Tag Archives: Tender offer

Special situation Quickie: Axel Springer voluntary tender offer EUR 63/share

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A few weeks ago, PE big weight KKR had announced to make a voluntary tender offer for German publisher Axel Springer at EUR 63 per share.

It is an interesting case as the offer is targeting only a minority stake. The threshold for the offer is set at only 20%.

The background seems to be that the biggest shareholder, Friede Springer and the CEO Döpfner, who own together ~45% want to make sure that they control the company together with KKR as they have entered into a shareholder agreement.

Looking at the stock price we can see that the offer has been made at a significant premium (~40%) but still below 2018 prices:

springer

There seem to have been other attempts to make sure that Friede and Döpfner control the company but they didn’t succeed.

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Short Cuts: Flughafen Wien, Alstom, Trilogiq, Sberbank

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Flughafen Wien

A quick update on my “Christmas-special situation” investment Flughafen Wien:

82,2% of the tendered shares have been accepted at the offer price of 82 EUR. With the current share price of ~ 77,5 EUR, the overall return results (pre costs and taxes) are :

(0,822*(82-79,25) + 0,178*(77,50-79,25))/79,25= +2,46% For the portfolio I assume that I would be able to close the position (sell the rest) at 77,50 EUR. Privately my broker DAB was not yet able to “release” the tendered shares.

Alstom

Back in August this year, I looked at Alstom as a potential “sum of parts” play following the GE deal announcement. One open point was the issue of pending corruption charges. I had written the following:

A second big issue is that at the moment no one knows exactly how much of the liabilities will get transferred to GE. Especially with regard to operating leases (nominal ~830 mn EUR), litigation liabilities (528 mn EUR) and pension liabilites (gross 5,2 bn) there is no definitive answer how much will be transferred to GE and what remains at Alstom. In a sum of part calculation, any of those remaining liabilities will have to be deducted from the extra assets as they are economically equivalent to debt.

I had some discussion and the consensus was that litigation liabilities would be transferred to GE, although I was sceptical. It turned out that I was right in this case. Alstom pleaded guilty and agreed to pay 772 mn USD fine. For the valuation, the most important sentence is this one:

In June, Alstom agreed to sell most of its energy business to General Electric. The French company said it would not be able to transfer its fine over bribery allegations to G.E.

Due to the strong dollar, in EUR the fine is actually 100 mn USD higher han the reserves. Overall, for anyone assuming GE taking over those liabilities, this reduced the value of Alstom by 2 EUR per share.. It will be interesting to see how the transport business is actually doing once Alstom publishes annual results. So far, I do not see any reason to buy the stock from a fundamental point of view.

Trilogiq

A few days before Christmas, Trilogiq reported 6m figures (30.09.2014). For some reason, the report is not on Trilogiq’s homepage, so one has to look at secondary sources like this one. Sales were slightly lower, gross margins more or less equal to last year. Net income was significantly lower but still positive.

They attribute the lower result to special marketing expenses and new hires:

la hausse de 13% des autres achats et charges externes, notamment du fait de la multiplication des actions marketing destinées à faire connaitre la nouvelle gamme GRAPHiT à travers le monde, l’augmentation de 12% des charges de personnel qui ont été grevées par d’importantes indemnités de départ et par de nouveaux recrutements

Cash is till around 22 mn EUR or 6 EUR per share. If Trilogiq manages to return at leat to 2/3 of the old profitability, (earnings were between 1,45 EUR per share and 1,75 EUR from 2008 to 2013), the stock would be priced at 6-8 times earnings. It remains to be seen if the temporary effects are in fact temporary. A friend forwarded me this equity research piece on Trilogiq where they expect 1 EUR EPS in 2016/2017 which to me looks quite conservative. Nevertheless, I think the further fundemental downside for Trilogiq at the current stock price is rather limited.

Sberbank

Over the holidays, I decided that I will exit my Sberbank position still within the old year at today’s prices. In the private account this also leads to “tax loss harvesting”. For the portfolio it became clear to me that my investment decision now has been invalidated 2 times. First, I estimated that the Ukraine conflict would be over quickly which was clearly wrong. Secondly, I did not account for the drop in oil prices and the ruble. I have honestly no idea how exposed Sberbank is directly or indirectly to oil and the ruble, but the prudent decision is to sell now and look at the stock (and the Russian market) again next year.

It might look very pro-cyclical selling near the low, on the other hand, if an investment case has deteriorated as much as in this case one should better exit before “behavioural biasis” such as “breaking even” etc. kick in.

