Monthly Archives: April 2016

March quarter earnings (3Q16) for Microsoft(MSFT)

April 22, 2016 By in earnings conference calls, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

MSFT reported earnings for its fiscal third (=March) quarter after the close yesterday.

My takeaways:

–the company had a good quarter for its future-oriented cloud and mobility businesses during a period where the legacy PC business was unusually weak.  In the latter arena, MSFT did substantially better than the market.

–the strength of the dollar continues to be a drag

–income tax.  Geographically, the US has been stronger than expected, emerging markets weaker.  One result of this development is that MSFT has adjusted its estimate for the corporate tax rate for the full year from 19% to 21%.  The full revision for the first nine months was made in the 3Q income statement, boosting the March quarter tax rate to 24% (this is normal accounting procedure).  That clipped $.04 from what eps would otherwise have been.

–company guidance for upcoming quarters is being revised down somewhat, in a justifiably cautious way.  The dollar is one issue.  But the bigger headache seems to me to be weakness in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, where lots of transactional (as opposed to long-term contract) business takes place and where tax rates are lower.

–today’s selloff appears overdone to me.  That’s partly the way markets move nowadays, reacting violently to headline news.  It’s also partly because MSFT had been up by 35% over the past year in a market that has been basically flat over the same time span.

–I’m not tempted to transact.  I see no reason to sell the shares I own.  If anything, I’d be a buyer below $50.  But I see no reason to rush.

 

last weekend’s “failed” Doha oil meeting

April 21, 2016 By in oil and natural gas, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Representatives from a large group of national oil companies, both Opec and non-Opec, met in Doha last weekend, ostensibly to see if they could mutually agree not to raise their oil production from current levels.

From a practical economic view, the conclave made little sense.  Because all the countries involved are strapped for cash, they’re already producing flat out.  The only exception is Iran, which declined to participate.  It is ramping up its output for the first time in a long while now that sanctions are being lifted, and has no intention of stopping.

 

It was clear from the outset that the best outcome would be an agreement where the parties said they wouldn’t do what they couldn’t do anyway.  So Doha was all about optics, about satisfying internal political demands that the local oil ministries were leaving no stone unturned.  Weird, maybe, but understandable if you’re an oil functionary who wants to keep his job.

Nevertheless, there was an immediate spike down in the oil price when failure to reach agreement was announced.  To my mind this was more traders playing games in the market than an expression of dismay.

More interestingly:

–crude oil prices are higher today than they were before Doha, and

–Brent crude, a proxy for non-US demand for oil (because it can be used in older refineries), is beginning to establish its traditional premium  over West Texas Intermediate.

my thoughts

We passed the seasonal low point for oil demand in mid-February and are entering the strongest seasonal period now.  So it makes some sense that the price should be strengthening.

The Brent premium suggests US drivers aren’t the only ones consuming more oil products.  The lower price may also be stimulating usage in the rest of the OECD, where petroleum taxes are much higher.

The (crazy) period of securities trading where low oil was thought to be a harbinger of recession appears to be behind us.

My guess is that traders will continue to search for a price ceiling, which I think is around $50 a barrel.

I wonder if the major non-government owned oil companies have been holding back production on the idea that prices are too low, thereby, consciously or not, aiding the recovery process.  This wouldn’t be much different from how these firms acted during the period of oil price controls in the US in the 1970s -1980s.

 

 

 

Intel’s restructuring announcement yesterday

April 20, 2016 By in earnings conference calls, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 1 Comment

Yesterday, Intel (INTC) announced 1Q16 earnings that were up year on year and more or less in line with the Wall Street consensus.  It did, however, lower full-year 2016 guidance a bit, based on a weaker than anticipated PC market.

More important, the company also disclosed a major restructuring aimed at orienting INTC away from its legacy personal computer business and toward the cloud.  The restructuring will eliminate about 12,000 jobs, or 11% of INTC’s workforce.  It will result in a $1.2 billion charge against 2Q16 earnings and is intended to be saving $1.4 billion annually a year from now.

The plan appears to be at least in part the brainchild of Venkata Renduchintala, recently hired away from Qualcomm to be INTC’s president–with the intention of having him make the kind of changes just announced.

Reading between the lines, this is a good news – bad news story.  The good news is that INTC, seeing the Ghost of Christmas Future in Hewlett Packard, is making significant changes to reorient its business.

The bad news is that it sounds to me like there may be a significant anti-change bureaucracy entrenched at INTC.  This is what I read the Oregonian as saying when it cites “a lack of product/customer focus in execution” as Mr. Renduchintala’s conclusion from his review of INTC’s manufacturing operations.  That’s also the reason, I think, for changes in senior management.  Maybe a fat-cat attitude is not so odd for big corporations in general,  but it’s of disappointing for a firm whose former chairman and manufacturing chief wrote a management book twenty years ago titled Only the Paranoid Survive, stressing market awareness as key to success.

In practical terms, I think what this means is that INTC is still a bit more GM-ish than I had thought possible. In consequence, the transformation INTC has been talking about for years and which current top management clearly wants won’t take place overnight. Still, I think that the moves INTC is making are needed and are an overall plus.

