One of the biggest and highest profile Spin-offs in Europe this year is clearly the separation of Swedish SCA (“Svenka Cellulosa Aktiebolget”) into an “integrated forest product group” which keeps the SCA name and a consumer product entity named “Essity”.
SCA communicated this already more than two years ago and starting this week, June 12th the spin-off is actually executed, with every SCA shareholder receiving one Essity share per SCA share.
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:
Market folly has a great collection of pitches from the London Value Investor conference
A good summary why most investors these days hate banks
Wexboy with a very nice write-up on a company called Applegreen
The unstoppable rise of the QR code in China
Interesting thoughts about the carnage in retail stocks and a follow-up post
Wow, my blog has been included in the “50 Of The Best Investing Blogs On The Planet”
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
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.
Another reason to trade less: Decision fatigue
Some interesting musings about how to find 28 baggers (Trifast)
Geoff Gannon’s former partner Quan with interesting thoughts about investment writing and Quants vs. longterm investors
Bery Ritholtz’s summer reading list and 5 books recommended by Bill Gates
A good collection of studies for spin-off stock price action directly after the event
People who follow my blog for some time know that timing of purchase and sales of stocks is not one of my strengths. I usually buy too early and sell too early. Italgas is one of the very rare exceptions:
When I looked at Italgas and then bought it end of November, I really managed to buy at or very close to the absolute low after the company had been spun off.
Looking at the stock chart we can see that Italgas outperfomed the broad index (lower blue line) but mostly mirrored the Italian small cap index with a slight outperformance if we consider the dividend which was paid early this week (0,20 EUR/share).
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:
Every now and then some more or less famous investor is quoted with some common wisdom that rarely gets challenged but which in my opinion is total nonsense if used in the wrong context.
Example: “Picking up Nickels in front of a steam roller” should be generally avoided
This is a comment I often here when I discuss certain special situations like for instance the Stada case.
A good write-up on Seritage Properties (one of Buffett’s personal positions)
Forager Funds likes Enero
Longcast Investor’s Q1 report
Some very good advice for (the last remaining) short sellers
Why Under Armour is struggling
How to report growth when you are a company which does a lot of M&A : constellation Software 2016 letter to shareholders
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.
value and opportunity 