overall return expectation for Rubis, including dividend would be in the range of +30% to +40% in the base case including dividends.
The bull case would be a little bit higher, the bear case would be the dividend yield only.
Pro’s & Cons
So let’s summarize the Pros and Cons for this special situation quickly:
+/- in general negative sentiment towards French stocks which limits short term upside
Summary & game plan
Overall, I find the set-up quite interesting as an “early stage” special situation, despite the exotic geographical footprint of Rubis.
The relevant dates are as follows:
From an operational perspective, Rubis will announce a Q3 trading update on November 3rd. I assume that this trading update will confirm the positive trajectory of the business. The upside case would be a further upwards revision of the expected 2026 profit.
The most important step will be clearly the formal approval of the restructuring in the special AGM on December 9th. Maybe this triggers some revaluation already, especially if maybe the compensation for the former “GPs” can be reduced a little bit.
I would then expect over the course of 2027 that we see more discussions on how to “catalyze” the value of Rubis. Either through renewed negotiations with CVC and Trafigura or some other actions.
My “long stop” date for this will be Mid 2028. If nothing happens until then, I will get out in any case.
Overall, I find this set-up attractive enough to allocate a 2,5% position of the portfolio into Rubis at the current price of ~35,50 EUR per share.
I partially financed the position with further sales of STEF, which has much more exposure to France, high French interest spreads and high fuel costs.
DISCLAIMER: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
Background/Follow up:
When I wrote the initial post about CEWE a few days ago, I didn’t know that CEWE actually held a Capital Markets Day for selected investors on the very same day that I was publishing my post. They didn’t disclose it on their Website or IR calendar either.
Anyway, in the meantime, the slides are online.
On the capital markets day they presented more background on the Kodak acquisition. In a nutshell, I can now better understand the rationale and see it as less opportunistic but more strategic than without that information.
I think there are clearly some risks with the Kodak Moments acquisition, but on the other hand, there seems to be also a plausible path for some extra growth on top of the rather slow growth in the past few years.
Here are a few interesting snippets:
Although there are no actual numbers, they project EBIT growth that in the first 2 years is double the organic run rate and up to almost 3x in year 5. As organic growth in the last years was more like 3-4%, this implies growth rates of 6-10% for the next 5 years which would of course be really great.
If growth would actually accelerate like this, then there is also a decent chance that the stock might get back to historical valuation ranges. So in the upside case, there is potentially much more upside than I thought initially.
One detail they seem to have mentioned only verbally is that Kodak Moments currently only charges around 50% per printed picture than CEWE. It seems that Kodak’s quality is also lower, but this is clearly a relatively simple lever for CEWE to increase prices (and quality) up to CEWE’s levels.
They also point toward some risk, where the regulatory approvals might be the most relevant ones:
From previous reports one can estimate that ~40% of Kodak Moment’s business is actually from Germany.
The attractiveness of the instant photo kiosk business
Another aspect that seems to have been mentioned in the call is that the “instant photo” business as such has been growing nicely within CEWE already. I always thought that only the online photo books were the growth driver, but with this information, the acquisition could make even more sense.
I did a little background research on these photo kiosks and it seems that they fulfil quite an interesting niche for customers. We shoot more and more digital pictures and it seems that from time to time, people have the urge to print out pictures rather today or tomorrow than to wait 4-5 days and uploading them online.
Modern Photo kiosks often offer additional formats like larger prints or even more sophisticated Greeting card or invitation card formats.
On my past visits to a dm or Rossmann, I always checked on the photo kiosks and I was surprised how busy they are at any time of the day. Interestingly, I have seen branches where CEWE stations were next to Kodak stations in the same store.
From the perspective of the drugstores, these photo kiosks seem to be helping to draw customers into the store who might then also purchase something else. So these photo kiosks seem to look like a win-win. It would be interesting to know how the revenue sharing looks between Rewe/Kodak and the drugstores.
Some other aspects of CEWE
Governance/Incentivation
As a KGaA, the Governance is different to a normal “AG”. Effectively, common shareholders have no say who runs the company, this is solely determined by the “Komplementär”, in this case the foundation of the family that owns around 30% of the shares.
Therefore it is important to understand how Management is incentivized. In CEWE’s case, the variable component of the Management’s salary is relatively small and almost exclusively tied to EBT development. So no per share or Return on Capital measures.
There is a share option program but the amounts are rather insignificant.
From that perspective, incentives are not optimal. Interestingly, they still buy back some shares and report ROCE, but the variable component of the Board’s compensation really only depends on absolute EBT.
