Category Archives: Uncategorized

Spin-off/IPO updates: Metro/Ceconomy, Brighthouse Financial, ALD SA

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Metro/Ceconomy

I had briefly written about the Metro/Ceconomy Spin-off in January. After some legal hassles, the spin-off took place last week last.

This is what I wrote back then:

With 327 mn shares outstanding, this would translate into ~6,20 EUR per share as a lower bound value for Ceconomy under my (very rough assumptions).

It think at or below this price, Ceconomy could be an interesting “Ugly duck” spin-off investment.

Interestingly, Ceconomy had a very good start, opening around 9,40 EUR and has gone above 10 EUR per share, far above my buying threshold.

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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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Travel series part 7 – Tripadvisor (TRIP) follow up & more thoughts on online travel

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This is the follow-up post on the intitial Tripadvisor post from last week.

So where is the upside ?

After “bashing” them in the first post, the question is: Is there an upside and if yes where ?

CEO & Capital management

With Steve Kaufer, the CEO, one of the founders is still on board. His salary is rather modest but he got plenty of options awarded in the previous years. According to Bloomberg, he received option in the original value of ~33 mn USD in 2014 to 2016. He owns  shares in an amount of 17 mn USD, which is not huge but still not insignificant.

In his 2016 letter to the shareholders he writes the following:

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Travel series part 6: Tripadvisor (TRIP) – Riding a dead horse ?

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So this is part 6 of my little travel series. Previous posts were:

Part 1 – lastminute.com
Part 2 – Expedia
Part 3 – Trivago
Part  4 & 5 – Flight Centre

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The company

Tripadvisor is clearly one of the most well-known names in Online Travel. The company was founded in 2000, but was then acquired by Interactive Group in 2004 and rolled into Expedia. In 2011 the company then was spun out and listed separately. Similar to Expedia in true John Malone style, there are two entities listed: Tripadvisor and Liberty Tripadvisor.

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Sapec SA – follow up

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Annual Report 2016

So now Sapec is out with their annual report for the last year (or 15 months).

The report is in French, so I am not sure if understood everything by 100% but I try to summarize the relevant issues:

  • Book value per share at year-end was 191,6 EUR
  • The operating result of the business ex the sold business is slightly negative
  • The Agro business was sold at 318,4 mn equity value, resulting in a gain of 226 mn EUR
  • They provisioned the full 36 mn Novo Bank guarantee.

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Amaysim (AU000000AYS5) – The “Freenet of Australia” ?

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Business & Business model:

Amaysim is a 320 mn AUD market cap Australian company which went public in July 2015 and  offers mobile  subscription plans without owning the physical network in Australia. So they are effectively a reseller (like Freenet in Germany). As a specialty, they do not package the plans with “free” phones and long lock in periods,  but offer “clean” and customer friendly  contracts which can be canceled on a monthly basis.

Essentially, this is a distribution / billing service. Their value proposition both, for the networks and end clients is that they can offer this service better and cheaper than the networks. If they can do this, then it is “win win” for both sides.

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Special situation: Liquidation of KANAM Grundinvest fund (ISIN DE0006791809)

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!

Background:

This investment is not an original idea, but rather a “me too” investment. Ben from Wertart has a very good write up from November last year, so I spare myself to go into too much historic description.

Just the short version: Kanam Grundinvest is one of several formerly open real estate funds in Germany which have been put into liquidation. The major difference to almost all other funds is that in the Kanam case investors actually didn’t lose any money over the lifetime of the fund as the real estate seems to have been relatively high quality. As of December 31st 2016, the fund has sold 95% of its real estate and is now effectively a cash box with some remaining real estate exposure.

So let’s focus on what has changed since Ben wrote his post:

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Book review: “Great by Choice” – Jim Collins

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“Great by Choice” seems to be the most recent book (2011) from management “guru” Jim Collins. Similar to “Built to last” he focuses on companies that have achieved great success. However in “Great by Choice” he includes a certain twist: He looks at 8 pairs of competing companies which more or less had the same starting point, but where one of them became super successful and the other not.

He then tries to work out why the successful ones were successful. The pairs are as follows:

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Travel series (5): Flight Centre – “Outsider” Company or off line Dinosaur ?

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This is part 2 of the Flight Centre analysis after the book review last week.

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The “old” business model

The Australian based company is a classic “travel agency”, both, running physical agencies as well as offering airline tickets and tours over web sites.

A traditional travel agency usually works like this: They offer flights from preferred airline partners and hotels or packages also mostly from certain partner companies. Traditionally you would go into a travel agency and ask if they can recommend you a destination, then you would be offered some colorful catalogues where they list the offered hotels (with prices mostly depending on the official “star system”) and then gladly sell you the “Bundle”.

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Performance review Q1 2017 – Strategy update “Money Management”

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Perfomance Q1 2017:

In Q1 2017, the blog portfolio gained +9,03% (including dividends, no taxes) against 7,77% for the Benchmark (Eurostoxx50 (Perf.Ind) (25%), Eurostoxx small 200 (25%), DAX (30%), MDAX (20%)). Since inception, the score is now +156,8% vs. 74,7% for the benchmark. The full details (and graph) as always on the performance page.

Some other funds that I follow have performed as follows in Q1 2017:

Partners Fund TGV: +10,88% 
Profitlich/Schmidlin: +5,56%
Squad European Convictions +8,81%
Ennismore European Smaller Cos 2,04% (in EUR)
Frankfurter Aktienfonds für Stiftungen +5,06%
Evermore Global Value +7,03%
Greiff Special Situation +4,13%

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