Short cuts: Rhoen Klinikum, Hornbach, Vivendi

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Rhoen Klinikum

KABOOM !! After a lot of corporate boardroom chess, Rhoen Klinikum and Fresenius today cam out swinging and announced that Rhoen will sell the mAjority of its business for 3.07 bn EUR to Fresenius.

Among other (and subject to regulatory approvals), Rhoen plan s to:

– pay a 13.80 EUR special dividend (this translates into ~1.9 bn EUR)
– and/or repurchase shares
– they will keep hospitals (mostly university hospitals) with an annual turnover of 1 bn where they expect an EBIDTA margin of ~15% in 2015
– the purchase price is cash, but Rhoen will use part of it to pay back debt
– the purchase price is priced at 12x EV/EBITDA

The stock price jumped initially today to 22 EUR and something but came back to ~ 19.50, giving Rhoen a current EV of around 3.5 bn (Net debt 800 mn)

The “stub” (remaining business) is currently then priced at around 500 mn EV but expected to earn 150 EBITDA in 2015. If we assume a Forward EV/EBITDA of around 6-8x, then a fair value of the current Rhoen shares (pre tax etc.) would be the current 19,50 plus 3,50 to 5 EUR per share or so. Slightly higher than the 22,50 Fresenius was ready to pay two years ago.

So for the time being I will not sell the shares and watch what is going to happen. At some point in time, the stub itself coul dbe an interesting situation in itself, as it will most likely drop out of the index etc. Sow I guess I will sell before the extra dividend is actually paid.

Hornbach

Quite a surprise: Kingfisher representatives, which owns 25% of the holding votes and 5% of the Baumarkt shares are actually leaving the supervisory board and planning to enter the German market.

They seem to target the “professional” market, not the retail sector. Clearly this is also the sector where Hornbach is strongest.

I am not sure how to interpret this. Clearly, it would be better if Praktiker (and MAx Bahr) would just disappear. I do not really understand why Kingfisher wants to enter the German market. Kingfisher is a great company, but in their major markets, UK and France they are number 1 with a clear size advantage. In Germany, they are a small fish and I would claim that the German retail market in general is one of the most brutal markets in teh world. Even WalMart didn’t have a chance here.

I am wondering if somehow now Hornbach enters the French market ? As far as I know, they so far operate some shops along the border which draw a lot of French people because prices are a lot lower in Germany.

Vivendi

Some 18 months ago, I had a quick look at Vivendi because Seth Klarman bought a stake.

Subsequently, he sold out again a large part at a loss. Now however, there seems to come some actual change. French “raider” Bolloré became vice chairman and the company announced the following:

Bowing to investor pressure to overhaul its structure, Vivendi will begin a formal study to separate its French phone unit SFR and assemble the rest of its businesses into a new international media group based in France, it said yesterday. Billionaire shareholder Vincent Bollore will become deputy chairman, as Vivendi ends its search for a new chief executive.

This is quite interesting. Thinking loud, Vodafone with all its Verizon Cash might be interested in the telephone part (after cashing out their minority participation to Vivendi some years ago….).

Nevertheless, I still hesitate to buy Vivendi. 2012 was a very bad year for them. Under my metric the made a loss, increased the share count and have 1 EUR per share more debt despite showing positive free cashflow.

Note to myself: Put Bolloré on my watch list. This guy seems to know what he is doing in France.

A quick look at the Stockopedia Screening tool + Quantitative value investing & Data quality

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It seems that I begin to harvest my successes as an investment blogger. After getting a free book, I now received already for the second time (temporary) free access to a stock screening tool. I wonder what comes next……maybe someone offering me 100 mn EUR to manage ?? 😉

A year and a half ago, I checked Tim Du Toit’s Eurosharelab screener which looked like a fair deal and a good tool

Now I checked the Stockopedia tool. I did only check the screening tool, they offer a lot of other stuff but I am not really interested in that.

From the beginning, I found their tool very easy to use. I don’t know the current status of Eurosharelab, but for me the biggest plus of the stockopedia screener is the fact that one can set up custom screens based on a large number of different variables. I was able to create my custom screens without reading any manuals etc. The navigation is very good, I liked especially the “Bloomberg” like selecting of fields for the queries.

The results are presented very well, it is very easy and convenient to drill down into the stocks or to check the fundamental data. This is even better than in Bloomberg and a big advantage of the fully web based technology. The speed of the queries was OK, could be a little bit faster.

