Category Archives: Value Stocks

Gerard Perrier – Follow up (Acquisition history)

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In my initial post, I was actually quite sloppy. As reader al sting pointed out in the comments, they actually made a couple of acquisitions over the last years:

– 2005: Ardatem
– 2007: Maditech (?)
– 2007: SEIREL AUTOMATISMES
– 2011: SERA

Let’s look for first at Ardatem,, the service comnpany specialised on nuclear facilities. In their 2005 annual report they mentioned the acquisition as follows:

24.- Evénements postérieurs à la clôture du bilan. Acquisition de la société Ardatem le 4 janvier 2006, par la SAS Soteb : cette société de prestations de services intervient dans le secteur du nucléaire et réalise un chiffre d’affaires de l’ordre de 5 millions d’euros pour une marge nette d’environ 4% en 2005.

So in beginning 0f 2006, when they bought it, Ardatem had sales of 5 mn EUR with a margin of 4%.

In 2007, they bought “Maditech” which complemented the Ardatem acquisition and seems to be now als part of the “Energy” segment. Maditech had sales of 3 mn EUR at the date of the acquisition.

In 2011 then for comparison, the “energy” segment had sales of 28 mn EUR and an operational result (before tax) of ~2 mn EUR. That is quite a good developement 4-6 years. So yes, G. Perrier did acquire companies, but most of the growth happened after the acquisition !

Seirel was acquired in 2007 as well, the following can be found in the 2007 report:

Le chiffre d’affaires de la SAS SEIREL AUTOMATISMES, contrôlée indirectement est de 3 887 367euros (exercice de 6 mois) contre 6 307 313 euros l’an passé (exercice de 12 mois) et le résultat de 134 426 euros contre 285 731 euros l’an passé.

In the 2011 report this looks like this:

Le chiffre d’affaires de la SAS SEIREL AUTOMATISMES, contrôlée indirectement est de 7 551 587 euros contre 6 471 226 euros et le résultat de 491 215 euros contre 229 896 euros l’an passé.

Again, within 4 years, the doubled sales and even managed to increase profit 4 times. Seirel looks like it was a “distressed buy”.

Overall, the recent acqusition startegy looks quite successful. They seem to buy opportunistic and are able to put those companies onto a growth path. This makes me worry less about their cash pile. I think having cash and then being able to move quickly can be a great advantage. Especially now that maybe more companies are struggling in France, G. Perrier could make very interesting deals.

I will use the current weakness of the stock to buy some more below 35 EUR.

Total Produce (IE00B1HDWM43) 2012 preliminary results – Disappointing

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Total Produce is one of the core holdings since the beginnings of this blog. In the beginning, we analysed the stock mostly in German, nevertheless, we finally settled after some back and forth on a fair value range of 0.69-0.83 EUR per share based on a free cash flow analysis, assuming ~8 cent of “adjusted” free cash flow per share (adjusting esp. for minorities.

One of the issues with Total Produce were back then Balance sheet quality (lots of goodwill, leverage) and only average return on equity, which however was set off by a very cheap price, significantly below book value

In between 2 things happened:

1. The price of the stock increased nicely to around 0.61 EUR. resulting in an overall performance of +55% incl. Dividends.
2. The quality of earnings however deteriorated in my opinion.

I think I have to explain point 2 a little bit in more detail. If you read the 2012 premliminary results, everything looks great:

Revenue (1) up 11.2% to €2.8 billion
•
Adjusted EBITDA(1) up 17.8% to €70.4m
•
Adjusted EBITA (1) up 21.4% to €54.6m
•
Adjusted profit before tax (1) up 19.1% to €47.3m
•
Adjusted EPS (1) up 12.0% to 8.11 cent
•
Final dividend up 12.0% to 1.512 cent; total 2012 dividend up 10.0% to 2.079 cent
(1)
Key performance indicators are defined overleaf

So everything is up double digits, where is the problem ? Well, the problem could be the use of the word “adjusted” in most of the items presented.

If one flips to the next page of the report, we can already see that “unadjusted” EPS declined by -7.5% from 7.11 pence to 6.58 pence per share.

Where does that come from ?

The “explanation” reads as follows:

Adjusted earnings per share excludes acquisition related intangible asset amortization charges, acquisition related costs, exceptional items and related tax on such items.

On the one hand, one could say OK, acquisitions are not part of the operating business, let’s ignore that. However, Total produce does a lot of acquisitions, year after year. Most of their growth actually comes from acquisitions, organic growth seems to be quite limited.

