Category Archives: Quick Check

Quick check: Adidas AG (ISIN DE000A1EWWW0) – will this fallen angel rise again ?

Posted on by 10 comments

Adidas, the iconic German sportswear company, seems to be a big topic for value investors these days. A couple of my readers mentioned Adidas in the comments and also Geoff Gannon thinks it is cheap at least compared to Nike and Under Armour.

Over the past decade or so, Adidas was a great performer, riding mostly on the “Emerging Markets consumer” megatrend. This year however the share price is down ~-37% at the time of writing,:

Nevertheless, the Stock is still not really cheap on an individual basis:

P/E 19
P/B 2,2
P/S 0,9
EV/EBITDA ~10
Dividend yield 2,6%

Since a couple of weeks, there are constant rumours that some activist hedge fund will sooner or later appear and press for changes how the company is run.

Maybe in order to make it harder for activists or other potential “predators”, Adidas just announced a 1,5 bn share buy back over 3 years. According to the Reuters article this seems to be a rather quick change of mind:

Chief Executive Herbert Hainer said in August that Adidas had no plans for a share buyback.

Adidas also just launched a 1 bn EUR bond issue, most likely to fund some of the share repurchases. The bond issue however doesn’t seem to have been a smashing success.

Why did the share price go down so much ?

They had to issue a couple of profit warnings in the last few months. According to Adidas, two reasons are to blame: The issues in Russia, a core market for Adidas and the problems with the Golf business (Taylormade).

With the football World cup in Brazil, everyone thought that Adidas will have a record year, but as of 6m 2014, Profit declined by ~.27%. Adidas is the German company with the largest share of Russian sales in the DAX 30 index with around 7,5% of total sales. Doing badly in a year with a football Worldcup is not a good omen for the eventless next year.

What I don’t like at Adidas:

When I look at an expensive company like Adidas, I always look out for things I don’t like. After reading the 2012 & 2013 annual report, here are my “don’t like” point:

– management targets do not include capital profitability
– growth in recent years mostly from retail business
– Sales decreased already in 2013, 2014 just extends the negative trend
– they blame FX for most of their problems but that is part of the normal risk of doing business in Emerging Markets
– Adidas is doing Ok, but both Reebock and Taylormade are shrinking
– as with EVS, 2014 should have been a fantastic year (Brazil, Socchi). 2015, without any big events will most likely be even worse
– US as a strategic growth market does not make that much sense to me
– comprehensive income is lacking net income by a wide margin
– reporting overall is not very good, lots of “Marketing stuff”, critical figures like profitability per region are missing

What I like

– clearly iconic brand with growth potential especially in EM
– relatively conservative balance sheet
– management salaries are relatively low compared to total profit

Let’s look at some issues in more detail:

Retail business

If you look at their historical numbers, a large part of the recent growth comes from their “retail segment”. They started opening own stores some years ago and have expanded them fast. In 2013, the traditional business which they call “whole sale” already shrunk and only retail had some growth. However retail is lower margin business (Operating margins ~20% against 30+%). They expanded their stores much more aggresively than Nike, especially in Emerging Markets.

Also, retail business in my opinion is riskier than their core business. If you are in retail, you are also in Real Estate. With the threat of the internet (Zalando, Amazon), they are walking on a thin line.

Interestingly, despite paying ~600-700 mn rents p.a. they are only disclosing 1,7 bn of operating lease liabilities. I am not sure what to make of this, it looks like they are only renting short-term which might be OK if EM continue to be weak.

Currency Management:

According to the CEO’s letter in the 2013 annual report, Adidas doesn’t hedge FX risk in Emerging Markets as it is “too expensive”. Well, that’s complete nonsense in my opinion. Of course it is expensive, but for an EM based retail business, not hedging FX is almost suicide. A retailer in Russia is short the USD vs. Rubles twice: First, all the merchandise will be imported from China on a Dollar basis. Secondly, most of the rental contracts will be in USD as well. Sales will be made however in Rubles, so if the Ruble declines against the Dollar, all the nice margins just disappear.

