Today I read an article in one of the major German Newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine, about the merits of investing in stocks.
I know that the year is still young, but this article (in German) might be easily the worst article of the year on stock investing.
They offer 3 “compelling” reasons why stocks are attractive:
– dividends are increasing
– stocks are still below all time high if you look at a pure price index (the old FAZ index)
– the dividend yield according to them is 2,9% and higher than 10 year Bunds (0,5%) or BBB bonds (1,5%)
They even recommend to buy stocks just before the dividend payment to collect the dividend and then sell. They finally show a calendar with all dividend dates of the major German stocks in order for the readers to be prepared.
Technicalities:
For some reason, the author doesn’t seem to know the existence of an “Ex-dividend” adjustment for stocks. I guess this guy also buys bonds the day before they pay the coupon or so. Including taxes and execution costs, I am pretty sure this kind of “dividend hopping” has negative expected value.
Anchoring bias
Secondly, it is interesting that you see such a nice example of an “anchoring bias” in a major newspaper. For investing in stocks it doesn’t matter if the stocks trade at an all time high or all time low. All that matters is if stocks are valued adequately in relation to their intrinsic value which in turn is determined by future profits and cash flows. With a “strategy” like that one mentioned, you will miss most bull markets and happily buy into bear markets. Congratulations !!!
Where is the problem with dividend yields ?
Well, before I further insult the writer of this article, the problem is that many people seem starting to think that somehow dividends are like “coupons”. This is clearly the side effect of the current low-interest rate environment.
However just buying stocks with high dividend yields is actually a loosing strategy as Dreman, O’Shaugnessey and others have shown. For me, the problem is two fold:
1. High current dividend yield stocks are often value traps
When companies get in fundamental trouble, they often try to preserve their “sacred” dividend until the bitter end. For some reason, canceling a dividend is been seen as the ultimate ratio before the real troubles begin. So it is quite common, especially in capital-intensive industries that struggling companies keep up their dividend despite an eroding business, as it could be seen with E.on, RWE or the banks. Sometimes you even see companies paying dividends and issuing dilutive shares at the same time just to keep up the illusion of a constant, “coupon like” dividend like Santander just recently.
Those long term returns mentioned above are actually much more the result of high growth, low dividend yield stocks which over a long-term grow so much that after 20 years or more, the dividend in relation to the original purchase price is then huge.
Especially these days, dividend yield is a very imperfect measure for shareholder returns anyway. Including share buy backs and looking at total shareholder return is the much superior strategy as for instance Mebane Faber has shown in his book.
2. Psychology: Yield hogs get slaughtered
A “yield hog” is someone who only looks at coupons or yields and not on total returns. If you buy a bond and the issuer does not go bankrupt, you get the coupon and the principal back. If you buy a stock, you might get your dividends (or not), but you never get your principal back. In contrast to a bond, you have to sell the stock to someone else in order to get your principal back. However there is clearly no guarantee that you will your principal back as “mr. market” might disagree on the value he wants to give you.
Psychologically, “Yield hogs” often cannot stand draw downs on the stock price and then get “slaughtered” when the panic sell in a bear market (often after doubling up on the way down). In some areas like insurance or pension funds, where you need to show a current yield, this “yield hog mentality” is basically baked into the business model and can be observed cycle by cycle.
So when do dividends add or indicate value ?
In my opinion, the only case where dividend yields are important if you invest in “deep value” cheap non-growing companies with a lot of cash flow and questionable capital allocation skills or dangerous environments. In such cases, having a paybacks via high dividends lowers the “risk duration” of an investment significantly.
In my portfolio for instance, Installux, Romgaz and Electrica are such candidates where I would not invest if they would just accumulate earnings. but be careful: i ti snot the dividend which makes them good investment but the undervalued nature of the stock. Admiral for instance, a company I really admire, would do much better fo its shareholders if they would buy back stock instead of paying 6-7% dividends. The long term compounded return would be much better without the tax on the dividend income.
Investing in stocks because of the dividend yield is an extremely stupid way to invest. Either you will end up holding a lot of value traps and/or you will lose your nerves in the inevitable downturns.
Dividends should only been considered in context with the underlying business model and in combination with the capital allocation (reinvestment, share buy backs, debt levels), but never ever as a stand-alone investment criteria.
Dividends ARE NOT COUPONS and stocks are not “yield replacements” for bonds !!
Again this turned out to be a quite long post as I am digging a little bit deeper into the balance sheet. Therefore a quick summary:
Although FBD Holdings, the Irish P&C company looks interesting, I will not invest. The company has a very impressive track record, but in my opinion the business model is not scalable as it doesn’t have any structural competitive advantages besides a loyal client base. Additionally, the company severely screwed up their asset allocation and will be faced with ultra low investment returns going forward unless they are increasing their investment risk significantly.
At current stock prices, the company is in my opinion pretty well priced, with only a relatively small upside in a good case and equally large downside in a more negative case.
A quick update on my “Christmas-special situation” investment Flughafen Wien:
82,2% of the tendered shares have been accepted at the offer price of 82 EUR. With the current share price of ~ 77,5 EUR, the overall return results (pre costs and taxes) are :
(0,822*(82-79,25) + 0,178*(77,50-79,25))/79,25= +2,46% For the portfolio I assume that I would be able to close the position (sell the rest) at 77,50 EUR. Privately my broker DAB was not yet able to “release” the tendered shares.
Alstom
Back in August this year, I looked at Alstom as a potential “sum of parts” play following the GE deal announcement. One open point was the issue of pending corruption charges. I had written the following:
A second big issue is that at the moment no one knows exactly how much of the liabilities will get transferred to GE. Especially with regard to operating leases (nominal ~830 mn EUR), litigation liabilities (528 mn EUR) and pension liabilites (gross 5,2 bn) there is no definitive answer how much will be transferred to GE and what remains at Alstom. In a sum of part calculation, any of those remaining liabilities will have to be deducted from the extra assets as they are economically equivalent to debt.