Share price momentum
Although it is not a criteria per se, the stock has positive Momentum. Looking at the long term chart, we can see that it is still below the ATH from COVID, bt it has been breaking out a little from a trading range recently:
In my screening model, the overall score at the moment is quite good, putting CEWE fromly into the top 10 of stocks that I monitor.
Summary & conclusion
Following the CMD material, I have become more optimistic about a potential longer lasting growth runway following the Kodak Moments Acquisition.
As mentioned above, I now better understand the motives and think that there is a potential for some additional growth if they execute that acquisition well.
I therefore decided to allocate 3% of the portfolio into CEWE at the current price of ~112 EUR per share. My expected investment return for this will be somewhere between 40-50% including the dividend yield, buybacks and maybe a little valuation uplift over the next 2-3 years. This is clearly not exceptionally high, but I think the downside is also relatively well protected at less than 9x EV/EBIT.
Due to the Governance topic (KGaA) and suboptimal Management incentives, I will most likely not increase the position much above the current level. For a full position, I would need better scores on that aspect.
The next milestones will be as every year, the result of the all important Q4 and then in 2027 the successful closing of the Kodak moments transaction.
DCC – post mortem
Let’s start with the positive case. I realized my DCC position recently as the share price (~64,4 GBP) approached the bid value (66,72 GBP) and the remaining upside was not so attractive anymore, especially considering potential GBP volatility for me as a EUR investor.
Looking back at the initial write-up, the result was pretty Ok.
I made slightly over +50% over 3 ¾ years plus some more on the additional portion I bought after the first bid in May this year. This was within the expected range of outcomes:
However, and this is a big HOWEVER, this positive result was not driven by the business case that I had underwritten, but purely a function of the premium paid by the acquirer KKR.
Looking at the earnings history, we can see that DCC’s earnings didn’t improve at all since my purchase in late 2022:
DCC rather had to go through a painful restructuring because they found out that everything they acquired outside their core business Energy was rather not good.
To be honest, I didn’t see this when I invested back then. I rather thought that having 3 different “platforms” gives them a lot of flexibility to allocate capital.
Looking at the stock chart we can see that my entry timing was quite lucky, but then not much happened until very recently:
So the positive outcome of this investment was much more luck than my ability to pick an undervalued company with a great past that performed well.
I think this is/was maybe a major weakness of my investment approach: Just assuming that a successful past is a good indicator for an equally successful future, depsite some temporary headwinds. This can work, but it clearly doesn’t have to work.
What went well though was the decision to increase the position after the first bid. While this was not a huge performance driver for the overall position, it was a very low risk Special situation add-on.
Quick update: Just an hour ago, DCC announced that they sold the remaining business from the Technology segment for a rather “lowish” price. From a potential 125 pence “Sweetener” for this deal the actual outcome seems to be “only” 42 pence now.
TFF post mortem
Funnily enough, I funded part of my DCC position as mentioned above with a partial sale of TFF, which back then was my largest position. I just checked my files and I sold ~11% of my position back then for ~39,70 EUR per share.
TFF was my oldest position and the only stock remaining from the initial portfolio from December 2010.
So why did I decide to sell now ? To be honest, i had been thinking about reducing/selling for quite some time. I wrote about my doubts already in the 2026 performance review in January 2026 and subsequently sold my Laurent Perrier shares.
With regard to TFF, I cautiously thought that maybe the worst is behind us.
And:
Then however came the horrible horrible Q1 (2026/2027) report in mid Septmeber which showed once again an acceleration of the sales decline, both in Wine and Whisky:
What really worries me now is the debt level of TFF. With declining Sales and profits, the 300 mn in net debt will become a larger and larger burden and refinancing this with the rapidly increasing interest rates especially in France is clearly not so easy.
What I find interesting, looking at the charts of TFF vs. Pernod and Diageo, is that TFF’s share price for some reason kept up longer than the actual spirits makers:
One of the disadvantages of writing a blog is that when I write about a decision like this one, the risk is relatively high that I look like a complete idiot if the stock rebounds within a short period of time. Then the usual group of trolls will make nasty comments that I delete (of course).
I think that was also one of the implicit reasons why I didn’t sell earlier. Going forward, I think I will move from a “real time blog portfolio” to something like a “quarterly rebalanced watchlist” in order to avoid such “mental traps”.