I also liked the existing “Guru” screens, especially the “Screen of Screens” which kind of aggregates all existing screens. (Note: EGIS is the second best stock there after Dart. It looks like that my Boss model is not totally useless…..)-

The list of “in and outs” is interesting, too, where one can see which stocks newly qualified for the top positions and which stocks dropped out. The single stock monitor also looks very comprehensive, with a good data history. Up until now they offer only Europe but including many exotic countries like Bulgaria etc.

All in all it is a very good tool which is a lot of fun to work with. They told me that they would charge normally 499 GBP p.a. but if someone is interested, they would offer a “special rate” of 399 GBP. If I recollect correctly, Eurosharelab had also 3 month access which could be interesting for people who don’t need such a tool permanently.

For small investors, they should consider if the really need this. If you for example have a 50 K GBP portfolio, the 500 GBP full rate would eat up already a full 100 bps of annual returns or depending on what you expect at least 1/10th of your total return if you make on average 10% p.a.

Quantitative investing & Data issues. Example “Magic Sixes”

As I have written many times, I like using screeners as a basis, but I do not think that quantitative value investing, especially in the small cap sector, makes a lot of sense. The major issue is data quality.

In order to test the data quality of the Stockopedia screener, I did the following:

I set up a custom “Magic Sixes” screen (P/E lower than 6, P/B lower than 0.6, Div Yield higher than 6%, Europe) both, in Stockopedia and Bloomberg and compared the results. The results were quite surprising for me. Stockopedia returned 28 stocks, Bloomberg 19 stocks, but only 2 stocks showed up in both lists.

Here you find the results:

Stockopedia Magic Sixes   Bloomberg Magic Sixes  
 
    C21 21ST CENTURY TEC
AIRC Air China    
AURG Aurskog Sparebank    
    BTT BABCOCK-BSH AG
BQRE Banque de la Reunion SA    
BTG4 Bertelsmann SE Co KGaA    
ELMU Budapesti Elektromos Muvek Nyr… ELMU ELMU NYRT
CAT31 Caisse Regionale de Credit Agr…    
CCN Caisse Regionale de Credit Agr…    
6C4 Chimimport AD Sofia    
CICG Cinkarna Celje dd    
CSFG CSF    
CTC Cyprus Trading    
DOM Domstein ASA    
    DIOD DIOD
    MLDYN DYNAFOND SA
    MLEDS EDITIONS SIGNE
ERME Ermes Department Stores    
EMASZ Eszak Magyarorszagi Aramszolga…    
    MLEVE EVERSET
RAM F Ramada Investimentos SGPS SA    
    BSG GERMANIA-EPE AG
HJH H.J. Heinz Co    
HF HF SA    
HGM Highland Gold Mining HGM HIGHLAND GOLD MI
HSPG Holand og Setskog Sparebank    
    INOX INOX
MELG Melhus Sparebank  
    KYTH K KYTHREOTIS HOL
    KDHR KMECKA DRUZBA
    OAB OAB OSNABRUECKER
    PVA PESCANOVA
PVL Plastiques du Val de Loire SA  
    1PL POWERLAND AG
5BU Real Estate Fund Bulgaria ADSI…    
    ALRIC RICHEL SERRES DE
SALB Salling Bank A/S    
    SHFT SHAFT SINKERS HO
SPOG Sparebanken Ost    
PLUG Sparebanken Pluss    
SVEG Sparebanken Vest    
SHL Stademos Hotels    
    SZI1 STOLBERGER TEL
TOTA Totalbanken A/S    
    59X UNIPHARM AD-SOFI

Only Highland Gold Mining and Budapesti Elektromos showed up in both tools. When I digged into the detailed data, I was even more surprised. In total, I had 43 “diverging” entries. From those, 7 stocks were stocks where there were large bid/ask spreads and depending on the price the stock would either have 0.59 as P/B or 0.61 for instance, so this is a pure technical issue.

On the other hand, 20 diverging stocks were clearly mistakes in the data of Stockopedia (either wrong, outdated or missing data) and still 16 stocks were clear data mistakes by Bloomberg.

I emailed a little bit back and forth and it seems that they get their data from Reuters and are working hard on improving data quality. But nevertheless it is for me highly revealing that based on two different data sources, you get 2 almost completely different set of stocks with a few relatively basic filters.

Clearly, the Magic Sixes filter at the moment only throws out micro cap deep value stocks, where data is always an issue, but still, I wouldn’t have expected such a result. Also rankings might help to a certain extent. Nevertheless that mae me highly suspicious of any “automated” Value trading strategies no matter how good they look in backtests.