I had some discussion and the consensus was that litigation liabilities would be transferred to GE, although I was sceptical. It turned out that I was right in this case. Alstom pleaded guilty and agreed to pay 772 mn USD fine. For the valuation, the most important sentence is this one:
In June, Alstom agreed to sell most of its energy business to General Electric. The French company said it would not be able to transfer its fine over bribery allegations to G.E.
Due to the strong dollar, in EUR the fine is actually 100 mn USD higher han the reserves. Overall, for anyone assuming GE taking over those liabilities, this reduced the value of Alstom by 2 EUR per share.. It will be interesting to see how the transport business is actually doing once Alstom publishes annual results. So far, I do not see any reason to buy the stock from a fundamental point of view.
Trilogiq
A few days before Christmas, Trilogiq reported 6m figures (30.09.2014). For some reason, the report is not on Trilogiq’s homepage, so one has to look at secondary sources like this one. Sales were slightly lower, gross margins more or less equal to last year. Net income was significantly lower but still positive.
They attribute the lower result to special marketing expenses and new hires:
la hausse de 13% des autres achats et charges externes, notamment du fait de la multiplication des actions marketing destinées à faire connaitre la nouvelle gamme GRAPHiT à travers le monde, l’augmentation de 12% des charges de personnel qui ont été grevées par d’importantes indemnités de départ et par de nouveaux recrutements
Cash is till around 22 mn EUR or 6 EUR per share. If Trilogiq manages to return at leat to 2/3 of the old profitability, (earnings were between 1,45 EUR per share and 1,75 EUR from 2008 to 2013), the stock would be priced at 6-8 times earnings. It remains to be seen if the temporary effects are in fact temporary. A friend forwarded me this equity research piece on Trilogiq where they expect 1 EUR EPS in 2016/2017 which to me looks quite conservative. Nevertheless, I think the further fundemental downside for Trilogiq at the current stock price is rather limited.
Sberbank
Over the holidays, I decided that I will exit my Sberbank position still within the old year at today’s prices. In the private account this also leads to “tax loss harvesting”. For the portfolio it became clear to me that my investment decision now has been invalidated 2 times. First, I estimated that the Ukraine conflict would be over quickly which was clearly wrong. Secondly, I did not account for the drop in oil prices and the ruble. I have honestly no idea how exposed Sberbank is directly or indirectly to oil and the ruble, but the prudent decision is to sell now and look at the stock (and the Russian market) again next year.
It might look very pro-cyclical selling near the low, on the other hand, if an investment case has deteriorated as much as in this case one should better exit before “behavioural biasis” such as “breaking even” etc. kick in.
Keeping track of all the companies one has ever looked at is pretty hard. It is pretty easy to update the companies which are in the current portfolio, but in my case, I often forget about the companies which I have looked a couple of years ago but didn’t buy for one reason or another or sold them. One of the great things of blogging is that you can easily look at everything you have ever written. Especially in the current environment, where good value investing ideas are pretty hard to find, it might make sense to look back at companies one has researched sometimes ago and either sold or not bought. Maybe they have become interesting again ? For me it is a lot easier to update myself on a stock I have looked 3-4 years ago compared to looking (and digging) into a completely new stock.
So in this new series, I will look into stocks I have written about and either sold or rejected and try to find out if something has changed or if some lessons could be learned.
AS Creation
AS Creation was the first detailed stock analysis on the blog in December 2010 (in German). The company back then looked cheap: Single Digit P/E, historically a single digit p.a. grower, 30% market share in Germany and the potential upside of a Russian JV (Russia was supposed to be a growth market back then). After some quite significant ups and downs, the stock was sold in August 2013 because the margins didn’t mean revert and the Russian JV was already in some trouble under “non crisis” conditions.
Looking back, the decision to sell in June 2013 at ~34 EUR looks smart if we consider the chart although in between the stock went up to 40 EUR again:
Operationally, AS Creation was hit by several negative events: First, the bankruptcy of Praktiker impacted them in the German core business, secondly, their French subsidiaries suffered and finally, the Russian JV which had to suffer from delays has been clearly hit by by the current crisis. With regard to the German business I have the impression that they never really rebounded to their historical average, maybe they did profit from some kind of anticompetition arrangements, for which they were fined. An interesting detail: They were convicted to pay 10,5 mn EUR in 2014, but they seem to have appealed the decision. To my knowledge, no appeal was ever succesful.
In any case, I don’t think AS Creation is interesting at the current level of 30 EUR. At a 2014 P/E of 15-20 (before any extra write-offs on Russia) there seems to be quite some turn around fantasy being priced in.
From my side there were 2 important lessons:
1. Mean reversion on single stock basis is nit guaranteed
2. If you buy cheap enough, you don’t lose much if things go wrong.
Medtronic
Medtronic was introduced (in German) on December 31st 2010 and then kicked out in August 2011 because I didn’t feel comfortable with a large cap US stock.
Looking back, this clearly doesn’t look like the smartest decision I ever made. Back then, I sold Medtronic at a loss of around -19%. Since then, the stock showed a total return of 167% in EUR. One of the interesting things about Medtronic is that a lot of the performance came from multiple expansion.
When I sold the stock at around 32 USD, the stock was trading around 10 times trailing earnings (3,27 USD per share 2010). 4 years later, reported earnings 2013/2014 have been ~20% higher per share at 3,80 USD, but Medtronic is now trading at around 18,5 times trailing earnings.
What is even more interesting than that is the fact that in absolute terms, 2013/14 earnings are at exactly the same levels as 2010/2011. Profit margins are even lower than back then. What happened ? Well, as in many cases for US stocks, the company bought back shares aggressively. Still, both ROE and ROIC declined but shareholders don’t seem to bother.
So despite the big run up of the share price, I don’t think that selling the shares has been a mistake. From a fundamental view the company looks worse than back then, however investors seem to be so happy about buyback driven EPS gains that they are willing to pay a pretty high valuation for this.
You could have speculated on such an outcome but as a fundamental investor, this would not have been in line with my investment philosophy. And clearly, You cannot increase the value of the company forever just by reducing the share count.
