Tag Archives: Ev/EBITDA

Some fun with Enterprise Value – E.ON AG Decommissioning Liabilities

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This is a follow-up to both, my recent post about EV/EBIT & Co as well as a discussion in a forum about how cheap German utility stocks really are.

German utility stocks are clearly in many lists for cheap stocks. Here is for instance a list of large utilities in Europe sorted by EV/EBIT:

Name Mkt Cap Curr EV/T12M EBITDA EV/T12M EBIT
       
ENDESA SA 23038.45 4.43 7.17
RWE AG 16827.67 3.06 7.27
E.ON SE 27849.92 4.89 7.64
PGE SA 8340.95 4.55 7.74
GDF SUEZ 41669.47 5.31 10.04
VERBUND AG 5739.31 4.93 10.07
EDF 49364.74 5.83 11.08
GAS NATURAL SDG SA 18052.44 6.91 11.26
DRAX GROUP PLC 3286.74 9.41 12.12
NATIONAL GRID PLC 34397.63 10.20 14.02
ENEL SPA 30805.4 6.22 14.94
A2A SPA 2562.72 7.52 15.16
ROMANDE ENERGIE HOLDING-REG 1066.69 9.56 18.64
SSE PLC 15811.63 12.01 18.76
IBERDROLA SA 29309.16 9.92 21.69
PUBLIC POWER CORP 2343.2 6.87 21.72

Apart from Endesa, EON and RWE really look like bargains. Even most “club Med” Italian utilities are trading at twice the EV/EBIT or Ev/EBITD levels than RWE and EON. A “mechanical” investor will say: I don’t care if they have issues, I will buy them because they are cheap.

However, there is a small problem: As many people know, following the Fukushima incident, the German Government decided in 2011 to speed up the exit from nuclear power and switch off the last nuclear power plant in 2011. Funnily enough, only in 2009, they decided to extend the licenses significantly.

Anyway, just switching of a nuclear power plant is not enough. Especially in a densely populated country like Germany, you don’t want to have those nuclear ruins everywhere. So the utilites are required to fully “decommission” the reactors and also all the nuclear waste. Decommissioning is expensive, for instance it is estimated for instance at currently 70 bn GBP for all UK nuclear power plant.

In order to avoid that utilities just go broke before they close their nuclear power plants, the are required to build up reserve accounts in their balance sheet. Let’s take a look into their 2012 annual report page 159:

eon nuclear

EON has 16 bn EUR of reserves on its balance sheet for the decommissioning of nuclear power plants. Those 16 bn are clearly already reserved in the balance sheet, but as they will be due in cash rather sooner than later, they should be clearly treated as debt and added to Enterprise value.

However, there is a second issue with them: For some reasons, they are allowed to discount those amounts with 5% p.a. This is around 2% higher than for pension liabilities which in my opinion is already quite “optimistic”. They do not offer any hint about the duration of those liabilities, but if we assume something like 10-15, just adjusting the discount rate to pension levels would increase those reserves by 3-5 bn and reduce book value by the same amount.

So all in all, net financial debt for EON more than doubles if we take into account a realistic value for the nuclear waste removal obligations.

Interestingly enough, E.on presents its own “economic financial debt” calculation on page 45 of the annual report, including pensions etc.:

EON net debt

If we adjust the nuclear liabilities for the unrealistical discount rate, we get around 40 bn “economic” finanicial debt. So let’s look how EV/EBIT and EV/EBITDA change if we use those debt figures:

Before adjustment:

Enterprise Value of 48 bn (28 bn Equity, 3 bn minorities, 23.5 bn debt minus 6.8 bn cash)
EBITDA ~ 9.8 bn
EBIT ~6.3 bn

Adjusting for economic debt, we get an EV of 71 bn and the ratios change as follows

EV/EBITDA adj = 7.2 v. 4.9 unadj.
EV/EBIT adj = 11.3 vs. 7.6 unadj.

So adjusting for economical debt already eliminates most of the “undervaluation” compared to the peers. All things equal, a Verbund for instance which only produces “clean” power at the same valuation seems to be a much much safer bet than EON.

Summary:

Even quite useful metrics like EV/EBIT and EV/EBITDA can be misleading if a company has large other liabilities which turn out to be very similar to debt. If a company looks cheap under EV/EBITDA, always check if there are pensions, operating leases or in the case of utilities Decommissioning liabilities which are not captured by the standard formula.

In this case, the company evene presents its “true” debt, but it is still not adequately reflected in almost every investment database.

Finally a quick word on “mechanical” investment strategies: I cannot prove it, but I am pretty sure that a mechanical strategy based on EV which adjusts for “obvious” shortcomings like operating leases should perform even better than the published results from O’s et al. However It is almost impossible to backtest this.

How to correctly calculate Enterprise Value

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After all that heavy macro stuff, back to the nitty-gritty world of fundamental analysis.

Let’s have a look at Enterprise Value, which as concept is gaining more and more attention, among others famous “Screening guru” O’Shaughnessy has identified Enterprise value as the most dominant single factor in his new book. Also a lot of the best Bloggers like Geoff Gannon and Greenbackd prefer EV/EBITDA

Interestingly many people seem to just use and accept the “standard” Enterprise value calculation.