Summary:

I really liked the Stockopedia tool. If I would not have access to Bloomberg, I would seriously consider their tool . Although I would always use it as a screener only, not as a basis for a trading strategy,

Maybe it is not representative, but my Magic Sixes example clearly shows that data sources alone can have a huge impact how portfolios look like even if you use the exactly same criteria.

If one really digs deep into data like I had to for my boss model, one would detect even more disturbing data issues, but that is a topic for another post.

DISCLOSURE: I got free access to the tool but I do NOT get any referal fees etc.

Book review: Renditenperlen aus dem Scherbenhaufen

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Disclosure: One of the authors did send my a copy for free.

This (German language) book is a very unique book. It only deals with so-called Hybrid bank capital which clearly could be called a “distressed asset class”. Hybrid bank capital before the financial crisis was a “win-win-win”: Banks liked it because they could replace expensive equity capital and buy back shares. Regulators gave happily credit for it because the banks told them that if there would be trouble, those instruments would behave as equity. Investors were happy, because the banks told them that if there is trouble, the bonds will always pay because they were bonds.

Well, after the financial crisis, it was suddenly “loose-loose-loose”: The banks did not get equity credit anymore, the regulators were pissed of and a lot of bond investors were suddenly owning very equity like investments.

“Renditperlen aus dem Scherbenhaufen” is a collection of case studies about a couple of those hybrid bonds which traded at very attractive levels at various points in times. The special thing about this book is that it is written by individual investors which are active on at least one of the many German internet message boards. Nevertheless (or because of this ?), the case studies are better quality than anything you will ever read in analyst reports, newspapers etc.

There is a lot of extremely valuable knowledge in the book plus a lot of background about the capital structure of banks. When the book was released, some of the case studies were still “active” and generated very attractive outcomes since then.

For beginners, it is maybe a little bit too detailed, but for investors which like to increase their circle of competence, it is a must read in my opinion. Also for anyone wanting to buy a banking stock, this book will give a lot of insight how the balance sheet of a bank works. The only drawback is that it is only available in German.

Edit: The autors asked me to set a direct link to Amazon. As I do almost anything for a free book, here it is:

Paperback
Kindle

And no, I don’t get any money if you click the link and buy….

Correcting research mistakes: Pharmstandard – SELL

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A few days ago, I introduced Pharmstandard as a potential special situation with a catalyst in the form of a buy out offer.

Thanks to the input of a few commentators, I recognized that I got one very important detail wrong:

The record date for the potential 16,50 USD offer was already on July 5th, so a few days before they announced this offer. Anyone buying now will not be able to tender the shares. Interestingly, this information was nowhere to be found in the English language section of the official releases.

This of course wipes out the most significant part of the investment case at the current stage and explains the relatively low price.

As a consequence, I will therefore sell my 1% position as of today and watch the developement from the sideline. Maybe there will be another potentially interesting entry after they spin of the OTC drug unit.

In general, I think it is quite important to act quickly if a significant part of a stock analysis turns out to be wrong. It would be even better to identify this beforehand, but that is one of the drawbacks of not having an awful lot of time to analyze. In those cases it is even more important to start a position small in order to lower the risk of things turning out like they did here.

I think it is also a good example for extending the “Circle of Competence”: In this case I have learnt that you should not rely only on the English language announcements of a Russian company….

Anyway, thanks to all the commentators for their helpful comments !!! This is what makes blogging so much fun

Performance review August 2013 – Comment: “Circle of Competence”

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Performance

The portfolio lost -0.6% in August, compared with -1.1% in the BM (50% Eurostoxx, 30% Dax, 20% MDAX). YTD the portfolio is up 21.4% against 12.5% for the benchmark.

The major driver was of course the 25% cash allocation in a down month, the single stocks were all within low single digit perfomance in either direction, so nothing special here.

Portfolio transactions

August was a rather active month with 4 relevant transaction:

1. AS Creation was sold out
2. MIKO came in as new “Core Value” investment (half position)
3. A 1% position in Pharmstandard as potential special situation was established
4. In parallel, I am building up a position in a yet undisclosed French company where I did not yet manage to write a post but I include it “anonymously” in the portfolio

Portfolio as of August 31st 2013

Name Weight Perf. Incl. Div
CORE VALUE    
Hornbach Baumarkt 4.0% 5.0%
Miko 2.6% 2.6%
Tonnellerie Frere Paris 5.7% 82.6%
Vetropack 4.0% 6.8%
Installux 2.6% 14.2%
Poujoulat 0.9% 11.4%
Cranswick 5.4% 33.0%
April SA 4.1% 34.7%
SOL Spa 2.8% 42.3%
Gronlandsbanken 1.9% 12.3%
G. Perrier 3.6% 37.8%
IGE & XAO 2.1% 10.6%
EGIS 2.6% 2.5%
Thermador 2.6% 3.0%
Not yet disclosed 0.6% -1.9%
     