Stand-alone I would argue that Medtronic is clearly overvalued, based on the stagnating profit and deteriorating profitability. However with the current Healthcare “merger mania” I would not want to short the stock either.
Netflix
I briefly considered to skip the whole Netflix episode but then decided against it. Looking back, this clearly shows that one can do stupid things and still make money….
Looking at the chart, we can see that despite extreme volatility, Netflix is now trading 3 times higher than when I covered the position:
The lessons here were pretty simple:
1. Don’t short “hot stocks” based on fundamentals. It is too volatile and just not worth it-
2. Stay away from whatever Whitney Tilson is recommending
Fundamentally, Netflix is on my “too hard” pile. I do think streaming is a big thing and will be even bigger in the future. However I have no idea how much money Netflix will actually be able to make.
Normally, I don’t care that much about quarterly results, but in the case of German utilities I sometimes make an exception simply because often they are too entertaining to miss.
Yesterday, for instance E.ON the German utility company reported Q3 figures. The press release reads pretty “upbeat”:
E.ON affirms 2014 forecast
11/12/14 | Posted in: Finance
Adjusted for portfolio and currency-translation effects, EDITDA above prior-year level
Renewables’ share of earnings rises to 17 percent
Economic net debt reduced by €1.2 billion
E.ON today reported nine-month earnings that were in line with its expectations. It therefore continues to anticipate full-year 2014 EBITDA of €8 to 8.6 billion and underlying net income of €1.5 to €1.9 billion. Nine-month EBITDA declined by seven percent year on year to €6.6 billion. The absence of earnings streams from divested companies and adverse currency-translation effects were the main factors. On a like-for-like basis—that is, adjusted for portfolio changes and currency-translation effects—E.ON’s EBITDA was above the prior-year level.
I would call this kind of disclosure “Level 1”: How the company wants to be seen
So with “adjustments” things look better than last year. However this time even a relatively “mainstream” German magazine remarked that the earnings disclosure of EON is relatively difficult to understand.
Level 2: P&L – Some kind of truth
In their quarterly report, EON has to use Accounting standards at some point. After 15 pages of useless “Management report” the first “real” accounting number shows up on page 16.
In fat type you can see the following: Net income 255 for YTD 2014, which is around 90% lower than 2014. Then in small print they show the following:
Attributable to shareholders of E.ON SE -14
Attributable to non-controlling interests 269
So under IFRS, EON actually lost 14 mn EUR in the first 9 months.But anyone who is reading this blog regularily knows that this is still only “half of the truth”:
Level 3: What really happened – Comprehensive income
Only on page 25 we see the comprehensive income statement of EON for the first 9 months. And this looks really ugly.
-1,7 bn losses from the increase in pension liability
-0,6 bn FX and hedging losses
then lead to a total loss of 2,2 bn EUR or -1,1 EUR per share for E.ON’s shareholders for the first 9 months.
If we look at the stock price, we see that the positive “spin” only lasted for around 20 minutes before the stock price started to drop.
Why are they doing this ?
Well, this is pretty easy and straight forward: This allows the Management to award them nice bonuses independent of what the total result for the shareholder looks like.
Total comp in 2013 according to the annual report for management was 18,5 mn, thereof around 13 mn “bonus”. And this in a year where the were only able to generate a comprehensive income o ~600 mn EUR or 2% ROE.
EON’s target achievement is measured the following way according to the annual report:
As under the old plan, the metric used for the operating-
earnings target is EBITDA. The EBITDA target for a particular
financial year is the plan figure approved by the Supervisory
Board. If E.ON’s actual EBITDA is equal to the EBITDA target,
this constitutes 100 percent attainment. If it is 30 percentage
points or more below the target, this constitutes zero percent
achievement. If it is 30 percentage points or more above the
target, this constitutes 200 percent attainment. Linear inter-
polation is used to translate intermediate EBITDA figures
into percentage
For a capital-intensive business like a utility, EBITDA in absolute is pretty useless. However it is pretty easy to achieve or beat for Management. As a shareholder you can be sure that your interests are not aligned well with those of the management. In my opinion, that whole mess at EON has a lot to do with this pretty obvious “detachment” between management and shareholders and only to a smaller extent with German energy policy.
Finally some other stuff
The most interesting item in the whole Q3 report for me was the fact that Electrical Power generation was actually 50% better (EBITDA) than in 2013 and more than 100% better on EBIT basis. The biggest drop yoy actually came from the natural gas business.
Summary:
EON’s Q3 report for me is a prime example for a badly managed company. The disconnect between management incentives and shareholders leads to nonsense reporting, mostly in order to avoid the hard truth of losses to shareholders. For instance anyone who wondered why they bought crappy assets in Brazil and Turkey instead of paying back debt should understand that this actually increased the bonuses of management irrespective of FX losses, write-offs etc. As an investor, one should stay as far away as possible from such companies, no matter how cheap they are because at some point in the future they will “hit the brick wall”.
EVS Broadcast Equipment SA is a Belgian company developing and selling state-o-the art equipment mostly to broadcasters and TV production companies, enabling them to store, edit and broadcast live camera images on a fully digitalised basis. They are especially strong in the area of live sporting events.
we can see that EVS is not super cheap. However if we look at past profitability and growth numbers numbers, we can see that EVS is still “super profitable” at levels which only can be explained by significant competitive advantages:
5 y avg
10 y avg
Profit Margin
30,8%
36,5%
ROE
55,2%
63,5%
Sales growth
3,30%
12,70%
EPS growth
-5,40%
22,30%
However, if one looks at the growth figures we can clearly see that the “High growth” phase seems to be clearly over, but they are still incredibly profitable.
Why are they so profitable?
This is a quote from the 1999 annual report (which is by the way a very good report):
The EVS Group sells its equipment to radio and television channels as well as to people providing services to these channels. This is a professional market where quality and technical performance of the equipment is often more important than its price.
Production of the equipment manufatured and marketed by ECS and NETIA does not require important tangible investment. Nor does R&D require any considerable investments, since engineers and programmers work directly on the machines to be sold or on PC type equipment for the sftware developement.”