Total Produce, year after year reports those “adjusted” earnings, whereas the “regular earnings” are always lower. Let’s look at the past 4 years:

2012 2011 2010 2009 Avg
“adjusted ” EPS 8.11 7.24 6.84 6.47  
EPS 6.58 7.11 5.25 3.7  
EPS/Adj. EPS 81.1% 98.2% 76.8% 57.2% 78.3%

So not surprisingly, we only see “upside” adjustments, on average the “real” EPS is only ~78% of the adjusted EPS.

But it gets worse. In my opinion, one of the most “underused” pieces of information about the quality of a companies’ accounts is the Comprehensive Income statment.

“Modern” IFRS accounting allows quite a lot of items to be booked directly into equity as those items are considered sort of non-operating as well. Usual suspects in this category are:

– pension revaluation
– fx effects of foreign subsidiaries
– revaluation of fixed assets

In my opinion, one has to look at all those items because all of them influence the value of the equity position. Let’s look again at the last 4 years:

2012 2011 2010 2009
EPS 6.58 7.11 5.25 3.7
EPS “Comprehensive” 5.15 4.21 5.39 7.34

2009 looks better based on comprehensive income, however especially 2011 and 2012 look bad from that perspective. This is mostly the result of pension charges. interestingly, in 2009, they booked a 3 mn EUR pension gain into comprehensive income, since then, Total Produce however had to book in total 30 mn EUR negative charge through comprehensive income.^The discount rates used to discount the liabilities at the end of 2012 are still relatively high at ~4.2% both for EUR and UK. So there will be more charges coming.

Many analysts will tell you that comprehensive income doesn’t matter, because it is not operational, but I have a different view. With regard to pension for instance, an increase in pension liabilities means that you will have higher cash outflows in the future and the shareholder will get less.

Free Cashflow

For 2012, Total Produce reports ~41 mn EUR Free cashflow. That’s about 12.5 pence per share or ~50% higher than in our base case scenario. Again, this has to be taken with a “grain of salt”.

Again, as in the first post about Total Produce, I would eliminate the working capital movement, especially as the improvement only came from higher payables and not a reduction of inventory or receivables.

If we do a quick “proxy” calc I would calculate the following Free Cash flow:

+ 38 mn EUR OpCF
– 13.5 maintanance capex (depreciation)
– 1.1 “net minority dividends
= 23.4 mn EUR or ~7.8 cents per share.

This is only slightly below the initial assumption of 8 cents per share but does not include the various payments for the acquisitions.

The problem I do have is that most of the free cash flow is now used for acquisitions, where I am not sure how “value added” that part is.

Summary:

In my opinion, Total Produce’s earnings quality deteriorated significantly. The “adjusted” numbers should be ignored, based on comprehensive income the company only earned ~5.15 pence for the shareholder and this is based on quite optimistic assumptions for the pension liabilities.

The company is using the majority of its free cash flow for acquisitions, where due to all those special effects, it is not clear to me if they earn really enough return. The priority seems to be to increase the size of the company. In my initial thesis, I was giving them extra credit for buying back shares but this seems to be no priority any more. Total value creation suffers quite significantly because of all the related expenses etd.

So I do not see much upside from here as the stock is now already close to my (slightly reduced) value range.

As a result, I will in a first step reduce my Total Produce position by 50%. I assume to have executed this end of last week at an average price of 0.61 EUR per share.

The other 50% are “on probation” so to say, I will look at the annual report and maybe 6M numbers in order to decide finally (or something better comes up).

Gerard Perrier SA (ISIN FR0000061459) – French “Hidden Champion ” ?

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DISCLAIMER: The stock discussed in the following post is a very illiquid small cap. The author might have already bought some of it or might sell it at any time.
PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!

Gerard Perrier SA is a French company, which has nothing to do with the famous sparkling water but, according to Bloomberg does the following:

Gerard Perrier Electric designs, manufactures, installs and maintains electrical and electronic equipment for industrial machines and automated processes. The Company’s subsidiaries include Soteb and Geral.

“Traditional” valuation metrics look Ok,but not spectacular:

Market Cap: 68 mn EUR
P/E (2011 Trailing): 9
P/B 1.7
P/S 0.5
Div. yield 4.1%
EV/EBITDA 3.8

P/B is quite high, EV/EBITDA quite low, how comes ? Well, end of 2011, they had ~7 EUR net cash per share, so this drastically reduces EV/EBITDA to such a low level.

