Tag Archives: E.ON

Uniper/E.On Spin-off: Take one ugly duck and transform it into ….. 2 really ugly ducks ?

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Background:

Monday, Sep 12th will be the first trading day for Uniper, the E.On spin-off. E.On shareholders will get one Uniper share for each 10 E.On shares they are holding.

Just to recap: Uniper will contain all the (unwanted) power generation assets of E.on, so all the “fossil fuel” power plants, the Russian assets and the Swedish nuclear plants plus some other stuff. The German Nuclear assets (and the corresponding liabilities) will remain at E.on due to the reasons I mentioned in the last post.

Uniper is clearly an ugly Duck, maybe the “most ugliest spin-off” I have seen since I started the blog. If we look into the most recent investor presentation, it is clear that you have a problem when the 3 listed growth projects are a German Hard Coal Power plant, q Russian power plant closed due to an accident which will reopen in 2018 and some strange dealings around the North Stream gas pipeline (page 9.). It doesn’t help either that Uniper had to take a 3,8 bn EUR pre tax write down in the first 6 months of 2016.That makes the duck still uglier.

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Greenlight Re & E.On/Uniper update

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Greenlight Re update:

As some readers might remember, I bought shares of Greenlight Re, the Bermuda Reinsurer with investment advise from David Einhorn back in December 2015, but then sold them one month later, triggered by the insight that I don’t really understand his investment criteria. Looking back, the decision to sell doesn’t look very smart, as the stock priced since then increased by around 18% in USD (or 14% in EUR). YTD the stock is up 14,8% in USD.

In early August, Greenlight Re filed their 6M report. Interestingly the NAV per share declined by -4% from 22.20 USD to 21,32 USD per share.

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David Einhorn: Nice Q4 letter but E.On as a long pick ? Really ? C’mon !!!

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As this has turned out to be a very long post, a quick “Executive Summary”:

David Einhorn has published that German utility E.ON is one of his major new long positions. Based on what I have written in the past about E.On, I do think his summary investment rational has some serious flaws,  mainly:

  • buying management’s “spin” that the recent share price decline was only caused by uncertainties about nuclear provisions
  • assuming a quick and very benefitial (for E.ON) solution for nuclear liabilities

To me it looks like that he tries to come up with some short term, rather risky “bets” in order to make good on his horrible 2015 performance as quickly as possible.

As a new shareholder in Greenlight Re I have to seriously rethink if I want to stay invested, however as a German tax payer I might also be biased in this case.

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