Category Archives: Tobin’s q

the MBA-ization of old school US

July 29, 2020 By in Academic Theories, stock buybacks Leave a comment

After last year’s crashes of the Boeing 737 Max caused the plane’s grounding worldwide, I decided to take a quick look at Boeing (BA) on the idea that the selloff might be an overreaction. BA is a stock I’ve never owned. And although I appreciate the power of the BA/Airbus commercial aircraft duopoly, it’s not an area I keep tabs on.

I was surprised to find that BA looked a lot like a US auto company to me–that is, an assembler of parts and components made by others (who own–my guess–the bulk of the engineering intellectual property I’d mistakenly thought was in BA). Billions spent on share buybacks, too. What’s left inside BA? …a brand name, a distribution network and a group of airline customers who have organized their maintenance operations around BA aircraft. My conclusion: BA is a shell of its former self, a product of MBA-ish financial legerdemain rather than a center of engineering excellence. Why is this bad? …because hollowing out the company creates good times now at the expense of diminishing ability to generate future profits. As with the auto industry in the US, innovation now resides with suppliers, who are where the superior profit growth is to be found.

What made me think of BA now is the surprising announcement from Intel (INTC) that it has not only lost the big engineering lead it had over the rest of the semiconductor fabricating industry just a few years ago but also is now about a year behind TSMC (yes, the nm numbers are different between the two, but that’s not so important). More than that, the company is mulling over whether to outsource manufacturing to TSMC. When I owned INTC shares in 2012-14, the company was trading at book value of $19 and yielding 3%. Yes, the world was passing the company’s x86 design by. But manufacturing was still excellent. I thought there was limited downside and that INTC was working to catch up with semiconductor rivals. The stock doubled while I owned it. At some point, though, it looks like INTC, too, opted for the business school financial engineering solution, which would be the really bad news in the INTC announcement.

Why do companies abandon the technical excellence that made them great in the first place? I think there are three related reasons:

–in an established company, the status quo is very powerful. This is even more true if the founding management is still around.

–CEO tenure is usually very short. Pay is astronomical, and is tied both to profit growth and the stock price. Someone who has spent thirty years getting to the top hoping for a gigantic payoff has little incentive to lead a (necessary) restructuring that will produce, say, two years of losses and a potentially depressed stock price

–in mature companies, CEOs tend to be marketers who have little technical background or understanding. They emphasize what they know.

stock options and stock buybacks

August 20, 2015 By in stock buybacks, Tobin's q Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

I first became aware of the crucial relationship between stock option grants and stock buybacks in the late 1990s.

I was on a research trip to San Francisco, where I had dinner with the new CEO, a turnaround specialist, of a chip design and manufacturing company with a checkered history.

In the course of our conversation, he said that one of his objectives was to ensure he retained top talent.  He went on to mention, as if it were a matter of course, that he would do so by having his firm issue enough stock options to transfer ownership of 6% of the company each year to workers (I’m pretty sure 6% was the number, but it could have been 8%).

I was shocked.

My first thought was that after eight years (six years, if the 8% is correct), there’d potentially be 50% more shares out.  This would massively dilute the ownership interest of any shares I might buy for clients.

My second was that I would have to evaluate the potential for massive positive earnings surprises that would make the stock skyrocket if the turnaround were successful, against the steady erosion of my ownership interest through stock option issuance.  (I decided to bet on skyrocket, which ended up being the right thing to do).

My third was that eventually suppliers of equity capital like me would have to question whether the kind of ownership shift this CEO was presenting as normal tilted rewards too far in the direction of management.

 

After this experience, I began to look much more carefully at the share option schemes of companies that might potentially be in one of my portfolios.  I noticed that in many cases companies had stock buyback programs–pitched as a “return to shareholders” of profits, sort of like dividends–that almost exactly offset the dilution from the issuance of new stock to employees.

This isn’t the case for all companies, but my observation is that it is for many.  I don’t think this is a coincidence.

Part of the rational for buybacks, it seems to me, is simply to prevent dilution of earnings per share, which would arguably help no one.  But at the same time, for the casual observer who looks only at share count and at earnings vs. eps, it obscures how big the corporate stock option issuance plan is.  I don’t think this is an accident, either.  Yes, the information is all in the SEC filings, but the reality is that even many investment professionals don’t read them.

That’s what I find problematic about stock buybacks–that I feel they’re misleadingly described as a shareholder benefit, while their purpose is to play down the level of key employee compensation.

 

 

should corporate stock buybacks be banned?

August 19, 2015 By in stock buybacks, Tobin's q Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

This is becoming an election issue.

Elizabeth Warren, deeply suspicious of anything to do with finance, regards them as a form of stock manipulation.

Many more mainstream observers note that $7 trillion (according to the New York Times) spent on buybacks by S&P 500 companies has consumed a large chunk of their cash flow at a time when both wage growth and new investment in physical plant and equipment in the US have been paltry.  They argue, without further elaboration that might have the argument make some sense, that the latter are being caused by the former.  Therefore, they think, if only stock buybacks were eliminated, employment and wages would rise and the US would reemerge as a global manufacturing power.  I imagine the same people are saving their old calendars in case 1959 should come back.

There are instances where, in my view, stock buybacks are clearly the right thing to do.  Imagine a publicly traded company that has a profitable business that generates free cash flow, and that has no liabilities plus $1 billion in cash on the balance sheet.  Let’s say the firm’s total market capitalization is $500 million.  In this situation, which actually happened for a lot of companies in 1973, stock buybacks would accommodate shareholders who wanted to liquidate their holdings and create $2+ in value for remaining shareholders for every $1 spent.  I can’t see any reason to outlaw this.

