And on we go, another 15 randomly selected stocks from Norway. This time, four of them made it into the preliminary watch list. Only 80 stocks more to go….
181. Circio Holding
Circio Holding is a 6 mn EUR market cap Biotech that is loss making and has renamed itself recently from Targovax. “Pass”.
182. Borgestad
I always wanted to have a quick look at A&O and was finally motivated again reading about it several times in my Twitter timeline. In my All Danish Stocks series, A&O didn’t make the cut because I had already Solar in the portfolio, but still I want to look at them as this often yields some insights into the other company.
Both companies are headquartered in Denmark and in principle distribute supplies for craftsmen/installers.
From what I understand, Solar Group is focused a little more on electrical equipment, A&O has a broader assortment but focused on renovation and remodeling. A&O Johanson has a small B2C segment that makes up ~12% of sales but less in profits, as margins in B2C are smaller.
A&O is active in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, however 90% of sales seem to be in Denmark. A&O has a dual share structure, with “super voting” shares owned by the family and CEO giving copntrol to the family. Also Solar Group has a dual share class structure, with the majority of the votes owned by the heirs of the original founder (4th generation).
Tamburi Investment Partners (TIP) is kind of a “secret star” in the area of European Holding companies. I looked at it briefly within my Italmobiliare write-up friom last week. The stock price has performed extremely well especially over a 10 year horizon:
TIP has been founded in 2000, listed in 2005 and the history is well documented on TIP’s homepage.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
What better day to publish a post about an Italian company than Ferragosto, the Italian Public Holiday where virtually any Italian family is somewhere close to a beach and Italian offices only are staffed with the most junior person to take up the telefone in order to say: “No one here, please call next week/next month”.
With Italmobiliare, I fell deeply into a rabbit hole, which lead to a quite extensive analysis. Due to some problems with the WordPress editor, I wrote it with a different Editor and have attached the PDF with the full version. In the blog post I’ll focus on the executive summary, the Pro’s and Con’s and the return expectations. The rest of the gory details can be read in the attached PDF document.
Executive summary:
Italmobiliare (IM) is an Italian Holding company with a market cap of ~1 bn EUR that underwent 2 pivots in its 40 year history as a listed company. The first pivot, in the 1990s, from conglomerate to Cement (Italcementi) and then once again in 2017 after a 2 bn sale to Heidelberger into an Italy focused, “Quality-growth small/mid cap PE” style investment company.
What makes the company very attractive to me, is a very interesting portfolio (including at least two potential “Super Star” holdings), decent value creation, good strategy/transparency and especially a 50% Discount to NAV.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice, just a tiny little bit of “forensic analysis”.
The Social Chain, an initially hot, but now busted “Social Media DTC” company was recently subject to an intervention from German regulator BAFIN, claiming the 2021 accounts contained a material error in the Cashflow statement.
In essence, BAFIN said that The Social Chain’s Operating Cashflow did contain ~60 mn EUR of non-operating cashflow items that should have classified either as Financing and Investing Cashflow.
Why is that important ? Many investors (myself included) consider “Free Cashflow” as a very important metric. Free cashflow consists of Operating Cashflow minus Capex and is generally considered to be less easily manipulated than accounting numbers (“Adjusted EBITDA before costs to build the product”).
Looking at the headline numbers from the 2021 annual report, we can see that despite the “adjusted pro-forma” numbers, the +22 mn Operating cashflow compares to -23mn EUR in EBITDA and -82 mn EUR Net income and seems to generate the impression that the underlying business is cash generating, as the investment cashflow was mostly M&A:
Dislaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
Background:
Some of my readers might remember, that I bought into a “Freedom energy” basket in March 2022 in order to “hedge” against potentially catastrophic effects from the Russia/Ukraine war. After a first nice run, I sold 3 out of the initial 4 (7C Solar, PNE, Energiekontor and ABO Wind) and only kept ABO Wind because I considered it the most undervalued stock.
Looking at the chart we can see that for some of the stocks of that basket, not so much happened, only PNE is still significant above the level of March 2022 (ABO Wind is the solid Yellow chart):
This has become a quite long and somehow rambling post. If you look for “actionable investment advice”, then you don’t need to read this.
Background: Handelsbankon on the blog since 2015
One of the great things of an Investment Blog/Journal is that one can easily revisit everything that one has written years ago when I want to look at a stock again.
Handelsbanken is a stock that I have covered quite often since 2015. Initially, I compared Handelsbanken to Deutsche Bank in 2015, claiming that Handelsbanken is a much better run “quality bank” compared to Deutsche Bank and that Deutsche Bank, despite the much cheaper valuation, most likely the worse investment. This is how Handelsbanken has performed against Deutsch Bank and the European Banking index.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOU OWN RESEARCH !!!
Some days ago, I made the case for a significant increase in demand for insulation in Europe for the next several years. In this post, I want to dig a little bit deeper into the main listed players and which I find more interesting. In general, even only for the German speaking region there are many companies that offer insulation, among them very large, diversified groups such as BASF, Dow Chemical and St. Gobain.
However, the following listed companies are those who do the majority of sales in insulation to my knowledge:
Kingspan, Irleand/UK
Rockwool, Denmark
Recticel, Belgium
Steico, Germany
Sto SE, Germany
Sto, Rockwool and Recticel are already in my portfolio with relatively small weights.
Before jumping into the companies, I have compiled a table with a few KPIs that i find interesting. One quick coment upfront: As Recticel is undergoing a signifcant transformation, their numbers are curently not comparable.
Disclaimer: This is not Investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!
Summary:
If you would ask me about the most boring stock of my generally very boring portfolio, I would possibly name Schaffner Group. I had bought a first position back in 2021 during my “All Swiss Stocks” series.
However, I have never written a more detailed write-up despit my annual summaries (2021/2022 , 2022/2023), maybe becasue I always got bored when I started writing about it ? Over time I added to the position and after the most recent 6 months numbers, I decided to increase into a full position. Time to explain the investment case a little bit better.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice, PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
For all readers that found my SFS write-up from February as too exciting, I have good news: I have found a stock that looks at least as boring as SFS, maybe even more so: Logistec, a maritime terminal operator from Canada.
Background/Intro:
This is the first investment idea that I initially found on Twitter, a big Hat tip to Sutje who brought this up on my radar and of course to the author of the original write-up “Wintergem Stocks”. The Wintergem Substack has a 3 part write-up that I can only recommend to read first:
Part 1 – Deep Dive Marine Segment
Part 2 – Deep Dive Environmental Segment
Part 3 – Is Logistec a compounder
Wintergem has also a recent update on Logistec’s recently released 2022 report.
In this post, I will just focus on aspects that a found especially interesting on top of the excellent Wintergem write up.
value and opportunity 