Pre-market reaction has been mildly negative.  I guess that’s about what one should expect.  Personally, I’m encouraged and remain content to collect the dividend and wait.  I’d be tempted to buy more on a selloff.

plusses and minuses of using book value

April 19, 2016 By in book value, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

on the plus side…

–book value is a simple, easy to understand, concept.  Discount to book = cheap, premium to book = a potential red flag.

–it’s very useful for financials, which tend to have huge numbers of often complex, short-lived transactions with hordes of different customers, and where financial disclosure may not be so transparent (financials aren’t my favorite sector, by the way).  So the 30,000 foot view may be the best.

…maybe a plus?…

–in the inflationary world most of us grew up in, and that is still reflected in the financials of older companies, historical cost accounting tends to understate the current value of long-lived assets.  Think:  a piece of land bought in Manhattan or San Francisco in 1950 or an oilfield discovered in 1970–or 1925.  Many of the older retail chain acquisitions of the past twenty years have been motivated by the undervaluation on the balance sheet of owned real estate.

…definitely a minus

–in my experience, accountants tend to be very reluctant to compel managements to write down the value of assets whose worth has been impaired by, say, advanced age or technological obsolescence.

–more important, we are living in a period of rapid change.  The Internet is the most obvious new variable, although I think we tend to underestimate how profound its transformative power is.  In the US, we are also seeing a generational shift in economic power away from Baby Boomers and toward Millennials, who have distinctly non-Boomer preferences and a desire to live a different lifestyle from their parents.

Online shopping undermines the value of an extended physical store network.  Software (which by and large doesn’t appear on the balance sheet) replaces hardware (which does) as a key competitive edge between companies.

intangibles…

Warren Buffett’s key innovation as an investor was to recognize the value of intangibles like this in the 1950s.  In his case, it was that the positive effect of advertising expense and strong sales networks in establishing brand power appeared nowhere on the balance sheet.  In a world where his competitors were focused only on price-to-book, he could buy these very positive company attributes for free.  Price to book was still a solid tool, just not the whole picture.

…vs. structural change

The situation is different today.

The Internet is eroding the value of traditional distribution networks and of other physical assets positioned to serve yesterday’s world.  The shift in economic power to Millennials is likewise calling into question the value of physical assets positioned to serve Boomers.

In more concrete terms:

Tesla doesn’t need a car dealer distribution network to sell its cars.  A retailer can use Amazon, or Etsy or a proprietary website, rather than an owned store network.  A writer can self-publish.  These all represent radical declines in the capital needed to be in many businesses today.

Millennials like organic food and live in cities; Boomers eat processed food and live in the suburbs.

This all calls into question the present economic worth, still expressed on the balance sheet as book value, of past capital spending on what were at the time anti-competition “moats.”

Another issue:   I think that the institutional weight of the status quo has pressured managements of older companies into ignoring the need for substantial repositioning–including writedowns of no-longer viable assets–so they can compete in a 21st century environment.  Arguably, this makes low price to book a warning sign instead of an invitation to purchase.

using book value as an analytic tool

April 18, 2016 By in book value, return on equity, return on equity vs. return on capital, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

historical cost

Generally speaking, all of a company’s balance sheet data are recorded at historical cost (adjustments for currency fluctuations for multinational firms are he only exception I can think of this early in the morning).

book value

If this accurately reflect’s today’s values, and sometimes this can be an IF, then

…book value is an accurate indicator of the market value of shareholders’ ownership interest in the firm.

asset value

That means that price/book (share price divided by book (shareholders equity) value per share) can be an indicator of over/undervaluation.  In particular, if a company’s shares are trading below book, then it could potentially be broken up and sold at a profit.

management skill

We can also use return on book value (yearly net profit divided by book value) as a way of assessing management’s skill in using the assets it controls to make money.  This can be a particularly useful shorthand in the case of, say, financial firms, which tend to have fingers in a lot of pies and to disclose little about many of them.

Notes:

–price/book is not a linear or symmetrical measure.

On the one hand, a basic tenet of value investing is that when the return on book is unusually low either the company’s board or third parties will force change.  So weak companies may trade at smaller discounts to book than one might think they deserve.

On the other, strong performing firms will likely trade at premiums to book.  However, the amount of the premium will depend both on the state of “animal spirits” and more sober judgments about the sustainability of above-average results.

—return on book vs. return on capital.  Return on capital is the same kind of ratio as return on book and has the same intent–to assess how well management is using the assets it is entrusted with.  The difference is that ROC factors in any long-term debt a company may have.

Return on capital is defined as:  (net profit + after-tax interest expense) divided by (long-term debt + shareholders equity).

Return on capital and return on book value are the same if a company has no long-term debt.  Return on capital is typically lower than return on book if a company has long-term borrowings, debt capital usually costs (a lot) less than equity capital.

using return on capital

ROC and the spread between ROC and ROB can be important.  We should think of ROC as the profitability of the business enterprise and the difference between it and ROB as the return on financial leverage.

For instance, for a given firm, the ROC may be 10% and the return on book (equity) 15%.  The difference, 5 percentage points, is the result of “financial engineering,” or the leveraged structure of the company.  Those figures may be ok (and, for the record, I’m not against leverage per se).  But if the ROC is 2% and the ROB is 12%, virtually all the profits of the firm come from financial leverage–not from the underlying business.  That’s a risky situation, in my view–one that owners should be aware of.

More tomorrow.