So far so good, but why might this be a “hidden champion” ? Well, a look at “standard” returns over the last few years shows a picture of a very very good business:

EPS FCF Profit margin ROE Net debt per share
2002 1.55 1.80 5.6% 19.9% -3.8273
2003 1.65 0.34 6.0% 19.1% -3.5185
2004 1.80 1.87 5.9% 17.4% -4.9838
2005 1.82 0.93 6.0% 15.8% -5.027
2006 1.51 0.46 4.3% 12.7% -2.938
2007 2.04 0.61 4.9% 16.6% -1.349
2008 2.43 2.11 5.2% 18.1% -1.1732
2009 2.29 3.37 5.0% 15.9% -4.2205
2010 3.21 1.67 6.3% 20.0% -5.2313
2011 3.55 4.23 5.8% 20.0% -6.6423
  21.84 17.39    

If we adjust ROE for Net cash, we can see ROEs (or ROIC) of 30% or higher for the last few years. Whenever I see such numbers, the question is of course: How are the doing it ?

Well, according to my understanding, Gerard Perrier to a large extent is rather an engineering /servicing company than a production company. Under the roof of Gerard Perrier, the operating business is run via 5 subsidiaries, which are the following:

Soteb
This entity had in 2011 ~48 mn of sales out of the 122 mn total sales. This is the largest entity and also the core entity which installs and mantains electrical installations at large industrial sites. This company is quite asset light, as the business model does not require large fixed assets etc.

Automation geral, Seirel automatism and SERA are the subsidiaries which are summarized under the segment “Fabrication” in their segment report. In 2011, the 3 companies together made around the same sales than Sotheb (47 mn EUR). The largest part of this segment seems to be equipment for automation of industrial production. Naturally, anything which is fabricated requires more capital. So compared to Soteb, they need twice as much fixed assets to generate the same amount of sales.

ARDATEM
This is the company which represents the “energy” segment. In my understanding, Ardatem with 2011 sales of around 29 mn EUR is specialised service company for electrical installations,etc. for nuclear power plants with the largest client being EDF. Again, very low fixed asset requirement

So all in all, 2/3 of the business seems to be “asset light” service businesses with (hopefully) a large amount of recurring revenues. The production segment seems to be more capital intensive, but as far as I understand this is a very specialized production process with specific orders and also relatively limited working capital requirements. So in 2011 for instance, Gerard Perrier in total had total inventory of only 3.6 mn EUR or around 11 days. So this looks like a good “Just in time” or “on demand” fabrication model.

Competitive advantages ?

I have to admit that I did not yet dig deep enough if there is any sustainable moat. However, from my practical experience I know that electrical installations are quite special. I recently moved into a new apartment in a newly built house. Of course there were some issues with the electrical installations. Maybe for cost saving reasons, the landlord called in a different electrician to fix those problems. Despite having all the original plans, the guy from other company was struggling hard with fixing the problem. When I started to talk to him he told me that yes, there are the plans where everything should be but in practice, they have to deviate for different reasons from the plan and often those plans are then not updated anymore. So the electrician who has installed the system has of course a “natural” moat regarding this installation and fix problems quicker than a third party electrician.

Just by coincidence I had a similar discussion with an electrician who was working for the City council where I am living. He said basically the same thing, that you cannot trust plans for electrical installations and you have to know how it is actually wired, otherwise you need a long time to find the problems.

So I am not sure if this applies here as well but I can imagine if you have already installed a very complex electrical installation in an industrial plant, the client wants problems fixed really fast in order not to delay production. So once you have the job, I guess chances are good that you get all the follow up work.

Regarding my checklist, the score is pretty good, some highlights:

– The company is family owned (61%), the son of the founder is co-CEO
– only one analyst is following the company (Gilbert Dupont)
– share count has decreased since 1998
– always free cash flow positive, earnings to FCF conversion high (80-90%)
– not too many acquisitions, good organic growth
– veryx capital efficient business modell, low fixed assets
– Beta ~0.6, do relatively independent from index
– 260D stock price volatility of 19%, relatively low
– other shareholders: Small stakes (~1%) of Natixis, Fidelity, Amundi. Due to low trading volume not interesting for most funds

Valuation

Simple Version:

Assuming a 2012 EPS of 3.75 EUR and 7 EUR net cash (not required for operating purposes) per share, Perrier trades at a P/E of ~9 (gross ) or 7 net. For such a high quality company, a “fair” P/E should be anywhere between 10-15 (net), so a fair price could by between 45-65 EUR per share.