OPPORTUNITY    
KAS Bank NV 4.9% 37.0%
SIAS 5.1% 49.6%
Drägerwerk Genüsse D 8.5% 168.9%
DEPFA LT2 2015 2.6% 61.4%
HT1 Funding 4.2% 48.3%
EMAK SPA 4.8% 53.3%
Rhoen Klinikum 2.3% 17.0%
Pharmstandard 1.1% -0.6%
     
     
Short: Prada -1.0% -20.7%
     
Short Lyxor Cac40 -1.1% -13.0%
Short Ishares FTSE MIB -1.9% -11.5%
     
Short CHF EUR 0.2% 6.9%
     
Cash 24.8%  
     
     
     
Core Value 45.5%  
Opportunity 33.6%  
Short+ Hedges -3.8%  
Cash 24.8%  
  100.0%

Comment: Circle of Competence

For most value investors, Warren Buffet’s concept of “Circle of Competence” is a very important guideline.

Here is a video of the Oracle himself explaining the concept.

Most famously, he avoided the Dotcom bubble by staying within his circle of competence and not investing in tech companies. Many people therefore take this advice as granted and tend to stay in an area which they know best, like German small caps etc.

However I have a serious problem with this concept or at least with the interpretation of it.

First of all, in reality, each of us is born without any circle of competence with regard to investments. So whatever you consider as your CoC now, has been outside your initial CoC. So at one point in time one had to step out this “zero CoC” to build up any kind of competence.

It is also funny to listen to Warren Buffet explaining this concept. His CoC is HUGE. Clearly, his most well-known investments are Coca Cola, Gilette etc. But if your really follow his investment career, you can clearly see that he continuously expanded his circle of competence..

I mean he started with delivering newspapers and putting pinball machines into Barber shops, but then over his career he almost did everything. Starting with buying department stores, newspapers, he invested in commodities (Silver) Chinese companies, Israeli companies, sold CDS, S&P 500 puts, bought reinsurance companies, provided LBO financing etc. etc.

Expanding one’s CoC however only works if you step outside your CoC a least a little bit at one point in time. Clearly, jumping blindly without any knowledge for instance into US listed Chinese stocks normally does not end well.

I think the best way to expand one’s circle of competence is along the following dimensions:

a) Geographically
So if one has a lot of knowledge in one sector like for instance car manufacturers, it is not that difficult to look at those companies in other countries in order to gain experience. Due to the fact that many companies today are very international, this kind of knowledge in my opinion is extremely important anyway. Just looking at the 3 German car manufacturers for instance is a quite useless task. Usually it is easier to look at “familiar” countries first before going to more exotic places. In that way it is easier to learn about specific issues in other countries if you know the sector well.

b) Sector wise
Similar to geographically, it is also relatively easy to move from a sector one knows well to a sector which is in some way connected. So if you are strong in chemicals, to their direct suppliers (Oil companies) or customers should be easier if not necessary. If you know a lot about consumer staples, retailers would be logical next step etc. etc. For me for instance, it was much easier to understand IGE & XAO, the Electro Cad software company after I had analysed what their client G. Perrier is actually doing

c) Along the capital structure
A more unusual way to expand one’s circle of competence is along the capital structure of a company. Usually many people buy stocks and then maybe some bonds. However if you want to more systematically improve your knowledge, start with a company with a more complicated capital structure, including, bonds, loans, Hybrid debt, convertibles and work your way thorough. You will be rewarded with a much better understanding how the financial side of a company works and you might dicover some interesting opportunities along the way.

There are clealry many ways to expand one’s circle of competence, but the three mentioned have worked quite well for me. I think it is important to move in relatively small steps and be patient. Whenever you step out, you will most likely experience a set back, but one should consider this as an investment.

So to sum it up: Don’t let you fool you by Uncle Warren. If he would have stayed with delivering newspapers and putting pinball machines into Barber shops, he most likely would not be one of the richest people of the world. Only if you expand your circle of competence continuously, you will reap the reward over time. However make sure not to jump too far…..

Pharmstandard (US7171402065) – The Russian Job or interesting special situation with catalyst ?

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A couple of weeks ago, when I analysed EGIS and other Eastern European Genric drug companies, I mentioned Pharmstandard OJSC as one of the big players in the interesting Russian Generics market.