In any case, after almost 17 years, I sold my TFF position which now was only 2% of the portfolio. My average purchase price (including a later purchase at a higher price ) was 11,75 EUR and I collected 4 EUR in dividends per share. That’s about 2% p.a. over almost 17 years. It improves a little bit taking into account the mentioned partial sale in 2022. But overall, the result was not great.
EVS
Luckily, I sold EVS in July because I didn’t feel comfortable after the CFO suddenly disappeared and numbers looked weak in an “event year” with Olympics and the Football Worldcup.
Yesterday, EVS drastically reduced their sales outlook for 2026 and the stock got hit really hard and was down -30% at the end of the day:
And this after being already down -30% YTD.
In this case, my timing was fortunately better than usual.
Rightmove
Yesterday around 4 pm my time, Rightmove suddenly jumped almost 15% because an outlet called “Betaville” mentioned that they heard about a rumor of take over interest for Rightmove.
No one knows if there is any truth in that or not, but the significant reaction in the share price in my opinion shows that maybe (and this is a big maybe), the worst is behind for the major classified/marketplace players.
Upfront remarks & Management summary:
This is not a deep dive but more like my typical “first round screening” of a potential interesting investment. In the past, I would have not necessarily published it if I didn’t invest. Going forward, I will now and then publish these “initial assessments” mainly in order to receive feedback from readers who might see it differently. So please give feedback if you see things different !!!
As a Management Summary, I did not invest. Although I like the company, I could not build up the conviction for a 3-5 year investment case mainly due to recent slow growth and a somewhat risky acquisition.
Company History:
Cewe Color traces its roots back to 1912 to a photo finishing lab in the Northern German town Oldenburg. And that’s what they did for the next ~100 years: “finishing” or “developing” Fotos from films that were given or sent to them. For the (few) younger readers: In the old days, there were real photo cameras where you took the pictures on a rol of film and you could only look at the pictures after they came back from the phot finishing lab.
In 1951 they introduced color pictures, 1994 they started to develop digital pictures and in 2025 they introduced the category that is today’s most relevant: The photo book.
in 2007/2008, CEWE became the target of US activist Guy Wyser-Pratte, who wanted CEWE to speed up its transformation into a digital player. However, in 2008, the activists lost interest.
As a consequence of this “activist attack”, CEWE changed into a KGaA structure in 2013, which makes it factually impossible to take over the company as the listed shares are effectively only non-voting shares.
Here are some current highlights:
This chart from the annual report is very interesting which shows the transition from analogue to digital over the years:
When Wyser-Pratt “attacked” the company in 2007, only~50% of the business was digital, however that changed pretty rapidly.
From different sources, one gets an estimated market share for CEWE in Europe of ~30% and an estimated market share in Germany of >50%.
Recent developments:
Sale of Commercial Online Printing division – This was actually very positive news: Cewe published in May that they were selling their struggling Commercial Online Printing division to Cimpress.
This seems to result in an one-off gain of around 50 mn EUR.
As we see in the numbers, the division was barely profitable and not growing but represented 10% of total sales:
More or less at the same time, CEWE announced an acquisition: They are buying the Kodak Moments business which is basically very similar to their CEWE in-store kiosk business from a US PE fund,
This is what we know from Kodak Business:
Purchase price: 88 mn EUR (including debt)
Sales 200 mn EUR
EBIT margin “mid single digits” – lest assume 5%
That means CEWE paid an EV/EBIT 8,8x vs. 8.3x for CEWE itself. The seller seems to be an American Private Equity investor, who bought this business and another one from the bankrupt UK Kodak pension fund only 2 ago.
I found some information about the business from 2023 where it seems that 40% of the Kodak moments business seems to have been generated in Europe, 3% in the US and the rest in Australia and South America.
So CEWE sold ~2 mn in EBIT and acquired 11 mn EBIT, which seems like an OK deal. The big question s of course if and how fast they can bring the Kodak Moments business up to CEWE’s standards with double digit EBIT Margins.
The main risk that I see is that CEWE’s German Board (one exception) might struggle a bit with the non-European parts of the Kodak Moments business. I am also not 100% sure in what condition this business is after years of bankruptcy and 2 years of PE ownership.
General development
In general, looking at different sources, printing single photos still seems to be in a decline, while photo books seem to be growing, at least from a value perspective.. To my understanding, the acquired Kodak Moments business includes both.
Another question is at what stage, Agentic AI might be an issue for “branded” Photo book offerings. My feeling is that things move quickly, but I have no idea if and when this could be a threat.
Other aspects:
What I do like about CEWE is that they report ROCE which is rather unusual for a German small cap. ROCE numbers are pretty OK:
Ebit margins are double digit, however since the Covid Boom, they have been going down a little bit.