Instead of hedging, the report “currency neutral” sales growth etc. In my opinion this is definitely a weakness especially if you compare Adidas to their major rival Nike. If you look into the annual report of Nike, you can see on page 77 & 78 that they have a pretty sophisticated hedging program in place, which creates a lot less volatility in stated net income AND comprehensive income.

Comprehensive income

As this is often the case, the Comprehensive Income of Adidas is hidden deep within the annual report, in this case it is mentioned the first time on page 189. And, as it is not surprising, Comprehensive income is a lot lower than Net income as the table shows and also much more volatile compared to competitor Nike:

Adidas     Nike    
  EPS CI in % EPS CI in%
30.12.2009 1,25 -0,4 -33,0% 1,99 1,81 90,8%
30.12.2010 2,71 4,4 161,9% 2,22 2,12 95,6%
30.12.2011 2,93 4,0 137,2% 2,48 2,48 99,7%
28.12.2012 2,52 1,5 60,9% 2,65 2,81 106,2%
30.12.2013 3,76 2,2 59,4% 3,02 2,83 93,6%
Total 13,17 11,8 89,3% 12,36 12,04 97,4%

Most analysts would ignore this, as they would call this a “non cash” accounting effect. But especially currency movements in the comprehensive income in my opinion have enormous predictive value. Although its true that the initial currency movement (i.e. the decline of the NAV of foreign subsidiaries) does not impact the cashflow, a permanently lower value of the foreign currency will clearly lower the future profits of the company, especially if they don’t hedge.

Ignoring this effect is like looking at your stock portfolio and ignoring the currency movements if you calculate performance. You can do this, but it does not reflect the underlying value.

Strategy & Capital allocation

Adidas’ strategy to focus on Emerging markets has paid of, despite set backs like currently in Russia. What I don’t understand why the want to target the US. In the US, they have no advantage against Nike, rather the opposite. Nike is much bigger in the Us and clearly has economies of scale against Adidas in advertising expenses.

In my opinion, this is mostly due to the fact, that return on capital is not part of the targets for Adidas management. They have target like sales growth, operating margins and some nonsense stuff like EUR amounts for investments, but no return on investment or return on invested capital targets. Nike, th main competitor, reports ROIC

This leads more often than not to chasing growth for growth sake and not creating value. In my opinion, Adidas clearly has a strategy & incentive issue here.

Brand & Moat

There are different opinions on this topic, but for me , a brand is not a moat. It is a competitive advantage, especially as we have seen in “new markets” like the EM, but on the other hand, brands can easily loose their power if they are not well managed. A sports brand like Adidas in my opinion is even more difficult than a “luxury brand”. Sports brands define themselves via sports stars. Signing sports stars or teams gets more and more expensive and when you are unlucky, your expensive star turns out to be a sex maniac or drug abuser and all the money is for nothing.

A real strong brand allows you to make above average margins and returns on capital, which somehow Adidas fails to deliver compared to some of its competitors.

Valuation

At a 2014 PE of 19, Adidas is clearly not in value territory, based on Comprehensive income, the stock looks even more expensive. In order to justify an investment, one would either need to assume EPS growth or multiple expansion. Yes, Nike trades at a lot higher multiple, but it is also a lot better company than Adidas with much better earnings quality. I also have doubts, that Adidas will increase stated EPS in 2015. Without a major sports event and with Russia still critical, they should rather be happy to maintain current profits.

The share repurchase will maybe add to EPS, but overall, for me Adidas is not a buy at the moment. If you are an event-driven investor wanting to bet on a short-term bump by someone like Icahn, Loeb etc. it could be interesting.

Summary:

Adidas is a company with an iconic brand, however stand-alone it is already quite expensive and the company has at best average management. Earnings quality in my opinion is clearly lower than for competitor Nike. Some activist investors might indeed shake up things a little bit and bump up the share price in the short-term, but the company is clearly facing a very difficult year in 2015. “Turning around” Adidas and bring them to Nike’s level in my opinion is not just spinning off Reebock and Taylermade, but a real change in startegy and incentives.