So building “mission critical” equiment with low price sensitivity combined with low to no physical capital needs sounds like a pretty good business case. But how do you get into such a desirable position ?
Again, the best explanation is given in the 1999 annual report:
In 1994, most recorders used by television channels were tape recorders, although hard disks already had replaced tapes for recording purposes in the
computer area. Three factors have since then influenced the use of hard disks rather than tapes for professional video recording :
• the increased capacity and higher performance of hard disks,
• their lower cost,
• considerable progress has also been made in compression : for example, the JPEG system allows an average compression ratio as low as 5:1 in the memory space required to record a picture.
EVS strategy on the huge professional recorder market has been to pinpoint those applications for which hard disks would offer the user a substantial competitive advantage over tapes. By the end of 1996, the number of professional recorders installed throughout the world was estimated at about 352 000 units, for 60 000 users.
Among these, tape recorders accounted for about 340 000 units, compared to 12 000 disk recorders.
So what EVS did in the mid/late 90ties was a classical “disruption”: At that time, most broadcasts were recorded on physical tapes which had a lot of disadvantages. In sports for instance if you wanted to show a replay, the recording had to be stopped, rewinded and replayed. In between, no recording could be done,so often the consequent action on the field was unrecorded. EVS as one of the first companies offered a digital solution, which allowed continuous recording and easy access to slow motion etc.
The second boost came in the mid 2000s with the introduction of full HD and HDTV which sped up the change from tape to digital and required new generation of servers.
EVS became the defacto industry standard for most of the digitalised live TV production around the world, especially for sports. Somewhere I read that they claim a 95% market share in certain areas. With all the money pouring into professional sports these days, it still looks like a pretty good place to be a “niche market leader”.
Will EVS stay so profitable ?
This is a much harder question to answer compared to “why are they so profitable”. The question boils down to: Are the obvious competitive advantages sustainable ?
According to theory, two potential competitive advantages could e relevant for EVS: Size advantages and the network effect.
Network effect:
As far as I know, EVS did use mostly open source and industry standards, so in theory it should be relatively easy to replace EVS’s equipment. It seems however that the software implies a certain way to do things that doesn’t make it that easy to simply copy the stuff. EVS equipment seems to define work processes and many people in the field might prefer a known, working process to a new one even if its cheaper. The technicians are trained on the gear and might prefer this to any other gear. Nevertheless I would argue that there is no strong network effect at work here but maybe a “soft” one.
Size advantage
Although EVS is still a relatively small company, within its niche, it is huge. They had a big headstart into the current technology and have built up significant technical knowledge which is not easy to copy. Any small competitor who wants to compete with based on the same technology will have a big issue. Even if they would be able produce slightly better gear, they would still need to build up a sales and service organizition and spend a lot of money on getting access to all those potential clients. This would be different if a competitor would be coming into the market “vertically”, for instance guys like Sony who produce the cameras etc. but for some reason that didn’t happened. Maybe the niche overall is too small to justify a big investment by a “vertical” competitor.
For me, the biggest issue might be that once again the technology will change and allow another disruptor into the business. A small hint could be seen in a interesting research report from media technolgy research company Devoncroft (report is free but registration required).
For EVS, one of the most “dangerous” developments could be what is described on page 36: The move from specialised IT gear for real time processing to “generic” gear. EVS delivers “spezialised” gear and software. This is how a typical EVS “box” looks like:
I am not sure how solid their business would be if the “Boxes” were seperated from the software and this would clearly open the door for disruptors.
Limits to Armchair Investing
At this stage, there are clearly limits to Armchair Investing. With the time available for me, it is impossible to judge for me if EVS will be able to keep its high margins or not. If margins “normalize”, then the current price for the stock might be still high. If margins remain high and the market still grows then the stock would be a “high quality” bargain. However I do not feel comofrtable to make any judgement here.
Some other observations
– Founders sold down early, only one remaining (CTO)
In 1999, the three founders and their families owned around 57% of the company. Since then, 2 of the three left and the remaining one has reduced his ownership to ~6%. It seems that they were not fully convinced about the long term prospects of EVS.
– they are currently building crazy expensive heaquarters in Belgium.
Overall cost is expected to be around 60 mn EUR. This is from the 6 month report:
At the end of 2011, EVS started the construction of a new integrated building in the proximity of its current location in Liège, in order to gather all employees of EVS headquarters, split today in 6 different buildings. EUR 39.4 million have been invested by the end of June 2014 (less EUR 5.2 million of subsidies booked at the same date). The total budget for the project (including some higher investments in future-proof equipment) is estimated between EUR 55 and EUR 60 million.
EVS has in total 500 employees, with at least 1/3 outside Belgium. So spending ~200k EUR per employee for a new headquarter is absolutely insane in my opinion.
– current CEO is a “manager”, no ownership
The current CEO came from outside and has no stock ownership. He does have stock options and I have not seen a single share purchase of management ever.
– potential “diworsification”
The new strategy is to diversify “verticaly” into post production technology as the core sports area seems to be somehow saturated. EVS tried to diversify early on, but both attempts failed (digital radio, digital cinema). Maybe vertical diversification works better but if the high margins can be retained ?
– weak first half of 2014 indicates increasing pressure on margins
Normally, EVS always performs strongest in years with large sports events. 2014 with the Winter olympics in Sochi and the Football Worldcup in Brazil should have beenn a great year for them. However, despite rising sales, profit went actually down compared to the “non event year” 2013. 2015 with no events willbe even harder for them. So the trend clearly is negative at the
The stock price also shows that the market does not look that favourable at EVS’s prospects following the 6 month numbers:
Summary:
EVS is an interesting company. As a clear niche market leader with fantastic historic profitability , it could be a great investment especially if the diversification strategy would work. On the other hand, there are several qualitative factors which i found distrubing, especially with rgeard to the new HQ and the lack of “ownership” within management and employees. On top of this, 2015 will be a tough year for them anyway so it might be the wrong time to invest in any case. So for me it is just a stock for the watch list with the next review in Q3 2015.