A kept an eye on them mainly in order to gain a little bit more insight into the Russian market. But the story which developed over the last week is definitely woth sharing it.

Up until early July, everything looked great. Pharmstandard aggresively bought back shares in an amount of roughly 10% of their market cap. They communicated that they might use those shares to finance M&A transactions.

Then, in the beginning of July some strange news emerged (official press releases can be found here):

– first they stated that they want to do a spin-off of their OTC drug business
– then, on they same day they announced that they are in advanced talks on a potential M& A transaction
– then, still on the same day they announce that they will buy a company called “Bever Pharmaceutical” for 630 mn USD without describing the company at all.
– the bought company then again, will be included in the spin-off
– it is not clear if the spin-off would be listed or not or if GDR holders can legally get those spin-off shares
– then it came out, that one of Pharmstandard’s supervisory board members, Dr. Alexander Shuster is actually the owner of Bever and will become the second largest Pharmstandard shareholder via this transaction
– Nevertheless, a few days ago, a shareholder meeting approved the acquisition with the votes of the majority shareholders
– the next special shareholder meeting will be in September to decide on the spin off

Clearly, this story did not go well with investors. Both, the London listed GDRs as well as the Russian listed stocks got punished hard:

In my opinion, this clearly is not very shareholder friendly, but on the other hand, compared with what I have experienced in Italy (EMAK, Autostrada), this rather looks like an OK transaction at least with regard to the M&A transaction:

– they paid minority shareholders in cash via an open market share buy back
– they used pre “price drop” levels to determine the purchase price consideration

And, at least in Italy, buying into a stock AFTER such an event occured was usually an interesting entry point.

The special situation aspect: Potential buy back offer before spin off at 16.50 USD

Now it gets interesting. In their spin off presentation, they mention that there will be a buy back offer to shareholders before the spin off actually happens. In several articles (I did not found this on their website), a price of 16.50 USD per GDR was mentioned. According to the timeline, this should happen in November if everything works out.

So let’s do some quick math (EDIT: I wrote this yesterday…., today’s price is a lot higher):

If I buy today at 14.65 and get 16.50 in November, that’s a 12.7% return for 3 months. Not too bad. Clearly there is some downside, if the offer will not come and they spin offf without compensation for GDR holders. On the other hand, if the spin offf works out well, there could be significant upside on top of the 16,50 USD offer.

On top of that, I like the underlying business and I think the stock is cheap and undervalued (excluding the Corp Governance issues).

According to my model, the current Pharmstandard is worth far more. The company achieved on average over the last 6 years 20% net margins and 30% ROIC at a current valuation of PE/6, P/B 1.6 and EV/EBITDA at 5.5

Update: I started writing this post yesterday, when the stockprice was at 14.65 USD, today, it jumped already significantly to 15.39. For the time being I will remain on the sideline and watch.

Maybe there will be a opportunity for a odd-lot tender like Norislk 2 years ago. I would also consider adding a small stake if the price is at a ~10% discount to the offer prcie, so below 15 USD (up to 1% of the portfolio). So I will put in a limti order at 15 USD and wait how this interesting story developes.

Sold, rejected but not forgotten: Tracking 2nd level and 3rd Level investing mistakes

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Some 15 months ago, I had a post about stocks I had either sold or not bought after analyzing them.

This time I want to update that list plus provide some “theoretical” background why I think this is an important part of any investment process.

Types of investment mistakes

Of course there are many mistakes to be made in investing. Nevertheless, for this exercise I would categorize “investment mistakes” into 3 general categories along the typical process of most “stock pickers”. The process normally looks something like this

A) Stock screening & quick analysis
B) Deeper Analysis
C) Buy decision (or not buy)
D) Sell at some point in time

At all stages, mistakes are easy to be made. Nevertheless I would argue that most analysis goes into what I would call Level I mistakes:

Level 1 mistake: Buying a stock which performs badly.

This is quite easy to identify, because if one looks at most investment reports, one will see the performance of the current portfolio with the bad performers “jumping out of the report”. I guess most of the efforts in many investment firms goes into finding out the reasons for those underperformers and then trying to improve.

A lot less effort usually goes in what I would call “level II” mistakes:

Level 2 mistake: Selling a stock which outperforms strongly after selling.