10 year EPS growth from 2015 to 2025 has been ~10,4% p.a. which is pretty impressive. However, since 2023, EPS was rather flatish. The main growth came in the years up to 2022.
This is the EPS chart from Tikr:
Valuation & Share price:
Looking at the chart we can see that CEWE peaked during COVID and traded sideways until recently, underperforming both, SDAX and MDAX (before dividends)::
Recently the stock went up from the trading range as some market participants seem to see a better future.
Valuation wise, the stock is still relatively cheap.
Based on trailing 12M P/E, the stock trades at around 13x P/E vs. an average of 15x:
Pro’s & Con’s
+/- some share buy backs
Intermediate conclusion
Although I kind of like CEWE, at this stage I don’t see myself investing into the stock on a 3-5 year horizon,
Yes, it’s cheap, quite profitable and the stock price has just trended upwards. On the other hand, I do see the risk that the recent acquisition might not go so smoothly and I am also not sure about growth prospects after that one time bump from the acquisition.
If I would be in the mood for shorter term trades, I might set up a 3-6 month trade trying to ride the current momentum, but the high interest rates make me nervous.
I also need to manage my exposure in the portfolio to the European consumer to which I am exposed directly and indirectly through stocks like Sixt, Fielmann, Thermador, Italmobiliare etc.
Therefore, for the time being, I am not investing into CEWE but keep it on the watch list.Upfront remarks & Management summary:
This is not a deep dive but more like my “first round screening” of a potential interesting investment. In the past, I would have not necessarily published it if I didn’t invest. Going forward, I will now and then publish these “initial assessments” mainly in order to receive feedback from readers who might see it differently. So please give feedback if you see things different !!!
As a Management Summary, I did not invest. Although I like the company somehow, I could not build up the conviction for a 3-5 year investment case mainly due to recent slow growth and a somewhat risky acquisition.
Background/Intro_
Some readers might remember that I did a series on Online travel companies some years ago. Here is the link to the last post, including links to previous posts (2017 to 2022, time flies…)
I ended up investing for a short time in Expedia but, for some reason, never looked at Booking.com, which even back then was the clear market leader.
Looking at the charts we can see that Expedia and Booking have done OK. Booking actually did better than the S&P until early 2026:
Back then when I wrote the series, the newly launched Google Travel was the big bogeyman and mostly killed the pure “display aggregators” like TripAdvisor and Trivago, whereas the “Booking engines with inventory” like Booking and Expedia did ok.
Another interesting comparison is AirBnB and Booking. Comparing both since AirBnBs much hyped IPO in Decmeber 2020 is pretty interesting:
While Booking is still up nicely, AirBnB didn’t go anywher. for the last 5-6 years-
Under the hood however we can see Booking, with the exception of the Covid period, historically traded at a NTM P/E of ~25x whereas today it is only trading at ~15x NTM P/E-
This is the reason why I decided to have at least a first look into it, as a P/E of 15 for a “high quality compounder” is not a bad starting point.
Booking has changed over the past years
One of the most striking things about Booking is how they have changed their underlying business model over the past few years compared to when I started the travel series.
They always distinguished between Merchant vs. Agency bookings. A merchant booking is when you pay to Booking first and then Booking pays the Hotel/Airline/Car rental. An agency booking in contrast is when Booking is not involved in the payment and just creates the “match”.
This is how things looked in 2018/2019:
80% of Booking’s business was Agency, only 20% were merchant transactions. Now let’s compare with the first 6M 2026:
Today, 73% of the bookings are Merchant bookings and the merchant share is still increasing.
Booking initially focused on the Agency because this was market standard and easier to implement especially with the hotels but not very cash efficient, as they had to “front” all advertisement expenses and could only collect the commissions much later.
With the merchant model, similar to airlines or package holiday companies, they can create a nice, interest free “float” of customer prepayments. In total, that results in significant negative working capital, meaning that further growth actually creates capital instead of requiring capital which is a very nice position to be in.
In addition, Booking has diversified much more into apartment rentals, airline tickets and car rentals. They don’t tell us how much the share of these categories is in USD, but this part from the 2025 report shows that especially airline ticket sales are growing significantly:
Booking is calling this the “connected trip” which is currently still a relatively small slice of the pie but seems to grow faster than the overall business:
Cash generation & share buybacks
Increasing the merchant model share means that Booking holding has been creating tons of cash despite nice growth in the past and uses most of that cash to buy back shares on top of a small dividend.