Adidas is clearly a bet on the Emerging Market consumer, which might work out over the long-term but is somehow maybe difficult in the short and mid-term. There are also cheaper stocks available if one wants to bet on an EM revival. On top of that, I am clearly no expert on branded sports good so for me, this would only a buy if it would look cheap from an absolute point of view, which it doesn’t.

Quick check: Grindeks AS (ISIN LV0000100659) – P/E 4.9, P/B 0.6 Baltic value or “red flag” alert ?

Posted on by 27 comments

Introduction:

Via my “home forum”, someone brought up the Latvian Pharma company Grindeks AS. The company looks similar form the business model to Hungarian company EGIS and Croatian Krka which I covered some months ago

Valuation wise, the stock looks like a clear “no brainer”:

Market cap: 62 mn EUR (at ~7 EUR per share)
P/E trailing 4.9
P/B 0,59
P/S 0,6

ROIC, ROE, net margins all solid “double digit” numbers. My own, mechanical “Boss Score” would indictae a fair value of at least 3 times the current market cap.
The only issue coming up is the fact that the company never paid a dividend.

There is also a quite obvious reason why the stock is cheap: The majority of sales goes to neighbouring Russia, which clearly is not very popular with investors these days. As I do not have an issue with this “Headline risk” as long as I get compensated accordingly, I looked into the annual report 2013 in order to find out more.

As with Australian Vintage, I scan the report for unusual or problematic things first.

In Grindeks case, I was puzzled by a quite unusual balance sheet position called “Advance payments for financial investments “ something which I haven’t seen before. The explanation in the notes says the following:

In 2012 the Company has signed purchase agreement with Dashdirect Limited regarding purchase of the controlling interest in the equity of HBM Pharma (Slovakia). As of the date of signing these financial statements the agreement is partly completed. The main activity of the HBM Pharma is production of the medical substances. As of December 31, 2013 the Company’s and Group statement of financial position contains advance payments related to the before mentioned purchase agreement in the amount of EUR 11,670,000. The Group management is certain that this deal is going to be finalized during 2014.

In my experience, it is not uncommon to take over M&A targets in several steps, but it is quite uncommon to pay money first and get nothing in return. A few days ago, Grindeks issued another news item which covered this strange transaction.

The numbers look OK, Grineks seem to pay only 6 times P/E of the target company. However another sentence looked strange:

Orders of JSC «Grindeks» make up about 30% of the total “HBM Pharma” s.r.o. turnover

So they are buying a company where they are the biggest customer anyway, also strange. So I decided to google a little bit and found this:

On July 8, 2010 Lithuanian-domiciled Central and Eastern European (CEE) specialty pharmaceutical company Sanitas, AB sold its 100% shareholding in subsidiary HBM Pharma s.r.o in Slovakia to Latvian company Liplats 2000, SIA. HBM Pharma was primarily engaged in toll manufacturing activities and the entity has been sold with all of its existing toll manufacturing contracts. As previously announced, sales, marketing and regulatory divisions in Slovakia and the Czech Republic were separated from HBM Pharma and retained in Sanitas Group prior to the divestment.
Sanitas acquired HBM Pharma (previously named Hoechst Biotika) from Sanofi Aventis in July 2005.

So a Latvian company called Liplats 2000 bought HBM in 2010. Googling further, I found this document on HBM’s website, describing a cross border merger between Liplats 2000 and HBM. The most interesting part of this document ist the last line in the final page: From Liplats side, a guy called Kirovs Lipman signed.

Now Kirovs Lipmans happens to be the majority shareholder of Grindeks. So effectively, Grindeks is buying this M&A target from theit majority shareholder (and former CEO). This is from Grindeks annual report:

Kirovs Lipmans – Chairman of the Council Born in 1940. Kirovs Lipmans has been the Chairman of the Council of “Grindeks” since 2003. Simultaneously K.Lipmans is also the President of the Latvian Hockey Fede
ration, the Member of the Executive Committee of the Latvian Olympic Committee, the Chairman of the Board of “Liplats 2000” Ltd. and JSC “Grindeks” Foundation „For the Support of Science and Education”, the Chairman of the Council of JSC “Kalceks” and JSC “Tallinn pharmaceutical plant”, also the Member of the Council of JSC “Liepajas Metalurgs”. Graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Railway and Transport

So to summarize it at this point: Grindeks never paid any dividends but makes a major acquisition and pays money upfront to a company controlled by the majority shareholder, without any disclosure of this potential conflict of interest.

