value and opportunity

Another week, another 10 Swiss stocks, this time with one stock to “watch”.

31. Plazza AG

Plazza is a 581 mn CHF market cap real estate company that invests in and around Zurich. The company seems to trade close to NAV and as a rule I normally don’t consider listed real estate as part of my investment universe, therefore I’ll “pass”.

32. Komax AG

Komax is a 831 mn CHF market cap company that supplies cable automation machines to mainly car manufacturers but also the Aerospace industry as well as other industries. As a automobile supplier, business suffered already in 2019 before getting hit again in 2020.

The stock chart shows a significant cyclicality which is not a surprise:

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And the next batch of randomly chosen Swiss stocks, however this time I only identified one potential “watch list” candidate. 

I do have to say that I enjoy this kind of research a lot. After looking now at 20 stocks so far I have to say that reporting quality is generally a lot better than for German companies, independent from the size of the company. 

11. Varia US Proporties

Varia is a listed property company that only invests in US real estate with a market cap of ~380 mn CHF. They seem to own a diversified portfolio of resdidential units. The company seems to be a “yield vehicle”, with relatively large distributions but little increase in NAV. As I am not a fan of listed real estate in any case, I’ll “pass”.

12. Lonza Group

Lonza is a 42,3 bn CHF “large cap” chemical and pharmaceuticals Group. What makes the company interesting is the fact that over the last 10 years, the share price has risen by around 10x:

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Introduction

After the great fun of doing the “All German shares” Series in 2019/2020, It is time to start the new “All Swiss Shares” series in 2021. According to the Swiss Stock Exchange, there are currently 220 Swiss based listed companies, so the series will be a little bit shorter. The reason for choosing Switzerland is that I actually own already two Swiss based companies (Richemont, Zur Rose) and that I think there is an interesting mixture of companies in Switzerland, several of which I have covered over the last 10 years.

Again, mostly for my own entertainment, I will use a random approach in looking at the companies.

One difference to the German series is that I’ll try to better define what I am looking for. In principle, my portfolio comprises three different styles/buckets:

1. “Long term holdings” – Stocks where I think there is good long term potential. For this group, I require high quality with regard to the business model, leadership and balance sheet
2. “Value Trades” – Stocks where I think for some specific reasons there is a significant undervaluation that will materialize in a period of up to 3 years. This could be a “sum-of-part” situation, a spin-off, activist involvement or another situation where I think that I can identify the reason for the undervaluation and where I have a different view. Due to the shorter time horizon, the requirements for “quality” are a little bit lower.
3. “Special situations”  – in my definition, special situations are based on corporate actions (M&A, Squeeze out etc.) where the potential outcomes are clear and the main task is to assess probabilities and an expected value.

So now let’s jump into the first 10 stocks. Surprisingly, I found already 4 stocks worth “watching” out of the first batch.

1. BVZ Holding AG

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