This is a little bit more tricky. There is a lot less literature of “when to sell” compared to “when to buy”. Once you have bought a stock, there should be already a fair amount of time and effort been made to analyse the stock. So in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to keep stocks on one’s radar screen even after selling. Nevertheless it is of course much more fun to look at new stocks and forgetting about the old stuff. Especially if sold stocks systematically outperform, one should check if one is not a prisoner to some well known investment biases

In my opinion, it also makes a lot of sense to systematically track the performance of sold stocks in order to find out if one could (and should) improve the investment process

Finally, there is a third systematic family of mistakes:

Level 3 mistake: Stocks analysed intensively but not bought

This is one of the advantages of blogging: Whenever I write a longer post, I already have invested quite some time on the specific stock. So it is quite easy for me to track those posts where I did for any reason not buy such a stock.

Again, I think one should look at this closely in order to identify potential biases etc. in one’s investment process.

From theory to practice: The last 17 months

So let’s look first at all the stocks I sold since the March 2012 post:

Stock Reason sold /not bought Date Perf Perf BM Delta
KPN Special situation expired 10.05.13 34.2% 3.3% -31.0%
IVG Conv ESUG 21.05.13 16.1% 1.1% -15.0%
Bouygues Portf. Mgt. 28.06.13 21.7% 7.1% -14.6%
Total Prod dissapointing CI 08.03.13 21.3% 7.1% -14.2%
Mapfre Autumn cleaning 31.10.12 30.1% 19.9% -10.2%
Dart Too expensive 18.07.13 7.1% 2.7% -4.3%
Total Prod dissapointing CI 10.04.13 12.1% 9.0% -3.2%
OMV Autumn cleaning 30.10.12 22.6% 19.5% -3.0%
Dart Too expensive 26.07.13 4.5% 2.8% -1.7%
Buzzi business model problems 23.05.13 2.8% 2.7% -0.1%
WMF too expensive 11.04.13 5.0% 8.1% 3.1%
Fortum Autumn cleaning 30.10.12 6.4% 19.5% 13.2%
Piquadro Sold because of business problems 08.08.12 2.7% 24.5% 21.8%
Nestle Sold because of Pfizer acquisition 23.04.12 11.8% 35.0% 23.3%
EVN Autumn cleaning 31.10.12 -9.9% 19.9% 29.8%
Praktiker Sold because of Anchorage 04.07.12 -81.3% 30.6% 111.9%
           
        avg 6.6%

Explanation: a negative number means that the stock has outperformed my BM since I sold it, a positive number means the Benchmark outperformed vs. the stock.

On (unweighted) average, the stocks I sold underperformed the benchmark, so this looks OK. This is clearly driven by the Praktiker bonds, where I am very happy that I sold them. On the other hand, I missed out some nice gains as well. With KPN for instance, I think I was a little bit too quick with the trigger finger. My “autumn cleaning” exercise was on average also positive. So this is a good encouragement to follow-up on this exercise.

Next come all the stocks I have analysed but not bought in the same format:

Stock Reason sold /not bought Date Perf Perf BM Delta
Reply Cashflow red flag 31.08.2012 140.6% 24.5% -116.1%
Banknordik forgot to follow up 26.11.2012 70.1% 19.5% -50.5%
Curanum not really interested 05.09.2012 66.7% 25.0% -41.7%
Severfield Too expensive stand alone 21.03.2013 47.7% 7.9% -39.8%
Walgreen M&A 04.07.2012 62.7% 30.6% -32.1%
Osram Target of 23 EUR not hit 08.07.2013 35.7% 6.1% -29.7%
M6 only short analysis, issue with CI 26.11.2012 43.0% 19.5% -23.5%
Cairo undecided 27.06.2012 58.1% 38.9% -19.2%
Halfords Negative momentum 06.06.2012 55.1% 40.5% -14.6%
Hankook could not buy privately 29.10.2012 31.0% 21.0% -10.0%
Astaldi too much debt 23.07.2013 11.2% 3.0% -8.2%
Porsche still don’t like them 29.11.2012 24.3% 17.7% -6.6%
CIR no margin of safety 17.07.2013 7.3% 4.0% -3.3%
EAC Watch only 29.07.2013 2.8% 2.6% -0.2%
Canal+ no real upside 19.09.2012 19.1% 19.6% 0.5%
Rallye leverage 25.01.2013 8.4% 9.3% 0.9%
Bongrain Doesn’t earn coc 26.11.2012 17.0% 19.5% 2.5%
Greek GDP linker   10.06.2013 -2.6% 3.7% 6.3%
Accell low FCF, insider selling 26.10.2012 12.3% 20.5% 8.1%
Solvac not cheap enough 13.12.2012 4.4% 14.9% 10.4%
Mr. Bricolage Too much debt 13.09.2012 9.4% 20.9% 11.5%
Viel Underlying busienss 18.12.2012 2.4% 14.0% 11.6%
Morgan Sindall no mean reversion potential 23.10.2012 1.0% 21.6% 20.6%
WSU because of US problems, not cheap 19.04.2012 10.6% 31.9% 21.2%
Maisons France Cycle 29.01.2013 -12.5% 9.4% 21.9%
Energiedienst Business model 04.02.2013 -12.3% 12.5% 24.8%
TNT Express Too expensive stand alone 21.11.2012 -5.2% 20.8% 26.0%
KHD insiders 30.07.2012 -0.7% 27.7% 28.4%
Fabasoft track record 25.06.2012 -2.7% 40.3% 43.0%
           