There are also cases—IBM comes to mind–where continual buybacks make investors think that this is all the firm has left in the tank.  So though buybacks keep on generating increases in earnings per share, by shrinking the number of shares outstanding, they no longer support the stock price.  The generate selling pressure instead.  In theory, and provided management understands it can’t play with the big boys any more, the firm should liquidate and return funds to shareholders rather than to continue to destroy value.  Like that’s ever going to happen.  But investors will vote with their feet.  While maybe management conduct should be different, I can’t see how that could be legislated.

My big beef with stock buybacks is that the main purpose they serve is to disguise the gradual transfer in ownership for a company from shareholders to employees that happens in every growth company (more about this tomorrow).  This could be/ should be made clearer.

I also think managements should show more backbone when “forced” into buybacks to satisfy activist investors, in what is the 21st century equivalent of greenmail.

But the idea that barring stock buybacks will cause corporations to make massive capital investments in advanced manufacturing in a country that has a sky-high 35% corporate tax rate, a shortage of skilled labor and rules that bar a firm from bringing in needed technical and management employees from outside is loony.  It isn’t clear to me that removing legislative impediments to investment will be enough to roll back the clock and make the US a manufacturing power.  It isn’t clear, either, that we should want to return to an earlier stage of economic development.  But outlawing buybacks won’t achieve that goal.

why I don’t like stock buybacks

August 18, 2014 By in Dividends, stock buybacks, Tobin's q Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

buyback theory

James Tobin won the Nobel Prize for, among other things, commenting that company managements–who know the true value of their firms better than anyone else–should buy back shares when their stock is trading at less than intrinsic value.  They should also sell new shares when the stock is trading at higher than intrinsic value.  Both actions benefit shareholders and add to the firm’s worth.

True, but not, in my view, a motivator for most actual stock buybacks.

Managements sometimes say, or imply, that share buybacks are a tax-efficient way of “returning” cash to shareholders, since they would have to pay income tax on any dividends received.  I don’t think this has much to do with buybacks, either.  It also doesn’t make a lot of sense, since a majority of shares are held in tax-free or tax-deferred accounts like pension funds and IRAs/401ks.

the real reason

Why buybacks, then?

Years ago I met with the CEO of a small cellphone semiconductor manufacturer.  We had a surprisingly frank discussion of his business plan (the stock went up 20x  before I sold it,  which was an added plus).  He said that his engineers were the heart and soul of his company and that portfolio investors like me were just along for the ride.  He intended to compensate key employees in part by transferring ownership of the company through stock options from outsiders to engineers at the rate of 8% per year!!

Yes, the 8% is pretty extreme. In no time, there would be nothing left for the you and mes.

Still, whether the number is 4% or 1%, the managements of growth companies generally have something like this in mind.  They believe, probably correctly, that they won’t be able to attract/keep the best talent otherwise.

The practical stock option question has two sides:

–how to keep the portfolio investors from becoming outraged at the extent of the ownership transfer and

–how to keep the share count from blowing out as stock options are exercised.  A steadily rising number of shares outstanding will dilute eps growth; more important, it will alert portfolio investors to the fact of their shrinking ownership share.

The solution?   …stock buybacks, in precisely the amount needed to offset stock option exercise.

is there a better way?

What I don’t like is the deception that this involves.

However, would I really prefer to have companies allow share count bloat and have high dividend yields?  What would that do to PE multiples?   …nothing good, and probably something pretty bad.

So, odi et amo, as Ovid said (in a different context).

 

 

Tobin’s q and LinkedIn (LNKD)

September 12, 2013 By in Stock ideas, Tobin's q Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

James Tobin was a Nobel Prize-winning economics professor at Yale.  One of the things he’s famous for is his formulation of the “q” ratio, which is:   total market value of a publicly traded company’s outstanding stock ÷ the replacement value of the company’s net assets.

Sometimes q is taken to mean:  per share stock price ÷ book value per share.  But that’s not right.  A company may have a brand name or powerful distribution network that don’t show up in book value (Warren Buffett’s key investment insight).  Or it may have potentially lucrative mineral leases that appear on the books only as raw land, because they haven’t been fully explored.  Or, in today’s world, a firm may have created big software research/development assets whose only effect on accounting values comes from the subtraction of associated salaries from earnings.

Tobin understood that sometimes a company has assets that are hidden from public view.  As a result, a company’s true q is likely best known–or solely known–to its top management.

Tobin’s advice to managers is this:  if your company q > 1, meaning the stock is worth more than the value of the company’s assets, sell stock.  If your q < 1, buy stock back in.  Never do the reverse.

There’s a certain paradox to q.  If, out of the blue, a company launches a stock offering whose proceeds will find no obvious near-term use, then top management, which knows the firm the best, must think the present q is a lot bigger than 1.  If so, no rational person should want to buy the shares being offered.

…which brings us to LNKD, which has recently announced a $1 billion stock offering.  Year-to-date, the stock is up 123% vs, an 18% gain for the S&P.  The trailing PE, which is probably not relevant, is 730x.

My guess is that the offering will be heavily oversubscribed, despite the implicit warning that the offering itself entails.

It will be interesting to see how LNKD shares fare over the coming months.