How to calculate standard Enterprise Value

Investopedia has the “normal” definition of Enterprise Value:

Definition of ‘Enterprise Value – EV’
A measure of a company’s value, often used as an alternative to straightforward market capitalization. Enterprise value is calculated as market cap plus debt, minority interest and preferred shares, minus total cash and cash equivalents.

Investopedia also offers an interpretation

Investopedia explains ‘Enterprise Value – EV’
Think of enterprise value as the theoretical takeover price. In the event of a buyout, an acquirer would have to take on the company’s debt, but would pocket its cash. EV differs significantly from simple market capitalization in several ways, and many consider it to be a more accurate representation of a firm’s value. The value of a firm’s debt, for example, would need to be paid by the buyer when taking over a company, thus EV provides a much more accurate takeover valuation because it includes debt in its value calculation.

So this is a good hint how to understand Enterprise Value: It originates from take-over valuation, most prominently from Private Equity investors or “old style” corporate raiders.

How to UNDERSTAND Enterprise Value

The private equity / Raider business in principle is relatively easy: You buy a company (or achieve full control) and then in a first step you extract all existing cash and/or assetswhich are not necessary to run the business from the company. In a second step, the corporate raider will then put as much debt onto the target company’s balance sheet and let it pay out as a dividend or capital reduction.

The more the Raider can get out quickly either as excess cash or as a “dividend recap” (short form for a debt financed dividend) the higher the return on investment.

The first important aspect: Excess cash OR excess assets

As I have written above, a raider of course likes best plain cash lying around. On the other hand, the raider will happily sell anything which is not really required to run a business and pocket this cash as well. However mechanical screeners will only capture cash on the balance sheet, not any “extra assets”.

A good example is my portfolio company SIAS. Their EV/EBITDA decreased strongly because the “exchanged” their extra asset in the form of a South American minority stake into cash. Another “extra Asset” company would be EVN with its Verbund stake.

Including the Verbund stake, EVN looks quite expensive at EV/EBITDA 8.3 (EV ~ 4 bn, EBITDA ~ 500 mn) against 5-6 EV/EBITDA at RWE and EON. However if we deduct the “extra asset” of 25% Verbund (~1.6 bn EUR) from the 4 bn EV, we suddenly end up with an EV/EBITDA of <5, a lot cheaper for this very conservatively run utility company.

In my experience, it is much more interesting to find companies with extra assets which don't show up as cash on the balance sheet. This was mentioned before as favorite technique of value legend Peter Cundill.

Next step: What to add to Enterprise Value

So its pretty clear that the less debt a company has the more a PE/raider will be willing to pay.

But it is also important to understand, how the capacity to put debt into a company is determined. Especially in the US, the debt will be put into the target in the form of corporate bonds. In order to sell them, you need to have a rating.

The lower the rating the more expensive the debt. In practice, raiders will try to achieve a BB rating as this is usually the “sweet spot” before bond spreads go up dramatically.

Rating agencies have relatively simple ratios to determine maximum debt loads within a certain rating category, however the most important point is this one:

Rating companies add additional items to determine debt capacity which are:

– pension deficits or unfunded pension liabilities
– financial and operating leases (capitalised)
– any other known fixed payment obligations (cartel fines, guarantees etc.).

Economically, those items are very similar to financial debt which is usually included in the EV calculations, as they represent fixed payment obligations which sometimes (like pensions) even rank more senior than debt.

It is therefore no wonder that with a “standard” EV/EBITDA screener, often UK retail companies with huge (underwater) operating lease and pension commitments show up as “cheap” and then people are surprised that they go bankrupt soon (Game Group anyone ?).

Special case: prepayments

Prepayments are an interesting feature of some business models, among other for instance at Dart Group.

Normally, a company produces its goods first and then sells them again receivables until cash is then finally collected. In the case of prepayments, cash comes first in against a payable and the good gets produced at a later stage and then delivered with no further cash inflow to the customer. If the prepayments do not carry any formal restrictions, the company in theory can use the cash for whatever it wants. So for instance if a company can finance inventory out of payables, the prepayment cash could be used to finance even machinery or to reduce financial debt. So to make a long story short: cash from prepayments without formal restrictions should be considered “free cash” and deducted from enterprise value.

How to calculate Enterprise Value correctly:

So now we have all ingredients to correctly calculate Enterprise Value:

a. Equity Market cap
PLUS
b. Financial debt (long + short term)
PLUS
c. minorities, preferred
PLUS
d. financial leases and operating leases
PLUS
e. pension deficit or unfunded pension liabilities
PLUS
f. any other fixed liability which has to be repaid independently of the business success

MINUS
g. cash or cash equivalents
MINUS
h. “extra assets”, assets not required to run the business

Of course, EBITDA has to be adjusted as well in order to make usefull comparisons.

Basically we have to add back leasing expenses and pension expenses to EBITDA in order to compare the ratio against other companies.

Summary:

Standard screening EV/EBITDA does omit various relevant elements of an “economical” Enterprise value. Adjusting it for relevant items will prevent an investor to end up with relativ obvious value traps.

I am willing to bet that a back test on the adjusted EV/EBITDA ratios would generate even better results than the “standard” EV/EBITDA calculations.