        avg -5.4%

Here unfortunately, the average doesn’t look so good. On average, the stocks I analysed but did not buy outperformed the BM as well. The most obvious miss is Reply SpA. However here, I still think that in the long run it pays to avoid companies with questionable accounting. In this case, clearly at least for now I was wrong to discard it.

A little bit more bothers me that 2 of my potential special situations, Osram and Severfield outperformed. Both were pretty clear-cut cases (Osram, classical spin-off, Severfield classical rights issue), but somehow I was lacking conviction to follow through on the idea. I think I have to be more careful to separate my careful market view and focus on quality from the special situation area.

Summary:

Looking at sold stocks and stocks rejected lat e in the investment process makes a lot of sense. In my case, I think selling looks OK, whereas I will have to work on my “special situation” investments.

MIKO BV – Quick comparison with Groupe Guillin SA (FR0000051831)

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In my MIKO BV post a few days ago, Winter commented correctly, that the plastics division of MIKO looks similar to what a French company called Groupe Guillin SA is doing.

At a first glance, Group Guillin looks even more interesting with the following valuation metrics (in brackets MIKO):

P/B 1.0 [1.24]
P/E 6.8 [11.8]
P/S 0.3 [0.5]
EV/EBITDA 3.6 [5.5]

So Guillin does almost the same but is much cheaper. Cheaper is always better for value investors, isn’t it ?

Guillin looks also quite OK in my Boss model and even shows better free cashflow so what is not to like ? ROEs look Ok as well as this table shows:

ROE ROIC
31.12.2001 19.3% 9.6%
31.12.2002 27.0% 14.0%
31.12.2003 17.6% 12.6%
31.12.2004 12.0% 11.0%
30.12.2005 15.2% 10.0%
29.12.2006 10.4% 7.3%
31.12.2007 11.5% 8.4%
31.12.2008 7.0% 6.0%
31.12.2009 13.7% 10.4%
31.12.2010 13.4% 7.6%
30.12.2011 7.3% 5.3%
31.12.2012 13.4% na.

However, ROICs don’t look so great as Guillin especially since 2006, when they grew quite quickly after 3-4 years without growth but ROIC suffered significantly

Lets compare this with MIKO’s plastic segment numbers:

MIKO plastics          
  Assets Libailities Net invested assets NI ROIC/ROE
2007 29.3 5.6 23.7 2.40 10.1%
2008 35.1 4.5 30.6 2.16 7.1%
2009 32.4 4.35 28.05 5.17 18.4%
2010 39.4 6.1 33.3 4.55 13.7%
2011 42.9 5.7 37.2 4.04 10.9%
2012 46.7 6.7 40 4.12 10.3%

So we can clearly see that MIKO consistently generates significantly higher ROICs than Guillin (in some years 5-6% more) than Guillin. Guillin uses leverage to achieve OK ROEs, while Miko doesn’t use leverage. Also net margins are on average 2-4% higher for MIKO plastics than for Guillin.

So in my view, the MIKO plastics business looks much better quality than Guillin, despite the fact that the MIKO plastics division is only 15% of Guillins sales. So scale doesn’t seem to be the deciding factor, it looks like that MIKO has found a more profitable niche than the larger Groupe Guillin. As far as I understand, Guillin sells direct to supermarkets while MIKO’s clients in the plastics division are consumer product manufacturers.

I have been looking at Groupe Guillin actually quite often, but the low return on invested capital kept me away. Although one has to say that the stock performed quite well over the past years, also compared to MIKO:

So Guillin is clealry not a bad company, but in direct comparison I think MIKO has greater potential (and a better downside protection) than Guillin.

Slovenia: The next Cyprus or contrarian opportunity ?

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I bet that many people could not point out on a map where Slovenia actually is located. Many people also don’t really know the difference to Slovakia.