More sophisticated version:

Gerard Perrier managed to convert ~80% of its earnings into free cash over the last 10 years while being able to grow sales and profits by 130% over the same time with only one small acquisition in 2011. So if we start at 3 EUR free cashflow (80% of my estimated 3.75 EUR 2012) we get the following “value” grid relative to discount rate and growth:

Growth        
Discount 1% 2% 3% 4% 5%
11% 30.00 33.33 37.50 42.86 50.00
10% 33.33 37.50 42.86 50.00 60.00
9% 37.50 42.86 50.00 60.00 75.00
8% 42.86 50.00 60.00 75.00 100.00
7% 50.00 60.00 75.00 100.00 150.00

Mean reversion potential

This is a very interesting point. Based on historical P/Es, margins etc., Perrier trades more or less exactly at historic levels. This is because the stock rarely traded at double digit P/Es. However if we look for instance the 15 year period we can clearly see that this still led to a great performance of ~13.4% p.a. against 3.8% for the Benchmark. The same applies for 10 years (16.3% p.a. vs. 5.1% p.a.) , 20 years (24.6% p.a. against 6.2% p.a.) and 5 years (25.9% p.a. vs. 9.6% p.a.).

It is almost unbelievable, that a stock which outperforms in such a consistent manner over such a long time still only trades at single P/Es. Efficient markets “French style”.

Stock chart

For a “hardcore” counter-cyclical investor, G. Perrier looks almost like a momentum stock:

I am not a chart analyst, so I leave it to my readers to interpret this.

Risks & Issues

Of course, there are always issues with any stocks so let’s look at some of them:

France / EUR crisis
This is clearly one of the main reasons why the stock is cheap. In the case of Italy, I clearly underestimated the extent of the decline in local economic activity. Clearly this is a risk for G. Perrier, as most of their business is domestic. However the actual number look relatively good. The had a string first quarter in 2012, then 2 slower quarters before in Q4, growth picked up again.

Interestingly, growth came mostly from the energy sector according to this news release, and the “core” SOTEB remained more or less flat. Nevertheless, 4% organic growth is quite an achievement in those times.

It seems to be that (so far) their business is relatively isolated from the general French economy. Although I am not sure if for instance their business is concentrated on certain industry plant where a close down might hurt business for Perrier.

Summary:

Gerrard Perrier for me is a very interesting stock. Although P/B is rather on the high end for my taste, the company looks like a very interesting “hidden French champion”, with a very cash generative, capital light business model, good management and resilient business.

Regarding the portfolio, I will assume that I could have purchased 9.000 shares since the beginning of 2013 at 33,60 EUR, the VWAP from 01.01. until 4.03. This translates into ~2% of the portfolio.

Together with Installux and Poujoulat, this will be my “French Micro Cap” basket with a weight of ~6%. My maximum weight for illiquid French “micro caps” would be 10%.

Some thoughts on discounts for Holding structures (Porsche SE, Pargesa, Autostrade Torino)

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In my post about Porsche SE, I concluded the following:

However on a relative basis I don’t think that there is a lot of upside in the Porsche shares, as I don’t see a quick “real” catalyst and a certain structural discount (20-30%) is justified due to holding structure and non-voting status of the traded shares.

Geoff Gannon used this summary to come up with his view on holding company discounts:

I do know something about holding companies that trade at a discount to their parts. And I don’t agree with that part of the post. If the underlying assets are compounding nicely – you shouldn’t assume a holding company discount is correct just because the market applies one to the stock.

So he is basically saying one should ignore the holding structure and look at the underlying only.

Interestingly, we had such a discussion on the blog about the same topic in the Bouygues post. Reader Martin commented that “one usually applies a 20-30% holding/conglomerate discount” which I didn’t apply in my sum-of-parts valuation.

So far this seems to be quite inconsistent from my side, isn’t it ?

I have to confess that especially for Porsche, I did not mention all my thoughts about why I applied a discount there. However maybe I can shed some light on how I look at “holding structures” and when and how to discount them.

For myself, I distinguish between 3 forms of holding companies:

A) Value adding HoldCos
B) Value neutral HoldCos
C) Value destroying HoldCos

A) Value adding HoldCos

This is in my opinion the rarest breed of HoldCos. Clearly, Berkshire Hathaway is an example or Leucadia. Those HoldCo’s add value through superior capital allocation capabilities of their management. In those cases I would not apply any discount on the underlying assets, however I would be hesitant to pay extra.