This is a chart from their latest presentation:
This TIKR chart shows how share count has evolved over the past 10 years:
With the exception of Covid, they have been reducing sharecount by around -5% CAGR over the past 8 or 9 years.
Geopolitical exposure
Travel and tourist related stocks like Booking are always exposed to Geopolitical tensions. As they mention in their Q2 report, the Iran war has dampened demand from the important Gulf region.
High fuel and ticket prices will also maybe lead to shorter holidays in many cases and less nights that are booked.
As we can see in Bookings 6M report, growth rates already came down in Q1 and further in Q2 because of the start of the Iran war:
Especially the Q1 number is quite surprising, as the war started “only” at the end of February.
Normally, such a (temporary) weakness in global travel has always been a good time to invest especially in a market leader like Booking. From the lows in the initial Covid months, the stock had made 4x in the next 5 years or so. But: Also for Booking, the perceived threat of “Agentic AI” has to be considered.
So let’s move on now to the Agentic Thread (MUSE & Co)
Booking is a company where many people have some experience with the product, myself included. I have to admit that I have some kind of love&hate relationship. I love Booking for doing initial research on hotels. But in many cases I try to find out after choosing an option if I can get it at least as cheap directly. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
A big risk in investing especially with “consumer stocks” is always to look at ones own behaviour and then make conclusions for all the other consumers based on your own behaviour. That only works, if your behaviour is similar to the majority of consumers. If not, this can land you in a lot of trouble.
So in this case, I don’t think that my own behaviour is a good proxy for all consumers. I actually enjoy doing research for a family holiday trip, which is something that most likely not a lot of people share.
From what I am reading right now, Muse is not very good and makes a lot of mistakes. A friend of mine experimented with Clawbot, which also had its limits. But as ChatGPT, I do assume that those agents get better rather quickly.
So the question is: Will a lot of people delegate more and more tasks to these agents and which ones ?
The big question one needs to answer is the following: Is, maybe, travel a category that gets more easily disrupted by Agents compared to buying a car, an insurance policy or even a house ?
My answer to that is: I do not know, but I guess Travel is more exposed to this than Cars or houses. The next question then is: Will Agents “cut out” the middle man (Booking) or rather use the middle man as an easy source in order to fulfil tasks ?
Those are very difficult questions which in the case of Travel, I am not able to answer.
One indication that it could take more time than current “Agentic maxxers” think it takes is this page from the Booking presentation:
I think it’s still kind of interesting that only slightly more than half of Bookings clients are using a mobile device. This is interestingly below the average in E-Commerce which indicates that travel might be a little bit different compared to buying a new vacuum cleaner etc.
Some statistics show that more and more people use Chatbots for planning a trip, which so far however has not structurally changed the business model of Expedia and Booking, as they were able to integrate themselves into those conversations. So there is clearly also a path, where Expedia and Booking remain (very) relevant even within Agentic commerce.
On the other hand, Booking’s fast growing segments “connected trips” and airline tickets could be the first ones to see some kind of disruption.
But in any case, I find it much harder to underwrite Booking at 15x NTM P/E compared to an Autotrader at 12x or a Rightmove at 15x. Maybe I am wrong here, but only time will tell.
I do think that the risk is clearly higher for Travel and therefore for Booking than for categories such as Cars, real estate and even insurance which is regulated.
Summary:
Not looking at Booking 7-8 years ago because they were expensive, was clearly a “failure of omission”.
However, despite the rather attractive valuation, in Booking’s case, I am less sure if and how fast Agentic E-Commerce could negatively impact the business model.
Letting an AI Agent book a (cheap) flight is clearly less a leap of faith then letting an AI agent buy a new car or even a new home for you.
I will keep Booking on my watch list and might revisit if it becomes even cheaper, but for the time being, I could not convince myself to establish a position in the stock, despite all the obvious qualities of the Business model.
Appendix: Good Podcast discussing Booking’s business model
Why Booking.com built a business competitors can’t replicate
and another one
Norma Buyback Tender:
The original write-up is from mid-June and can be found here. Plus a same day update here.
Looking at the share price development, I clearly got out too early from this one at around 18,85 EUR per share plus dividend:
Overall, I was clearly lucky with the timing of the entry. I closed the trade early because first, I could lock in my expected return and secondly, I was a little bit “off grid” and had limited ability to react during the trading period of the tender rights.
The main difference to my initial case was that the tender price had been further increased from 20,87 EUR to 22,35. Interestingly, for the remaining shareholders, this is not really positive as more cash went to selling shareholders.