Ageas is a Belgium based insurance company and formerly known as “Fortis”, one of the biggest Eurpoean casualties of the financial crisis. Fortis, together with RBS and Santander tried to take over ABN Amro but especially Fortis then failed spectacularily and was saved by the Belgian Government and finally sliced and diced into Insurance and Banking, of which the banking part was sold to BNP Paribas.
Ageas itself is an interesting case, similar to NN Group, it is a strange collection of Belgium, UK, and Asian insurance companies plus some weird stuff at corporate level, resulting from the quite ugly split of a combined group into two separate businesses. However, a lot of the ugly stuff has already been cleared over the last few years and Ageas was looking like an almost “Normal” insurance company
The litigation
A few weeks ago, a Dutch court decided that Ageas is liable for misinforming Fortis shareholders in 2008:
The Amsterdam Appeals Court ruled that Fortis is liable for misleading investors by saying the firm was “financially stronger than ever” after a government bailout on Sept. 28, 2008, only to be replaced by a break-up plan five days later.
and further down:
Ageas should be able to meet a worst-case liability of 2.5 billion euros before taxes possibly stemming from the ruling, Matthias De Wit, a Brussels-based analyst at KBC, said in a note today. Still, potential indirect effects shouldn’t be ignored, he said.
Looking at the stockprice, we can estimate that the stock lost ~ 5 EUR per share:
With about 230 mn shares outstanding, the market seems to have implied ~ 1,1 bn EUR loss after tax. Ageas itself has provisioned around 130 mn EUR against this case.
Is this interesting ?
At the moment, it is hard to say. Ageas trades at ~0,62 times book value, which is relatively cheap. They are very active in repurchasing shares (sharecount decreased by -115 since 2011). I do like the insurance sector at the moment because its cheap and the problems (low interest rates etc.) are well known.
Insurance companies do have traditionally very good lawyers on their payroll and litigation is part of their business, so one can assume that they handle this very professionally. On the other hand, other than the CIR Spa case, there is no direct catalyst as the law suit can linger on quite some time.
Valuation wise, Ageas look similar to NN Group, actually, I could easily see those two Groups merging at some point in the future. My guess is that someone is maybe already working on the idea to form a strong Benelux players out of the available mid size companies (Delta lloyd, NN Group, Ageas, SNS).
Nevertheless, I do not think that AGEAS is a “Litigation play” at the moment, as I don’t have a good idea on the time line of the law suit. However it it looks like a pretty cheap insruance company with some upside potential, so I will keep it on my watchlist.
If I understood the filing correctly, the following will happen:
1. Existing shareholders will be diluted 1:100
2. Bondholders will accept a “haircut” of 60% plus the coupon will be reduced to 1% (from 7,5%) and the maturity will be extended to 2021 (from 2018)
3. Hero cycles will inject (up to) 15mn EUR via a capital increase
4. Bondholders will get 10% of the new company for the 15 mn haircut and a subscription right for additional shares
Interestingly, the advisor nominated by the bondholders also made a press release. Some additional info from this release:
– the advisor estimated a recovery rate of only 15% for bondholders in the case of bankruptcy
– technically, bondholders will own 91% of MIFA equity before Hero cycle invests
– bondholders get subscriptions right and could, if they want to invest new money, own up to 30% of MIFA including those shares they get via the debt equity swap
As some details are still missing (price of new shares) etc., it is hard to correctly say how much the bonds are worth and if bondholders were treated fairly compared to Hero. However current prices at ~38% seem to imply most of the upside.
My 5 cents on this
For me, the following aspects of this whole episode are interesting:
– How can be the recovery rate of bond issued twelve months ago only be 15% ? Where did the 21,5 mn EUR disappear ? In my opinion, MIFA was a fraudulent company for quite some time and was already insolvent when they issued the bonds.
– Will there be any law suits by bondholders ? Why did Hero take the risk and didn’t wait for insolvency ? Are there any special provisions for Hero to back out if law suits come up ?
– “Senior bonds” under German law should not be treated and priced as senior bonds. As this example shows, one can “haircut” bond holders under German law (“Schuldverschreibungsgesetz”) without even going into bankruptcy procedures. German Bonds are much more similar to potentially perpetual, deeply subordinated bonds or “Genußschein” than a senior bond under international law. Any covenants written into the prospectus are worth nothing as it is so simple to just restructure the bonds.
– such a restructuring can be decided with only a small percentage of the bondholders. Only 28% of the MIFA bondholders were present when the advisor, who can commit to binding changes, was elected. So in theory, 14% of the bondholders can decide what happens to the remaining 86% of the bondholders with very little chance for any “hold outs”. Maybe Greece and Argentina should issue their future bonds simply under German law. Tha would make life much easier for them.
. why does the MIFA share (1% of the future company) trade at 80 cents or 6 mn EUR market cap ? Do shareholders think that the company is worth 600 mn EUR ? This is a clear “short zo zero” situation if one could actually borrow the shares
– one could argue that the restructuring makes sense because MIFA will be able to continue to operate and now jobs are lost. However I think it would be naive to believe that Hero will operate MIFA they way they worked before. Hero wants the brands and the distribution, not the production. I am pretty sure that they will not guarantee a lot of jobs.
– but at least, the order that existing equity gets wiped out before the senior bonds still holds, even under German law. I had some serious doubts about this.
The most important lesson: As I have written before, new corporate bonds under German law should be avoided at all cost. Especially the “Mittelstandsanleihen” are in principal similar 20 EUR bills issued at 100 EUR with a tiny little option to receive 100 EUR. The “lipstick on this pig” is the high coupon. But German investors seem to buy anything with a high coupon these days anyway. No surprise maybe if you have to pay for holding 2 year treasuries at the time of writing.
Profitlich & Schmidlin (“P&S”) had a post a week ago (in German) on how they view the current situation at Alstom.
A short refresher: Both, General Electric and Siemens wanted to take over Alstom and/or parts of it. At the end, GE prevailed, however they failed to take over Alstom completely. Instead, they purchase the Grid, Renewables and Power businesses, leaving the Transport business at Alstom.