Of course, theoretically, this could have been an “arm’s length” deal with no disadvantages for Grindeks, but the probability that something is “fishy” is quite high, combined with the fact that they never paid dividends.

Maybe I am too cautious here, but an undisclosed significant “related party” transaction is a big red flag for me.

Coincidentally, Grindeks also issued Q1 numbers a few days ago which didn’t look good. Sales in Russia tumbled. This seems to be a very Grindeks specific problem, as for instance Krka showed strong Russian sales in Q1 despite the “Russian crisis”.

Just to be clear: A “red flag” doesn’t need to be the ultimate “value driver”. Reply SpA is a good example. Since my “red flag” alert, the stock made a whopping 276% return.

Summary:
For me, Grindeks is, depsite the attractive valuation, an absolute no -go. Undisclosed related party transactions combined with a lack of dividend makes this a speculation rather than a value investment. I don’t know if there are Corporate activists in the baltics, but this would be a good target. Additionally, they seem to have some specific operating issues as well, so no buy, watch only.

Quick check: Australian Vintage Ltd. (ISIN AU000000AVG6) – Deep Value Pearl or risky turn around Gamble ?

Posted on by 14 comments

A very persistent commentator asked me about my opinion on Australian Vintage, an Australian Wine producer. In between, Nate from Oddball covered the stock and seemed to like it as an asset play .

Optically, the company looks dirt cheap (Bloomberg):

P/E 7
P/B 0,3
P/S 0,3
Dividend yield 10,5%

When I look at such “cheap” companies, I start reading the only annual report and concentrate only on problems. I tend to avoid company presentations as they usually only show the positive stuff. A 30 minutes “speed” read of the 2013 annual report shows already some issues:

– goodwill, brand values and DTAs make up ~100 mn AUD of the book value plus another 50 mn AUD or so for biological assets and water rights
– the 2013 profit includes a significant “one-off” reserve release. without that, 2013 profit would have been some 40% lower or the P/E well into “double digits”
– the company carries significant debt and lease obligations, overall around 240 mn AUD in the 2013 annual report
– the directors salary is at ~ 3 mn AUD a significant portion of the profit
– on the other hand, directors own only insignificant amounts of shares (AUD amount of shares ~20% of total annual salary)
– operating cashflow has been negative in 2013, so the dividend has not been “earned”
– Depreciation is around 7 mn AUD per year, investments only 4-5 mn in 2012, 2013. This looks like “underinvestment”.
– most “hard” assets (inventory, property etc.) are pledged for the loans
– all subsidiaries are explicitly guaranteed by the Holdco, so all loans are fully recourse against any asset
– bank loan covenants exist, but are not clearly reported:

The Group is also subject to bank covenants with its primary financier as follows:
– Equity must be above $210 million.
– Gross profit and earnings before interest and tax must exceed pre-defined levels

– the bank loan facilites mature in 2015 and will have to be renegotiated
– there are “related party dealings” with companies of the CEO (purchase of grapes etc.)

In October / November 2013, they did a massive capital increase (42 mn AUD) in order to pay back debt. Some might argue this is a good thing, but paying large dividends and in parallel doing large capital increases is a very bad sign and very bad capital management (among others, they had to pay around 5% fees on the raised capital).

One observation with regard to the capital increase proespectus: On page 35 they show that the capital increase will increase earnings per share due to lower interest rate expenses. However they use a pretty obvious “trick” here: they use an “average amount” of outstanding shares, not the relevant final amount of shares. With the full amount of shares (232 mn) instead of the “average”, the capital increase would of course be “dilutive”.

The first 6 months of fiscal 2014 looked better on the bottom line, but again includes a big reserve release. Operationally, the first 6 months of 2014 were a lot worse than the year before, especially the US turned from an operating profit to a loss.