I had checked a few times during the trading of the tender rights and they were trading relatively close to their intrinsic value.
What I find quite surprising is that at the time of writing, the stock is still trading pretty high above my “undisturbed” value before the announcement. And how long it took to come down from the “inflated” tender price. I have to confess that I don’t fully understand this.
Paypal Stripe/Advent offer Special Sit:
Here clearly my expectation of a higher bid from Stripe/Advent did not materialize but they rather dropped their effort.
As mentioned in the comments of the original post, I directly sold after this became public as I have no opinion on the longer term development of Paypal. This is what I wrote back then:
However one more thing is important to mention: This is a special situation investment for me. So if for some reason, Stripe & Advent withdraw their bid, I will sell, no matter what. For a “Value investment” I still find Paypal too hard at this stage.
Luckily for me, the stock did not drop down to the “undisturbed” price of ~45 USD. So I could get out with a relatively modest single digit loss in this case.
I have to admit that I was already feeling a little bit insecure after Stripe closed the OpenRouter acquisition for ~7,5 bn USD a few days earlier. Stripe is a great company but they don’t seem have an unlimited budget for M&A as a financial intermediary.
As in all of these cases, there is always the risk that a case doesn’t work out. In my opinion, the most important part here is to stick to the original plan (i.e. sell) and try to find out if I have made any “a priori mistakes”.
In this case, the only mistake was maybe not to reduce the position after the open router acquisition from Stripe.
For the future, any public take-over situations with Stripe need to trade at a wider discount to account for this episode.
Delivery Hero/Uber take over Special Sit
As mentioned in my weekly links post, the UBER/ Delivery Hero take over could be an interesting Merger “Arbitrage” Special Situation.
In a nutshell, Uber owns currently around 25% of DHR outright and has launched a take-over offer in late August at an offer price of 41,5 EUR.
Expected closing of the deal is in the second half of 2027 and the acceptance hurdle for this offer is only 51% which Uber seems to have in the bag already.
The main risk of the transaction is clearly a relatively complicated merger control and approval process in many countries and especially an intermediate step where part of DHER’s business needs to get carved out and sold to a Private Equity shop called SSW Partners.
At the current share price of 36,85 EUR/share, the “spread” to the 41,50 EUR offer is 12,6%.
This needs to compensate for:
This is the stock chart from Delivery Hero which shows the significant bid premium:
All my 3 AI Tools (Claude, ChatGPT & Gemini) were recommending not to establish a position due the complexity of the deal (carve-out requirement) and the significant downside in a “no deal” scenario if the “cost of capital” is 10 to 15% p.a.
Personally, I think especially countries like UAE or Saudi Arabia could become more risky with regard to merger clearance when the war in Middle East continues to spread.
So in this case I actually follow the advice and sit on my hands. I will revisit this by end of October to see if it has become more attractive, either by a lower price or some fundamental improvements.
Interestingly, both ChatGPT and Claude offered to build an Excel spreadsheet. Here are some screenshots from ChatGPT which look very professional:
I didn’t check all the formulas, but it seems to be quite good.
In addition, ChatGPT also is checking now 2 times a day for updates.I guess Claude can do the same easily.
Although AI tools don’t change the Special Sit game completely, it clearly makes a more “equal playing field” as it reduces the effort to get into this.
The main risk that I see is that the motivation to actually read relevant documents goes down even more and that it is hard to see if the AI Agent makes mistakes or catches everything.
DISCLAIMER: This is not Investment Advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
Soundtrack:
There were quite a few songs that fit the topic, but in the end I really like Disco so ”Sexy Eyes” from Dr. Hook is my favorite;
Editorial Notes on AI use:
I do use AI tools (Gemini, Claude, NotebookLM) extensively during the research but I write everything “by hand”. In some cases, I will however copy & paste a summary or result table from a query after checking that the content is plausible. But I will always explicitly mention if I do this explicitly.
Management Summary:
Fielmann Group, the majority family owned German optical retailer has seen a significant multiple compression over the past 10 years despite a very decent operational performance since the Covid lows.
Based on a credible 5 year plan laid out in 2025, Fielmann is attractively priced and if they continue to execute under the leadership of the second generation family CEO, the stock offers significant potential over the next 4-5 years.
For this high margin, high return on capital business with a rock solid balance sheet and strong cashflow generation, the current valuation of ~15 NTM P/E and ~3,3% dividend yield looks attractive.
And here is the full write-up:
