Category Archives: Anlage Philosophie

DCC Plc (ISIN IE0002424939) – Extremely unsexy Business meets sexy Track Record at a super sexy Valuation

Posted on by 17 comments

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR ON RESEARCH !!

As this post has become quite long, here is the Elevator pitch:

DCC Ltd, a 4,3 bn market cap UK listed, Ireland based company at a first look like a very boring, unremarkable collection of very boring distribution businesses. A second (or third) glance however, reveals a very stable , well managed distribution company that has been compounding EPS at double digit growth rates for the last 28 years and can be bought for a very modest valuation of ~10x earnings. The company clearly faces some challenges but this might be more than outweighed by very good capital allocation, company culture and growth opportunities.

  1. History

DCC has a very interesting history. It was founded actually as some kind of Venture Capital company in 1976 in Ireland and was led for 32 ears by founder Jim Flavin. After turning into an operating company, DCC went public in 1994. Over the years they acquired a lot of businesses, many of those where distribution businesses from oil majors but also in other areas such as health care and technology components.

What I find extremely impressive is their track record since they listed in 1994 and is available in each annual report:

Read more

Panic Journal 5 – Ukraine/Russia edition: Is Europe really Toast, Energy Silver Bullets and the Weather

Posted on by 8 comments

It’s time after exactly 3 months for some new ramblings on Energy, Europe and of course the weather and other stuff.

Bad news everywhere:

The last few weeks felt like a new catastrophe is happening every week or so. Italian elections, the British Pound trading like a Shitcoin, Putin threatening the West with Nuclear Weapons, Energy prices for retail customers skyrocketing, potential Blackouts being a real issue in Europe this winter, steel and fertilizer companies shutting down in Europe, creating supply chain issues down the chain and in addition, rumors about regime change in China and/or preparations for an attack on Taiwan are surfacing every day.

I have been listening to some US podcasts and there seems to be consensus on that Europe is Toast. Even a comparison to the “Arab Spring” was made with the dire prediction that Governments will topple like Domino tiles. I don’t want to sound arrogant but one word of advice to my American readers: European countries are actually all Democracies and if people don’t like their leaders they will elect new ones.

The FT was just running an article about the coming Deindustrialization of Germany with the example of BASF threatening to “leave” Germany and Billionaire Ray Dalio thinks that Europeans are not working hard enough.

Read more

All Norwegian Shares part 1 – Nr. 1-15

Posted on by 7 comments

Good bye Denmark, hello Norway !!
As with previous series (Germany, Switzerland & Denmark) I will tackle the  Norwegian shares in random order. The main reason for this is that I find this funnier compared to working down the list in Alphabetic order. The first batch of 15 stocks has resulted in two watch list candidates. Let’s go !

  1. Kahoot!

Kahoot! is 1,1 bn EUR market cap former “growth darling” that was part of many “naive Tech investor” portfolios. Kahoot! is an online learning platform that addresses both, private customers as well as the corporate learning market. As many other Tech companies the financial report is a gibberish of Non-GAAP adjusted numbers. On a GAAP level, the company is loss making and cash seems to be shrinking. At 7x P/S this still looks much to expensive. “Pass”.

2. AF Gruppen

Read more

All Danish part 16 – Nr. 151-160

Posted on by 4 comments

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:

Nordea

Read more

Royal Unibrew (ISIN DK0060634707) – A High Quality Beverage Compounder at a reasonable price ?

Posted on by 25 comments

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!

The company:

Royal Unibrew logo

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.

Read more

Exmar – Update Q3 numbers: “Thank you for the Tango” & SELL

Posted on by 12 comments

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:

  • Cash proceeds for the ENI transaction were slightly higher (+13 mn) compared to my base case
  • Net cash at company level however was -23 mn lower than I had calculated
  • Interestingly, Exmar only reported net cash at Group level, not gross cash at Holding level
  • The remaining core LPG business seems to do quite well, with sales up ~6% and EBIT up ~50%
  • They didn’t provide explicit number on how much they earn with the remaining regasification unit that is operating since August. The earnings of the “infrastructure” segment are really hard to read
  • Next week, there will be an extraordinary shareholder meeting declaring a 0,95 EUR dividend per share

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:

Read more

Hypoport AG Part 1: : Great Business but experiencing a “Wile E. Coyote moment” ?

Posted on by 8 comments

Background:

Hypoport logo

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:

  1. Loan platform “Europace”

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.

Read more

Knorr Bremse AG: German Mittelstand”Hidden Champion” with a few issues

Posted on by 9 comments

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 logo

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.

Read more

PANIC JOURNAL – UKRAINE/RUSSIA EDITION PART 4: The new “Freedom Insulation” Basket

Posted on by 32 comments

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

Read more

« Older Entries Recent Entries »