Category Archives: Opportunities

Special Situation Updates: Actelion/Idorsia, Gagfah, SAPEC & Stada

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A lot has happened over the last few weeks for my 4 largest special situation investments:

Actelion / Idorsia

The original Actelion idea was very simple: Buy an M&A target at a small discount which is relatively safe and get something (the Idorsia spin-off) extra which no one seemed to have noticed.

Although the case played out exactly as I thought and Idorsia even seems to be worth more than I assumed, I only made around +4% on it. Not bad for around 5 months but not great either.

Looking back I think I made 3 mistakes:

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HP Enterprise (HPE) – Spinning-off its way to happiness ?

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DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!!

Management summary:

  • HPE, the enterprise arm of the old HP looks attractive on a sum-of-part valuation
  • following 3 spin-offs in 2 years, my model indicates an upside of ~40% in the base case and ~70% in an optimistic case
  • Some “soft catalysts” are on the horizon such as the upcoming Software “spin -off merger”, further share buy backs and a “normal” financial year
  • management acts shareholder friendly, has a clear strategy and has created significant shareholder value since 2011
  • major risk is clearly a further detoriation of the Enterprise solution business which had a bad start into fiscal 2017

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Special situation: Stada Arzneimittel AG – swimming with the sharks (again)

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. please do your own research !!!

Stada is a company I had been looking at many times in the past. A business which in principle is quite good (Generics and OTC drugs) but the company was run by a long time CEO who acted as it was his own company without owning a single share. He paid himself huge salaries, employed his son in a non-sensical but highly paid job, the company afforded itself a huge corporate center and so on. As a result, the company created little to no shareholder value in the 10 years up to mid 2016. As a comparison, the 10 year return of Stada until 03/2016 was only around 1,8% p.a. compared to 7,5 % p.a. for the MSCI Europe health care index, a significant underperformance.

Then however something happened which is still very rare in Germany: A local activist investor (Active Ownership Capital) and some other funds acquired a significant stake in the company and pushed for change.

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My 27 investments for 2017

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It has become already a small tradition that I do a short review of my portfolio at the end of the year. As mentioned before I found it quite helpful to list my current investments at the end of each year and try to explain (to myself) the investment case in a few sentences.

Former posts can to be found here:

My 27 investments for 2016
My 28 investments for 2015
My 24 investments for 2014
My 22 investments for 2013

Compared to last year, Hornbach, Koc, the Depfy TRY bond, the HT1 Bond, NN Group, Citizen’s and Greenlight have been sold. New positions bought in 2016 are Dom Security, Majestic Wine, Handelsbanken, Coface,  Silver Chef, Italgas and SAPEC and Kuka. Some positions (Gaztransport and Kinder Morgan) went in and out in 2016.So 19 out of last years 27 are still in, a turn-around of 30% is acceptable and consistent with my strategy.

With 27 stocks, the portfolio is still maybe a little bit too diversified, my preference would be to have not more than 25 positions. However 2 positions (Kuka, Sapec) are special situations which will most likely be sold/terminated early in 2017. The cash level at the moment is quite low at around 4%.

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SAPEC SA (ISIN BE0003625366) Still an attractive Special Situation despite +350% YTD ?

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. The stock mentioned is relatively illiquid and potentially risky. Please do your own research !!!!

Management Summary:

SAPEC SA, despite having gained already 350% YTD is in my opinion still a highly attractive special situation. The company is in the process of selling its main business which will result in around 230 EUR net cash per share compared to a share price of 135 EUR. Deal closing is very likely and management promised to distribute a “significant amount” of the proceeds. For me this is very attractive as I expect this to happen in the first half of 2017.

SAPEC is a somewhat strange company. Although the company is listed in Belgium, business activities are almost exclusively in the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal & Spain). This is how the company describes itself:

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Updates: Kinder Morgan (SELL), Deutsche Pfandbriefbank (PBB)

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Kinder Morgan

Yesterday, I sold my complete Kinder Morgan position at ~21 USD per share with a total gain of around 25% (in EUR, including dividends). Why ?

When I bought the stock in April I argued like this:

For me, the “expected case” would be something like a 8% discount rate and 1% growth resulting in a fair value of around 25,60 USD per share. Also, under my assumptions, the downside is relatively limited. Based on 18 USD per share (at the time of writing), that would imply an upside of around +42% which for me would be an acceptable return over my typical 3-5 year investing period (plus any dividends).

So why did I sell out now and didn’t wait for higher prices ? Well, something has changed: Interest rates went up. Since April, the 10 year USD Swap rate went up by +0,90% and the 20 year rate by around +0,70% p.a. If we look at my valuation grid from back then we can see that the value reacts significantly to change in interest rates:

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Italgas SpA (ISIN IT0005211237) – Spin-off special situation meets contrarian opportunity

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Management Summary

As this turned into a pretty long post again, quickly the highlights. I do think that Italgas SpA, the recent Spin-off from SNAM SpA represents a potentially interesting special situation investment because:

  • overall sentiment towards Italy is really bad (“Renzi referendum”)
  • the Spin-off was not timed well just a day before the US election
  • the current uncertainties within Italian regulation changes further deters potential investors
  • all this is reflected in asset multiples at the very low-end for comparable regulated assets

For those reasons I initiated a 2,7% position for my portfolio for my “Special Situation” bucket.

DISCLAIMER: This is not investment advice. Please do your own research !!!!

ml_colore

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Bayer vs. Monsanto: Who is the “patsy” at the Poker table ?

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One of the highest profile merger cases at the moment is the Bayer / Monsanto case.

A quick recap:

In may 2016, Bayer made a proposal to buy Monsanto. The first offer was 122 USD per share which was rejected. Bayer increased the offer 2 times, first to 125 USD and currently to 127,5 USD.

The big question is: Why is Monsanto only trading at 107 USD (at the time of writing)? Compared for instance to the initial ChemChina/Syngenta deal spread, the Bayer case looks a lot more solid:

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Uniper/E.On Spin-off: Take one ugly duck and transform it into ….. 2 really ugly ducks ?

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Background:

Monday, Sep 12th will be the first trading day for Uniper, the E.On spin-off. E.On shareholders will get one Uniper share for each 10 E.On shares they are holding.

Just to recap: Uniper will contain all the (unwanted) power generation assets of E.on, so all the “fossil fuel” power plants, the Russian assets and the Swedish nuclear plants plus some other stuff. The German Nuclear assets (and the corresponding liabilities) will remain at E.on due to the reasons I mentioned in the last post.

Uniper is clearly an ugly Duck, maybe the “most ugliest spin-off” I have seen since I started the blog. If we look into the most recent investor presentation, it is clear that you have a problem when the 3 listed growth projects are a German Hard Coal Power plant, q Russian power plant closed due to an accident which will reopen in 2018 and some strange dealings around the North Stream gas pipeline (page 9.). It doesn’t help either that Uniper had to take a 3,8 bn EUR pre tax write down in the first 6 months of 2016.That makes the duck still uglier.

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