Some additional thoughts:

– As an Australian asset play, the Australian Dollar plays a big role. As a non Australian investor, I might have a operational upside if the AUD goes lower, but asset value as a EUR investor will be lower as well
– the UK supermarkets who are the major non Australian clients, are under a lot of preassure themselves. They will squeeze their suppliers as hard as they can and will demand lower prices if the AUD becomes weaker
– return on assets is very low. If the 10 Year treasuries yield 3.7% and Return on assets is far below that than the value of the assets ist most likely overstated by a large margin
– moving “upscale” is not easy. This needs even more capital (oak barrels, longer ageing = higher inventory etc.) and time.
– from the main brand “McGuigan”, you can buy in Germany only the Shiraz which is currently on sale (4,95 EUR vs. 5,99 EUR) and a “Sparkling Shiraz” at 12,95 EUR. To upgrade from that level will be hard…..
– finally, the Australian wine industry seems to be one of the clearest victims of climate change. Water will become much more expensive and many grapes might not grow so well in the future. This could for instance seveely reduce the value both, of the land and teh biological assets. This study for instance shows that Australie is hit hardest globally. If this will realize, everything, land, machinery and “Biological assets” would loose most of their value.

Overall I think the main issue is that the interests of the Management and shareholders are not really aligned in this case. Especially the CEO, whose max target bonus has by the way doubled for next year, seems to be far more interested in his salary than the shares and it looks like that the majority of his own investments seem to be outside the listed companies. Combined with the relatively risky financial profile, this is clearly a “deep value” case with a significant risk especially close to the 2015 maturity of the loans.

Opposite to Nate, I can see a lot of things that could go wrong here and either trigger another massive capital increase or even a bankruptcy. As I do not know a lot about the Australian Wine industry either, I think I would pass on this investment as it is extremely difficult for me to handicap the probabilities and would therefore be a quite “risky turn around gamble”. As I don’t have any experience with Australian liquidation rules, I would also be really careful to expect meaningful recovery rates for shareholders in case of a bankruptcy / restructuring. If for instance the loans would get into the hand of aggressive “vultures” like Oaktree, I would bet that stated book values would not be worth a lot.

However for “deep value” specialists, this could be interesting if they are able to estimate the “survival probability” to a certain extent.

A side note: “Moving up the value chain” in wine usually means oak barrels. So despite the much higher valuation, I still think that Tonnelerie Francois Freres is the better (and safer) long term investment in the wine industry.

Short cuts: Kabel Deutschland, Rhoen Klinikum, Greek GDP linker, Royal Imtech

Posted on by 8 comments

Kabel Deutschland

Man, this looks like I got it really wrong. According to some press articles, now Liberty wants to buy Kabel as well for 85 EUR a share. So there seems to be a bidding war before even the first official bid has been announced.

The interesting point of this “red-hot” news is that Liberty has already once tried to buy the former Telekom Cable network in 2002 but this was not approved by the German Kartellamt.

How realistic is this ? I am not sure. Just in February, the German Kartellamt blocked the takeover of the smaller rival Telecolumbus by Kabel Deutschland itself because even the combination of KAbel Deutschland and the smaller rival was a problem for them.

So what is going on here ? I have no idea, but to a certain extent it looks like one of the best “stock promotions” ever. What kind of M&A process is this when everything “leaks” to the market ?

For some market participants, this doesn’t matter anyway. My “favourite bad research provider” Makor (yes, those guys who use the wrong formula to calculate fair prices after right issues) has the following recommendation viea Bloomberg:

We recommend initiating positions in Kabel shares, as we consider the shares trading about fair value in the context of a possible offer. However, given the strategic interests for the potential buyers (Vodafone, Liberty Media), a premium is probably justified and notwithstanding regulatory issues, a price above Eur 90/sh could easily be justified.

Wow, sometimes the stock market is so simple.

Rhoen Klinikum

Unfortunately, the “Rhoen surprise” did not last very long. Some more details were emerging . It looks like that the boss of the supervisory board (and the guy who wants to sell to Fresenius) decided, that the 5% votes of one of the blocking shareholders were not valid. The result will most likely be a court battle over up to 18 months. So lets wait and see what happens.