In order to make it more “interesting” and to please the French Government, GE and Alstom will form 3 Joint Ventures of which Alstom will buy a 50% share each. Plus Alstom will buy a transport related business from GE for 600 mn EUR. Additionally, Alstom seems to have a put option for these JV back to General Electric with a floor of 2,5 bn EUR.
So in theory, one could now use the information given for instance in the GE press release and calculate a prospective “sum of the parts” valuation for Alstom after the deal and this is how P&S have done it:
No op Assets
Net cash
4.122
London Metro loan
364
Transmash
700
Pension, others
-620
Total
4.566
Per share
14,78
On top of those ~15 EUR per share “extra assets” they add the 2,5 bn EUR for the JVs, which results in around 22,87 EUR per share for all those non-transport assets. With a “fair value” of the transport business of ~11 EUR per share they come up with their target value of 34 EUR per share, which would mean a nice +30% upside potential based on the current share price of 26 EUR.
My 5 cents on this
First of all I find it great that P&S share their investment case via their blog. This is definitely a good thing. And clearly, as with everything, it is their opinion and not everyone will agree with this. My opinion differs from theirs, but that does not mean that they are wrong or vice versa.
Before jumping into the details, I would just want to refer back to some earlier stuff I have written about holding companies. The question is: will investors really apply a “full valuation” to the operating business plus all the “extra assets” or will they discount the extra assets, especially the JVs and the other non-consolidated assets. I think it is more prudent to apply a discount to the extra assets. Unless there is clear evidence that those assets get liquidated, I think it is too optimistic to assign full value to those assets.
A second big issue is that at the moment no one knows exactly how much of the liabilities will get transferred to GE. Especially with regard to operating leases (nominal ~830 mn EUR), litigation liabilities (528 mn EUR) and pension liabilites (gross 5,2 bn) there is no definitive answer how much will be transferred to GE and what remains at Alstom. In a sum of part calculation, any of those remaining liabilities will have to be deducted from the extra assets as they are economically equivalent to debt.
Net cash position
Let’s start with that one. In their annual report, Alstom provides us with EUR -3.041 as net cash at March 31st 2014. GE stated that the whole transaction will generate a 7,3 bn net cash outflow for them which is an equivalent inflow for Alstom.
So theoretically we could calculate -3.041 + 7.300 = 4259 mn EUR net cash for Alstom. However there are several caveats to this:
– transaction costs: A transaction like this easily swallows up a large amount of costs for lawyers, consultants bankers etc. I would assume between 100-300 mn cash costs for Alstom before closing, with an expected value of -200
– mark to market debt: Although any financial assets under IFRS are marked-to-market, debt is still accounted for at cost. If Alstom would really want to buy back their bonds to shorten the balance sheet, they would have to pay market value which is ~350 mn higher than book value. So net debt has to be adjusted for this.
So for my calculation, net cash would be 4.259-200-350 = 3.709 mn net cash after closing of the deal
Transmashholding
Transmashholding is a 25% stake alstom holds in a Russian transport equipment manufacturer. P&S value this company 10x average 2012/2013 earnings at 700 mn EUR which is around 90% higher than book value. I would value this asset significantly lower because
– according to Bloomberg, the majority of the profit is “extraordinary profit”
– if we value them based on operating income (EBIT) with the same averaging, we would get on average 2800 mn Rubels EBIT p.a. (which is around 60 mn EUR p.a.) and assuming 10 times EV/EBIT we get 600 mn EUR EV. Minus ~10 bn RUB or 200 mn debt, the equity would be worth 400 mn, 25% of Alstom then would be 100 mn EUR.
Other liabilities
As I said before, we how much of the liabilities go to GE. My own assumption would be that all the critical ones (Litigation, Pension deficit, operating leases) are divided proportionally to the total amount of liabilities for the transport segment. According to the segment report in the annual report, transport had ~28% of all liabilities of Alstom. My default assumption therefore is that 28% of all “debt like” liabilities remain at Alstom as part of the transport business
Discount to extra assets
Finally, I would argue that especially as this complicated deal will only close in mid 2015, it would be quite optimistic to assume zero discount on the future cash inflow, JV assets etc etc. So I would actually discount those assets to be on the safe side with between 10-20% at the current status, as a compromise I will use 15% both, for net cash and the JVs. Just as a reminder: I am not sure if anyone remembers the planned GE – Honeywell merger in 2001. This looked like a done deal for a long time before the deal actually fell through. The deal might be very likely but there is always the risk of a deal stopper and one has to adjust for this in my opinion.
Bringing it all together & Summary:
So this would be my version of the “extra asset” calculation:
MMI
Net cash 03/2014
-3.041
+ Cash proceeds GE
7.300
– mtm bonds
-350
– deal cost
-200
Net cash adj
3.709
+ London Metro
364
+ Transmash
100
+ JVs
2.500
Total “extra assets”
6.673
– 15% discount JV&Cash
-931
Discounted extra assets
5.742
– “pension others” from P&S
-620
– 28% of Litigation liab
-148
– 28% of operating leases
-210
– 28% of pension underfunding
-217
Adjusted “extra” assets
4.547
per share
14,71
With my rather cautious approach, i would value the potential extra assets after the deal ~ 8 EUR per share lower as P&S. Together with their valuation of the Transport business od ~11-12 EUR, the current Alstom price at 26 EUR looks fair with no big upside.
Clearly, any of my assumptions could (and should) be challenged as well. Transmash could be worth a lot more and maybe all the liabilities go to GE. On the other hand, one should not forget that the deal is not done yet. I am for instance not sure how happy the potential clients are and if I read correctly, they need approval of 32 national regulators for this deal. Plus, the French Government will be heavily involved in Alstom going forward which might lower the prospects of aggressive share repurchases and increase the risk for “strategic” acquisitions.
Alstom has proposed more detailed information in November before an extraordinary shareholder meeting. For me, at the moment Alstom is not a buy. This might change especially if most of the liabilities would be assumed by GE, then the Alstom “stub” could be really interesting. In the mean time, the stock however is “watch only”.