B) Value neutral HoldCos

Those are holding structures which exist for some reason, but most importantly are transparent and do nothing stupid or evil to hurt the shareholder. Ideally, they are passing returns from underlying assets to shareholders.

A typical example of such a company would be Pargesa, the Swiss HoldCo of Belgian Billionaire Albert Frère. They are quite transparent and even report their economic NAV on a weekly basisandpass most of the dividends received to the shareholders. Nevertheless, the share trades at significant discount to NAV as their own chart shows:

At the moment, we see a 30% discount for Pargessa. So one should ask oneself, why such a discount exists for such a transparent “fair” holding co ? I can think of maybe 3 reasons:

– The stock is less liquid than the underlying shares
– people do not really trust Albert Frere despite being treated Ok so far
– no one wants to invest into this specific basket of stocks

Nevertheless, one has to notice that even for such a transparent company like Pargesa, a 30% discount does not seem to be the exception.

C) Value destroying HoldCos

Here I have the privilege to have documented such a case in quite some detail, Autostrada Torina, the Italian Holding company for toll road operator SIAS SpA.

As I liked the underlying business, I thought buying at a discount, following Geoff Gannon thoughts that a nice compounding business at a discount is an ever nicer business.

However, I had then to find out the hard way that the discount of the holding company was clearly a risk premium. In this case, the controlling Gavio family “abused” the holding to buy an interest in another company (Imprgilo far above the market price. They couldn’t do this in the operating subsidiary, as the sub was subject to regulation. The Holding co stock recovered to a certain extent but in this case the underlying OpCo was clearly the better and safer investment

My lesson in this was the following: Stay away as far as possible from such “value destroying” HoldCos. They are totally unpredictable and doe not have any margin of safety.

So going back to our Porsche example, what kind of Holding company is Porsche ?

Well, it is definitely not a “value adding” holding. The question now would be if it is a “neutral” or potentially even “value destroying” hold co ?

In my opinion there are already some warning signs:

– Porsche SE already communicated that they will not distribute the cash, but build up an additional portfolio of “strategic participations”
– Porsche only issues detailed reports twice a year, accounting is rather “opaque”
– in my opinion, Volkswagen has a lot of incentives to achieve a weak Porsche SE share price in order to then acquire their own shares at a discount (and swap them into VW pref shares if possible) at a later stage. Common shareholders (Porsche & Piech family might get a better deal. Under German law it is possible to treat pref holders differently

Compared to Pargesa for example, I would definitely prefer Pargesa with a 30% discount to a Porsche pref share at 35% discount.

So to summarize the whole post:

– With holding companies, it is very important to determine the intention and risks of the holding structure
– neglecting or even “evil” holding management can quickly turn a “discount” into a real loss
– better err on the safe side in such situations
– in doubt, assume there is a reason for the discount if you cannot prove the opposite
– however for skilled activist investors, those situations might create potential. So maybe Chris Hohn has a different game plan.But don’t forget that a lot of famous Hedgefund managers (incl. David Einhorn lost a lot of money with Porsche/Volkswagen already in the past.

Behavioural bias: “Averaging down” vs. “averaging up”

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Sometimes it makes sense to reflect why one has done something and why not.

Following my “boss Score harvest” project, I invested in two new UK stocks this year, Dart Group beginning of June and Cranswick in Mid June.

In September I increased the Cranswick position to a full position, for Dart however I was hesitant and could not decide to increase .

One doesn’t need to be a genius in order to find out that increasing the Dart position would have been better:

Since mid of September, Dart made 50%, against more or less flat performance for Cranswick. If I look back to September, I think one of the “true” reasons why I didn’t increase Dart was that I would have to “average” up on Dart, as the stock was already 20% up against my purchase price.

For some reason I am much more hesitant to buy at higher prices. So for Cranswick, it was easier to increase the position because I could slightly decrease my average purchase price. Somehow I seem to prefer lowering the percentage loss on a loss position (“averaging down” than to lower the percentage profit of a gain position (“averaging up”).

I am not sure if this fits into the standard behavioural biases, maybe it is a special form of “anchoring”.

This behavioural bias, not increasing the Dart stake cost me around 1% of portfolio performance so far and now I am even more hesitant to buy. It is also in direct contradiction to the fact that “momentum” combined with Value seems to generate strong results in the long run as demonstrated by O’Shaugnessey’s “what works on Wall Street”.