Greek GDP linkers

The most recent jump in the GDP linker seems to come from a “research piece” of Deutsche bank which several readers forwarded to me (thank you guys !!!).

Let’s look how the look at the nominal hurdle:

Based on the latest IMF forecasts, the 2011 level of GDP is expected to be re-attained in 2017. By fixing this point, we can then solve for the nominal growth rate required in order to exceed the nominal GDP threshold in a given year. We find that in order to exceed the threshold in 2022 (for warrant payment in 2023) would require a YoY nominal growth rate of 5.0%. A growth rate of 3.6% would be required to meet the threshold in 2024. If recovery to the 2011 level is achieved a year earlier than expected (in 2016) then the required growth rate for the first payment to be in 2023 falls to 4.2%, or rises to 6.3% assuming a year delay. These sensitivities are illustrated in the chart to the right.
Although it is far from certain, it seems reasonable to assume 2023 to be the year when payments commence on the warrants.

Ok, so the basic assumption is that the new IMF forecast from 2012 is now correct, after the initial forecast was completely wrong. Hmm, one might call this “positive thinking” if one wants to be nice.

Their final conclusion (after some “nonsense funky doodle” modeling) is as follows:

The combination of more stable macro-economic assumptions, and reduced default probability now mean that we find the current valuation of the warrants as being broadly justified (relative to the GGBs). Considering our constructive view, the additional beta of the warrants and also the additional ‘yield’, we now find the GDP warrants to be more attractive than the GGBs themselves as a means to take exposure to an eventual Greek recovery. We caveat that such a recovery remains uncertain and will likely be lengthy; implying that any anticipated outperformance of the warrants should be seen as a medium to long-term expectation.

So this conforms my view, that the GDP linker is more like a short-term “beta” play than an intrinsic value” investment as the Deutsche Bank “analysts” only take the IMF projection as fundamental basis and do not add anything new here.

Royal Imtech

Royal Imtech has released a quite bad Q1 report. It looks more and more that larger parts of the company are in real trouble and that the fraud might have been just the “top of the iceberg”. Time to take them of the “rights issue watch list”. As I am not a “fraud-turn around” investor, this seems to be the not the situations I am looking for.

Quick check: Cairo Communication (ISIN IT0004329733) – 12% dividend “wonder” or liquidation ?

Posted on by 2 comments

A reader pointed out that Italian company Cairo Communciations might be an interesting investment.

Company description per Bloomberg:

Cairo Communication S.p.A. carries out its activities in the communication field as an advertising broker for a variety of media, such as commercial television, analog and digital pay television, press, and the Internet. The Company also publishes magazines and books and operates an Internet portal through its own search engine, Il Trovatore.

Cairo looks relatively cheap on an earnings basis (2011):

P/E 8.5
EV/EBITDA 4.5
P/S 0.7
P/B 3.13

The company doesn’t have any debt but significant net cash (0.70 EUR per share against a share price of 2.56 EUR).

ROCE and ROE are both above 30%, so is this a value investor’s wet dream ?

Cairo is listed since 2000, so let’s look at some figures from the past:

BV Sh EPS DPS NI Margin Sales pS ROIC
29.12.2000 1.62 0.09 0 5.6% 1.5348 3.03%
31.12.2001 1.70 0.08 0 4.8% 1.7509 2.84%
31.12.2002 1.73 0.07 0.04 4.7% 1.5929 1.93%
31.12.2003 1.72 0.07 0.24 3.8% 1.7299 2.74%
31.12.2004 1.65 0.09 0.16 3.6% 2.3745 3.54%
30.12.2005 1.58 0.08 0.16 3.5% 2.3161 3.81%
29.12.2006 1.19 0.15 0.30 0.0% 2.7983 7.74%
31.12.2007 1.11 0.15 0.25 5.4% 2.9956 11.34%
31.12.2008 0.91 0.17 0.40 5.6% 2.9527 14.22%
31.12.2009 0.86 0.16 0.20 5.3% 2.9259 15.12%
31.12.2010 0.90 0.27 0.20 8.3% 3.2273 27.67%
30.12.2011 0.82 0.30 0.40 8.3% 3.6192 31.81%
             
Total   1.67 2.35    

The numbers look really interesting. On the one side, it looks like a liquidation, with dividends being constantly higher than earnings. On the other hand, Cairo managed to more than double their sales with almost half of the equity and at the same time increase their margins to a healthy 8%.