Disclosure: The author might have bought the stock well in advance of publishing the post. In this special case, the idea has been presented already some weeks ago to a group of value investors.
Introduction
Admiral is a UK based P&C insurance company. A brief look into Admiral’s multiples would single it out as a potential short candidate (~15 GBP/share):
P/B 8,0
P/S 4,5
P/E ~14,5
Div. yield 3,7%
Especially P/B and P/S look overvalued if compared to other P&C companies. The average multiple for European P&C companies is ~2,1 for P/B, 1,6 for P/S and 11,6 P/E. So the company looks wildly overvalued.
The pitch is relatively simple: Admiral is the UK version of GEICO, the famous low cost direct insurer owned by Warren Buffet. Just look at the cost ratios of Admiral compared to its 4 main competitors:
Cost ratio P&C 2013
Aviva
32,8%
RSA
32,6%
Direct Line
22,3%
Esure
23,8%
Admiral
19,9%
Clearly, the cost advantage against “traditional” companies like Aviva and RSA comes from the fact that they don’t have to pay insurance agents. But even compared to the direct competitors, Admiral seems to have a cost advantage. Among other things, Admiral is the only FTSE100 company located in Wales which implies quite “reasonable” salaries.
However there is a big difference compared to GEICO:
GEICO’s business model as we all know, combines low cost / direct with investing the “float” Buffet style, so every premium dollar earned is kept and invested as profitable as possible, preferably in stocks. In principle, this is the strategy of all insurance companies, but very few are able to get “Buffet like” returns.
So I have compiled 3 statistics which show that Admiral “ticks” differently:
2013
Ratio Financial income /total profit
Net retained premium
“Other” in % of profit
RSA
116,4%
93,6%
0,0%
Aviva
72,9%
88,2%
0,0%
Direct Line
35,2%
101,6%
36,3%
Esure
11,3%
91,4%
40,1%
Admiral
3,3%
25,0%
85,0%
A quick explanation of those ratios: The net profit of an Insurance company is the result of 3 major components:
a) Underwriting result
b) investment result
c) “other” stuff
The first column in the table above shows what percentage of the total result in 2013 can be attributed to the investment result. RSA for instance actually makes a loss in insurance, so more than 100% of their profit comes from the investment portfolio. Admiral, on the other end, attributes only 3% of the total profit to investments. So what’s going on here ? Do they manage their investments so badly ?
The second column explains this “conundrum”: All the other players keep more or less all the insurance premiums they are collecting. Admiral, on the other hand only keeps 25% of incoming insurance premiums, the other 75% get “ceded” to Reinsurers.
Finally, the third column shows, that Admira is actually earning most of its money with “other” stuff whatever that means. To solve the puzzle, one has to look back into history of Admiral: Admiral was founded by a Lloyds syndicate to act as a kind of “Underwriting agency” in order to generate premium for the syndicate. So from the start, Admiral had a very lean structure, selling only direct etc. At some point in time they decided that the syndicate was too expensive and that they actually want to issue the policies themselves. Nevertheless, they kept their lean set up and lined up reinsurers to shoulder the majority of the risk.
Most people familiar with Insurance would say that the concept of Admiral doesn’t make sense. Why should you give up profits both, on the insureance side as well as in investments by passing 75% ? The answer is relatively simple: Capital efficency. Most insurance companies are notouriously capital inefficient. Long term ROEs for most major players are below 10% p.a. despite often significant leverage through subordinated debt. The main reason for this is the fact, that in many jurisdictions, the “GEICO” model requires to hold a large amount of capital to buffer capital market movements. Unless you are Warren Buffet, the returns on those investments are often below average so as a result, ROEs are bad. Plus the fact that growth often requires a lot of upfront capital as well.
For Admiral, the big structural problem of course is the following: If I pass most of my premiums and cash to reinsurers, how do I then earn money ? This is where the “other” column from my table above comes into play. Due to this business model, Admrial very early concentrated on making additional money by selling “ancillary” stuff.
This is what Admiral writes in its latest annual report (by the way: all annual reports since 2003 are highly recommended for clarity and insight !!!):
Other Revenue
Admiral generates Other revenue from a portfolio of insurance products that complement the core car insurance product, and also fees generated over the life of the policy. The most material contributors to net
Other revenue are:
> Profit earned from motor policy upgrade products underwritten by Admiral, including breakdown, car hire and personal injury covers
> Profit from other insurance products, not underwritten by Admiral
> Vehicle Commission (see page 25)
> Fees – a dministration fees and referral income (see page 25)
> Instalment income – interest charged to customers paying for cover in instalments
This additional income is extremely high margin with almost no capital requirement and drives the profitability of the company.
The result
This low capital requirement leads to ROE’s which are compared to its peers “from outer space”:
Name
ROE FY
ROE 5Y
Average
16%
17%
ADMIRAL GROUP PLC
59%
59%
TOPDANMARK A/S
26%
31%
TRYG A/S
19%
21%
LANCASHIRE HOLDINGS LTD
15%
17%
BEAZLEY PLC
21%
16%
GJENSIDIGE FORSIKRING ASA
16%
15%
SAMPO OYJ-A SHS
14%
14%
GRUPO CATALANA OCCIDENTE SA
13%
14%
EULER HERMES SA
13%
13%
ZURICH INSURANCE GROUP AG
12%
12%
ALLIANZ SE-REG
11%
12%
AMLIN PLC
19%
10%
MAPFRE SA
9%
9%
XL GROUP PLC
9%
9%
RSA INSURANCE GROUP PLC
-11%
5%
Other unique aspects of Admiral’s business model
Comparison sites
Admiral runs in addition to its insurance operation, its own insurance comparison sites (e.g. Confused.com in the UK). Although those comparison sites themselves only contribute less then 10% of total profit, it gives Admiral a strategic advantage: Via their comparison site they can monitor in real time what competitors are doing and how they are pricing stuff. Other comparison sites also sell this kind of data but usually with a significant time delay. So running its own comparison site is clearly an advantage against a “normal” onilne insurer.