Lessons (hopefully) learned:

In the future I need to have a better formulated plan for scaling into a position in order to avoid this “behavioural bias”. Either a clear timeline or some clear fundamental triggers where I then execute regardless if the position has already increased to a certain extent or not.

Bouygues Q3 update

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The Q3 numbers of Bouygues are a first test for my Bouygues investment case.

If I update my simple sum of part valuation, we can see the following:

Market values listed companies:

  16.11 initial
Colas 96.55% 3.56 3.34
Alstom 29.40% 2.42 2.47
Tf1 43.59% 0.667 0.58
       
Total listed   6.65 6.39

So the listed subs have slightly increased in value.

Now looking at the unlisted, I will simply assume 9 Month EBITDA will equal 75% of total EBITDA:

9 month EBITDA 12M est EV Multiple EV
Bouygues Constr. 432 576 7 4,032
Bouygues Real estate 117 156 7 1,092
Bouygues Telecom 802 1,069 6.5 6,951
 
        12,075

Compared to the 6 month numbers I used last time, Telco is slightly below 6M run rates, construction and real estate perfom better.

Both, listed and unlisted subsidiaries in theory look better than at the time of my initial analysis. Net debt has slightly increased to 5.8 bn form 5 bn, mainly due to a 2 bn purchase of mobile licenses in France.

Putting this together, the updated fair value of Bouygues equity at “sum of parts” would be 6,65 bn + 12.075 bn -5.8 bn = 10.9 bn or around 35 EUR per share. From my point of view I see no fundamental reason why the shares have dropped quite substantially. I guess this is more “market psychology” following the announcement of France Telecom to cut their dividend.

However the stock chart looks really ugly now, although I am not a stock chart expert, there doesn’t seem to be any “technical” support on the downside and momentum is clearly negative:

Fundamentally the company seems to be “on track” at least compared to my investment case. So I will use today’s low prices to “fill up” again the current 2.2% position to 2.5% weight, further purchases will follow if the stock goes below 17 EUR (and fundamentals remain stable).

Bouygues again: How deep does one have to dig into Telco, sell side analysts & comparable Eiffage SA

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So to conclude my “Bouygues week”, a final post about the company.

In my recent post about Bouygues, a commentator said if I can’t correctly project future profitability levels for the French mobile phone market, then investing into Bouygues is not a good idea.

As I call myself a fundamental investor, I have to admit that I do not have any extra knowledge about the french mobile market at the moment.

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A few more thoughts on Bouygues (Telecom) – O2 IPO

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Recent news
After my buy decision two days ago, the share price jumped immeadiately 3%, but this was not the result of my blog but of some interesting news from the French Government, which was interpreted as positive for Bouygues Telecom.

The French Government seemed to have clarified that Illiad SA wil not be able to rely on cheap roaming contracts forever, but has to build out their own network rather sooner than later.

O2 IPO

Another, in my opinion even more interesting story is the currently planned IPO of Telefonica’s German mobile business O2. According to the FTD (German), Telefonica is looking for an EV/EBITDA multiple of 6.5-7.

One has to keep in mind that this is only the number 4 operator in Germany and they are offering a minority stake only.

So I would say my 6.5x EV/EBITDA for Bouygues is not that far off from reality.

What I found even more interesting is the fact that at least in the second quarter, O2 managed to earn 333 mn EBITDA based on 789 mn EUR sales. This is an EBITDA margin of 42% against ~20% for Bouygues. This is really interestign becaues for me it shows the potentail for Bouygues if O2 manages to earn such margins in such a tough market as Germany which has already 4 carriers.

I will have to reread Bruce Greenwalds “Competition demystified”, but I am pretty sure that if at some point in time Iliad has etsablished itself, there is a good chance that margins might “mean revert”.

In any case, if the IPO goes through, O2 will be a very good comparable for Bouygues, much better than Vodafone or France Telecom.

Boss score harvest Bouygues family – back to Bouygues SA (FR0000120503)

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After looking at one of the main subsidiaries Colas in the last post, let’s have a quick look back at Bouygues, the holding company itself.

Sum of part valuation

As I have mentioned in the initial post, Bouygues has 3 listed subsidiaries, Colas, TF1 and Alstom as well as 3 unlisted major subs which are Bouygues Construction, Bouygues real estate and Bouygues Telecom.

To get a feeling for a “sum of parts” valuation, we should start with the listed subs and then make assumption for the unlisted ones.

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