Together, this of course leads to a dramaticv increase in ROE and ROIC.

Interestingly the stock price hovers only slightly above the post internet bubble prices:

Summary:

I think this really looks interesting and worth a deeper look into the drivers of the sales increase and profitability development. If this would be “sustainable” then Cairo might indeed be an attractive opportunity.

Quick check: Fabasoft AG (AT0000785407) – Cheap EV/EBITDA 2.4 stock or value trap ?

Posted on by 5 comments

From time to time, readers ask my about my opinion on certain stocks. First of all this is of course flattering, secondly it is also a good motivation to look at as many stocks as possible.

However, I am not an expert on all stocks in the universe, but nevertheless I want to share some of my thoughts from time to time on the blog.

Fabasoft

Fabasoft is a small Austrian software company which is active in Document management solutions, mostly for Government and Defence companies. Fabasoft was IPOed in the middle of the “Neuer Markt” boom in 1999.

According to Pat Dorsey, Software companies can be interesting “moat” business, also the business scales pretty well, meaning increasing sales incrrease profits over-proportionally.

For Fabasoft, this doesn’t really hold true. Although they managed a turn-around in 2011/2012 according to their annual report, they seem to swing from profit to loss like a pendulum from year to year. The loss in 2010/2011 was preceded by a profit in 2009/2010 and again a loss in 2008/2009. the same again for the preceeding 2 periods. Loss, profit, loss, profit.

Since 2000 this looks like this:

TRAIL_12M_EPS BOOK_VAL_PER_SH NI Margin
29.12.2000 -0.37 3.24 -21.35%
31.12.2001 -0.20 3.09 -12.11%
31.12.2002 -0.12 2.91 -6.14%
31.12.2003 0.41 3.31 12.90%
31.12.2004 0.53 3.80 13.21%
30.12.2005 0.34 3.92 7.57%
29.12.2006 -0.07 3.68 -1.98%
31.12.2007 0.09 3.80 2.36%
31.12.2008 -0.29 3.27 -7.35%
31.12.2009 0.45 3.45 10.02%
31.12.2010 -0.05 2.76 -2.03%
30.12.2011 0.15 2.91 3.35%

The stock chart shows that since 2005/2006 the stock is trading sideways:

Sales have remained more or less constant since at least 2006. What makes the stock attractive under EV metrics is the relatively large cash pile.

As of 31.03.2012, the company showed around 14 mn EUR in cash which, based on 5 mn shares, a shareprice of 3.75 EUR and roughly 2 mn EUR EBITDA results in an implied EV/EBITDA of around 2.4, which looks very cheap.

However, this is one of the cases where a simple EV/EBITDA calculation might be a bit misleading. On the liability side for instance, they show prepayments of around 7 mn EUR. One could discuss this now for some time if we have to deduct prepayments from EV, but the major point for me is the followng:

Fabasoft is not a Net-Net, the market cap is still higher (19 mn EUR) than net short term assets (13 mn EUR) as well as net equity (14 mn) and the business is not consistently profitable. We do not know what they do with the cash. They paid some dividends and bought back some shares in the past, but nothing regular.

So even if they pay out all the cash, one is still left with a business which over the cycle does not earn its cost of capital. At least for me that doesn’t sound very attractive. I would prefer companies like Installux, who have a profitable business AND low EV/EBITDAs, there are plenty of them out there.

Summary: Despite an optical low EV/EBITDA, I don’t think Fabasoft is a very attractive investment. Mainly because they couldn’t prove that their business is actally profitable ovewr a longer period of time. If one is sure about a lasting turn around, than it might be a good investment, but as I don’t really know the business, this would be too risky for me. Based on past performance, this could well be a typical value trap.

Recent Entries »