Capital allocation
With regard to capital allocation, again look at this statement from the 2013 annual report:
Admiral believes that having excess cash in a company can lead to poor decision-making. So we are committed to returning surplus capital to shareholders. We believe that keeping management hungry for cash keeps them focused on the most important aspects of the business. We do not starve our businesses but neither do we allow them the luxury of trying to decide what to do with excess capital.
Charly Munger would say at this point “I Have nothing more to add”. This is how it should be done but rarely found especially in the Insurance industry.
Managment & Shareholders:
The current CEO, Henry Engelhardt founded the company on behalf of the Lloyds Syndicate in 1991. He still holds ~12,8% of the company.
Co-founder David Stevens owns around 3,8%. Both founders only pay themselves ~400 k GBP per year salaries and no bonuses. The only exception is the CFO, who is relatively new. He earns around 1 mn GBP including a bonus and doesn’t have a lot of shares. There are quite some interviews available on Youtube with the CEO, among them this one is especially interesting:
Largest outside shareholder is MunichRe with 10%, who is also providing the majority of the reinsurance capacity. Other noteworthy shareholders are PowerCorp from Canada and Odey, the UK Hedge fund with a -0.79% short position. All Admiral employees are shareholders and there is a program for employes to purchase shares.
Stock price
Since going public, Admiral has performed very well:
Including dividends, Admiral returned 25,5% p.a. since their IPO against ~8% p.a. for the FTSE 100. Since 2004, EPS trippled and dividends per share increased by a factor of five. Interestingly, Admiral never traded at a level which one would asociate normally with such a growth stock, at the peak, the share had a P/E of 22 in 2006. I think this has to do with the general discomfort that many investors have with financial stocks.
Challenges for Admiral
Some of the additonal income sources for Admiral are clearly under regulatory thread. Referral fees, bundling etc. are currently investigated by UK regulators (see here and here) but especially Admiral seems to be quite creative on how to find different ways to earn fees.
Another and maybe the biggest strategic issue is that in theory comparison sites could start to sell additional products as well as we can see in the car rental market. However Admiral has the big advantage as they cover both, the comparison area and the insurance “sales funnel”.
I also think that for the comparison sites, it is not that easy to sell additional insurance products. Insurance policies are less standardized than rental cars, with very individual pricing so it is harder for a comparison site to actually close the deal intead of passing the client on to the insurer for a fee. Clearly comparison sites will try to get into this game as well but again, Admiral is the best positioned insurer.
Finally, the UK car insurance business shows almost a “brutal” cyclicality, for instance in 2013 premiums for the whole market dropped ~20%. Nevertheless, Admiral has shown that they are profitable over the cycle.
Opportunities
Admiral is currently trying to expand its business model into 4 other countries: Spain, France, Italy and the US. An earlier attempt in Germany failed a couple of years ago, mainly because the German market renews policies only once a year and Admiral was not able to really use its strengths (dynamic offers and pricing) on that basis.
If they succeed in any one of those markets similar to the UK, then there would be significant upside in the stock. If they suceed in 2 or more, Admiral could become a multibagger. If they don’t succeed at all, one could imagine that they might take additional market share in the UL, but then the upside is limited.
Although the subs are growing strongly, they still made a loss in 2013. Car insurance is however to a certain extent a scale business. You need a certain scale to become profitable. Clearly, just buying a competitor (and paying a lot of goodwill) would look better in the short term. Building up your own operations takes longer, but if you do it right, the value generation is significantly better than via M&A.
SUMMARY: Bringing it all together
Personally, I think Admiral has a very unique “outsider” business model. Reinsuring most of their business allows them to focus on the core product, car insurance underwriting and ancilliary services. They don’t have the complexity of traditional insurers with complex investments, expensive investment management and “asset liability management” departments etc. etc.
This keeps structural complexity low, lowers cost and allows them to scale up business much quicker than any “traditional” model and with very low capital intensity. Traditional insurance companies have always the option to realize investment profits in order to make results look good in the short term. In the long term, this often leads to a detoriation of the core business. Admiral doesn’t have this luxury. Additionally it insulates Admiral mostly from capital market volatility and enables them to move aggresively if other insurers are nursing their investment losses. Additionally, they don’t need to sell complicated subordinated debt etc.
Overall, I think the likelihood that someone succesfully copies Admirals business model is low, because for any Insurance executive, it is extremely counterintuitive to give premium away. Any insurance CEO would rather sell his grandmother than increase the reinsurance share and give away investment money. GEICO for instance in my opinion is not a “real” outsider company. It is a traditional insurer with a focused direct sales force. Admiral is really a very different animal.
Clearly, the thread of Google & Co is real, but on the other hand, Google & Co hesitate to to move into regulated areas. However if they would want to seriously move into this business, I would think that Admiral could be an interesting acquisition target for cash rich Google & Co.
Against the traditional competition, in my opinion Admiral has a 10 year headstart in understanding how to sell insurence and especially “others” over the internet. I think they will chuckle when they read how for instance AXA tries to become “digital” as they were already selling 70% of their policies over the internet in 2003.
I would go so far as calling the combined business model a “moat”. Yes, it is maybe not that difficult to start an online insurer and does not fit into the classical moat categories, but to scale up quickly and get the whole package right, this is another story and in my opinion very very unlikely. Even the direct clones like Esure only go “Half way” by keeping all the premiums and exposing themselves to capital market volatility.
I also think that this is still a “value investment” despite the optically expensive multiples. In my opinion, the value lies in the business model plus the headstart in online insurance. To put it into s short thesis: This is a high quality company at a “Normal company price tag” and an “above average” growth opportunity due to the cost advanatges.
For the portfolio, I had bought already a “half position” in April at 13,80 GBP per share as I have briefly mentioned in the April post. I know this is a little unfair but I just didn’t have time to finish the write up.
P.S. There will be an extra post for this, but I have sold the rest of my April SA position in order to keep the exposure to the financial sector (~20% of the protfolio including the bonds) constant
value and opportunity 