Special situation “Quickie”: Flughafen Wien AG (ISIN AT0000911805) partial Tender offer

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Just by chance I looked at Flughafen Wien these days where since a few weeks an interesting situation is playing out.

Although Flughafen Wien is owned 50% by the Government and cannot be taken over, an Australian based Infrastructure fund called IFM made a partial tender offer for up to 29,9% of the shares.

Initially, IFM offered 80 EUR per share with a minimum threshold of 20% acceptance.

A few days ago, after pressure from soem shareholders, IFM increased the offer to 82 EUR and waived the 20% minimum threshold.

If I understood correctly, the new final date to tender the shares is December 18th. The money then is being paid within 3 working days, so before year end according to the official offer.

IFM seems to have secured around 12% from 2 funds already (Silchester, Kairos).

IFM seems to be a “reputable” investor, there seems to be no relevant operational risks for the offer from a technical point of view as far as I can tell.

However, the stock doesn’t trade at 82 EUR but rather at around 79,20 EUR per share:

This implies that investors expect 2 things

a) that more than 29,9% will be offered
b) and that the share price will fall after the offer below the offer price

Now we can play around a little bit to see if this is something worth betting on. We could start for instance assuming that the stock directly drops to 70 EUR after the offer expires.

Then we can calculate at the current price of 79,2 EUR an implicit or “break even” acceptance ratio:

79,20 = X*82 + (1-x)*70 = 76,67%.

So if 76,67% of the offers get accepted, the remaining not accepted stocks can drop to 70 EUR before one is making a loss on the transaction.

If all tendered shares are accepted, the max. profit would be 2,8 EUR per share or +3,54% for a period of 2 weeks.

Worst case: All minority shareholders tender (The Austrian government will definitely not tender…), then the lowest possible acceptance rate is 29,9/50 = 59,8% and the price falls directly to the value before the ofer (~61,50 EUR). Then the maximum loss per share would be -5,44 EUR or -7,4%.. At a more realistic drop to 70 EUR, the downside would be 2,02 EUR or -2,6%. This would be a positive expected value if the assumption of 70 EUR as a post tender price is correct.

I do think that this is a nice liltle side bet, so I will invest 2,5% of the portfolio at 79,25% into this little “special situation” with a time horizon of 2 weeks

One important note here: There is clearly a downside here and I would not recommend this to anyone who doesn’t regularily do such things, as the “single bet” might be not super attractive. However if one runs such bets on a continous basis (as I do, like MAN, Sky etc.), over time one will make money even with a few loosing trades.

“Bonus savings account” with Sky Deutschland (ISIN DE000SKYD000) voluntary tender offer

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Ruppert Murdoch is reshuffling his empire. Today he announced that BskyB, his British carrier has bought the 21st Century Fox 57% stake in German broadcaster Sky Deutschland.

Under German rules, once you transfer more than 30%, you have to make an offer to all other shareholders as well. This is from the offical web site:

Offer to minority Sky Deutschland shareholders
Following the agreement to acquire 21st Century Fox’s 57.4% stake in Sky Deutschland, BSkyB has announced that it will launch a voluntary cash offer to Sky Deutschland’s minority shareholders at €6.75 per share. There is no minimum acceptance condition as BSkyB believes it can realise the advantages of closer collaboration with Sky Deutschland and support its continued growth and development with the 57.4% stake it is acquiring through this transaction.

Although no details have been published yet, I think the likelihood of this going through is very high. Consequently, the stock now trades at 6,75 EUR.

However I find this quite interesting because if you buy the stock now, you get a free put option, as you will be able to tender the stock into the offer at some point in time. Depending on the time horizon, this option is worth between 4,5-8% (30-90 days). I don’t think that there will be a higher offer or something, but based on the historical volatility there is a good chance that we see slightly higher prices. Effectively it is a 0% savings account (quite attractive these days) with a bonus component.

Of course you cannot sell the option directly, but you can buy the share and make a pretty one sided bet on higher prices until the offer expires. At current prices there is no downside risk. A more sophisticated investor could buy the stock and sell a call in order to monetize the put option.

It is to a certain extent quite similar to the FIAT case but in my opinion with less execution risk.

Just to be on the safe side: I would not buy Sky Deutschland outright, this is a pure “special situation” investment.

For the portfolio, I will allocate a 2,5% position at current prices to this special situation, my return target is 5% within the next 30-90 days.

DISLAIMER: This is not a free lunch, of course there are risks which I haven’t mentioned or though of. But to me it looks like a pretty good risk/return progile.