So lets look at Wikipedia:

Slovenia is a small part of Ex-Yugoslavia. It has a population of around 2 mn and covers 20 thsd square kilometer. The history can be read extensively via Wikipedia. Most importantly, Slovenia was the first part of Yugoslavia which became independent. The next few years, Slovenia was seen as one of the big success stories in Europe, which resulted in Slovenia joining the EU and adopting the Euro already in 2007.

Last year however, Slovenia joined the European countries hit hard by the recession. The prior EUR fueled construction boom resulted in shaky loans, declining GDP, Rating agency downgrades, increase in interest rates etc. Starting last year, there was big fear that Slovenia was headed towards a “Greek style” restructuring.

Lately however, things look better. SLovenia has presented a restructuring plan which among others, includes the sale of a couple of state-owned companies. One should also note, that debt to GDP looks rather manageable:

On top of that, Slovenia’s economy is good at exports, but still, they are struggling in 2013. Nevertheless, Slovenia got 2 years “probation” in order to fix their problems, which they hopefully use.

The latest export vs. import data looks OK, nevertheless, 2013 will show a deficit of around -8% for the Government including bail out costs.

Slovenian stock market

From Bloomberg, one gets ~45 stocks from Slovenia with a market cap larger than 1 mn EUR, and 24 with a market cap bigger than 10 mn EUR. The major Slovenian stock market index only consist out of 7 stocks which are the following:

Ticker Name % Index Weight EV/EBITDA T12M P/B P/E
SBITOP Index          
KRKG SV Equity Krka dd Novo mesto 29.7 6.311327 1.32 10.39
PETG SV Equity Petrol DD Ljubljana 21.4 8.988676 0.98 8.35
TLSG SV Equity Telekom Slovenije DD 19.7 4.734508 0.89 16.89
MELR SV Equity Mercator Poslovni Sistem 13.5 N.A. 0.60 N.A.
ZVTG SV Equity Zavarovalnica Triglav DD 11.8 N.A. 0.76 5.96
GRVG SV Equity Gorenje dd 2.9 5.500231 0.18 15.94
KBMR SV Equity Nova Kreditna Banka Maribor dd 0.9 N.A. 0.08 N.A.

Quick check of the companies:

Krka

I have written about Krka already, a generic drug company similar to EGIS. I think this is a very interesting company,. Minimal home country exposure, consistently profitable. Not “extremely cheap” but good value for money. I would buy this company directly (if I could).

Petrol Ljublijana

This is the national refinery plus gas stations owner. Also active in Croatia and Bosnia. High “mean reversion” potential in my model.

Telekom Slovenije

Local telephone company. P/E 15 looks expensive, but company pays 15% dividend and has a 20% FCF yield. Significant debt reduction

Mercator

Supermarkets, Shopping centers. High debt load, large loss in 2012. However major shareholders sold out to Croatian company Agrokor in June.

Zavarovalnica Triglav

Major Slovenian insurance company, interesting, as valuation is really low for an insurer. 10.5% dividend yield. I would buy this stock if I could.

Gorenje

Household appliances. Has made losses but very cheap (P/B 0.2).

Nova Kreditna

One of the 3 problem banks, the only listed one. Most likely insolvent without Government support

The problem:

There is almost no way to directly buy Slovenian stocks. Only Krka and Nova Kreditna have secondary listings in Poland, but even there it is difficult to trade them. I asked several retail brokers in Germany and only SBroker (where I don’t have an account) told me I could trade the 2 stocks in Poland.

The alternative:

Although I usually do not like certificates issued by banks, in this case this would be the only alternative. I found several of them:

1. RCB7J9 / AT0000A038L9 from Raiffeisen International
2. AA0DMM / NL0000762557 from RBS
3. HV2AXY / DE000HV2AXY3 from Unicredit

The RBS paper seems to have the lowest bid/ask spread. As far as I have seen, they are all without maturity and track the SBI.

The opportunity /upside

For me the Slovenian index is quite interesting due to the following points:

+ there is almost no banking exposure left in the index. the only remaining financial is a cheap insurance company which i would buy outright
+ the Government has to sell some of their stakes, including among others the Telephone company. I am pretty sure that for the time being they will do nothing to punish the TelCo in order to get a price as high as possible
+ the largest stock in the index is Krka with ~30% which I want to buy anyway
+ once the Euro recovery story gets played more seriously (Goldman is already starting to “promote” European stocks), markets like Slovenia will follow with a certain delay.
+ Slovenia did never piss off other countries like Cyprus which supported tax dodging or Hungary which runs on a political amok course. In my opinion, they will be “well” treated by the ECB, EU and IMF.

Nevertheless for the time being I will not invest but look a little bit more into the other large index constituents, especially the TelCo and Oil company.

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