Category Archives: Accounting

capital spending and the business cycle: BHP as an illustration

August 23, 2012 By in Accounting, capital spending and the business cycle, Portfolio management Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

BHP’s fiscal 2012 earnings report

When BHP Billiton made its full (fiscal) year earnings announcement, it indicated that it is rethinking its planned $20 billion expansion of the Olympic Dam copper/uranium mining project.  It hopes to restructure the expansion in a way that costs less.  The company also recorded $3.5 billion in asset writedowns (“impairment charges”) for the year, the largest being a $2.8 billion reduction in the value of its US shale gas assets.

some perspective

To put these items in perspective, even after the writedowns BHP still made $15.4 billion for the twelve months and had operating cash flow of $24.4 billion.  So, for BHP the announcements aren’t a big deal.  But they do provide the occasion for making several important points about corporate behavior.

1.  Companies rarely outspend their cash flow, no matter what they may say to the contrary.  And if they do borrow to fund capital projects, it’s almost always just after the bottom of the economic cycle, when evidence is accumulating that business is past the lows and is accelerating.  Otherwise, if a firm sees that its projected cash flow over the coming year–sometimes longer–is going to be less than previously thought, it cuts the capital budget.  That’s what’s happening here.

Borrowing to fund capital expenditure adds an additional element of risk because the assets developed are long-term and illiquid, not stuff companies want to stock up on when the future is iffy.

2.  Cash flow isn’t always as available as it might seem.  Companies often have principal repayments on debt.  They can also have mandatory progress payments on capital projects already contracted for.  They pay dividends.  They may need to finance working capital–meaning they need money to buy raw materials, pay workers and offer trade credit to customers.  And (in BHP’s case a minor point, but not always) they may be “capitalizing” interest payments for ongoing projects (BHP capitalized $314 million of interest in fiscal 2012).  Capitalizing means the interest payments are parked on the balance sheet until the associated project is complete.  The money is paid to the creditors, but doesn’t appear as an expense on the income statement.

All this means a large chunk of cash flow is already spoken for each year.  Under normal circumstances, the easiest item to shrink is capital spending on new projects.

3.  Asset writedowns are a form of corporate housekeeping.  Many times–like this one, in my opinion–they occur when earnings aren’t so stellar anyway.  The idea is that more bad news doesn’t stand out so much.  That’s not the whole story, though.

Take the $2.8 billion writedown of shale gas assets.

Taken literally, the asset reduction means that BHP no longer believes the holdings are worth the amount it has invested in them.  They’re actually worth $2.8 billion less.  Conceptually, the firm is required to make the writedown once it becomes convinced this is the case.  Practically speaking, companies have a lot of wiggle room to use to avoid doing so.

Suppose it’s right that BHP has lost $2.8 billion through investing in shale gas.  It has two choices:

–it can either reduced the carrying value of the assets now, to the point where it can maybe make a slim profit in the future–and do so at a time when the business is slack and investors don’t really care, or

–it can keep the $2.8 billion loss on the balance sheet and show it little by little as gas is brought to the surface and sold.  Losses would continue for the life of the operations, until the entire $2.8 billion flows through the income statement.  Most of the red ink would presumably occur during better economic times, when investors are more eager to see earnings gains and would respond more negatively to the losses.

In other words, BHP is (prudently) wiping the slate clean while no one is looking.  In the non-commonsensical way that professional investors think, the writeoff is the mark of a good company.

return on equity (II): cleaning up a mess

August 16, 2012 By in Accounting, cash flow, cash flow/share vs. earnings/share, depreciation, working capital Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

a company as a project portfolio

Every company can be seen as a collection–maybe a portfolio–of investment projects, each with its own risk and return on investment characteristics.  This is not the only way of looking at a business.  And it’s probably not the best way, as the ugly collapse of the conglomerate craze in the US during the 1960s illustrates.  Nevertheless, looking at the business as a project portfolio highlights an issue that the top management of a firm can face.

the BCG growth/cash matrix

One common way of sorting projects  is to use the growth/cash generation matrix invented by the Boston Consulting Group in the 1960s: stars = high growth, high cash generation cash cows = low growth, high cash generation questions marks = high growth, low cash generation dogs = low growth, low cash generation. loaded with canines What do you do if you’re a company with a boatload of dogs?  ..or just one really big dog. To see the issue clearly, let’s simplify: –let’s say that equity is your only source of funding (no working capital or debt), and –let’s say you have only two projects, with 100 units of equity invested in Project 1, which earns 20/year, and 100 units in Project 2, which earns 1/year. the problem: the sterling 20% return on equity of Project 1 is obscured by the near breakeven status of Project 2. The overall return on equity for the company of 10.5%. Why is this bad? Wall Street loves high return on equity–and loathes low return.  And the computer screens that even many professional investors use to narrow down the vast universe of available stocks into a more manageable number to investigate will toss a company like this on the reject pile.  So you’ll be overlooked. What should management do? The possibilities: 1.  eliminate inefficiencies in Project 2 and in doing so raise the ROE to a respectable figure 2.  if that’s not possible, sell Project 2 to someone else who, mistakenly or not, thinks he can do #1 3.  close Project 2 down and write the equity off as a loss, or 4.  divide the company in two, and either (a) spin Project 2 off as a separate entity (that is, give it to shareholders) or (b) gradually sell it to the investing public.

cutting to the chase

Let’s skip down to #4, since what we’re ultimately concerned with is what motivates a company to create a REIT.

why #4?

How can a company get into a situation where solution #4 is the best alternative? In my experience, this almost always involves long-lived assets, where the investment is big, and a company puts all the money in upfront, in the hope of getting steady income over 20 or 30 years.  Examples: a chemical plant, container ships, hotels, or mineral leases. One of two things happens –either the company soon discovers it has wildly overpaid for the assets, or –some unforeseen change, like technological change or a sharp increase in input prices, alters the economics of the project in a fundamentally negative way.

two forms of cash generation

Any project generates cash in two ways: –a return of the capital invested in the project, and –profits. In describing Project 2 above, I said it produces 1 unit of profit per year.  But that profit is after subtracting an expense of, say, 5 as depreciation and amortization. D&A are ways of factoring into costs the gradual wearing out of the factory, the machines or the other investment assets that are used in making the project’s output. In the case of a motel, D&A is a charge for the gradual deterioration of the structure over the years, until the building is too shabby to be used any more and must be razed and rebuilt.  Similarly, big machines either wear out or become technologically obsolete. The key fact to note is that depreciation and amortization aren’t actual outflows of cash–they’re inflows.  But they’re classified as return of capital, not as profit.  (I think this make sense, but I’ve been analyzing companies for over 30 years.  Don’t worry if it doesn’t to you.  Fodder for another post on cash flow vs. profits, and why it makes a difference to investors.)

In the case of Project 2, the actual cash inflow is probably 6/year (depreciation and amortization of 5 + profit of 1).  That’s a 6% yield.  But it’s also a millstone around the neck of the company that launched the project.  It’s return on equity–a key stock market screening factor–will be depressed for as long as it owns the project. On the other hand, to an income-oriented buyer a yield of 6 units/year for the next 20 years is nothing to sneeze at.  At a price of 85, the yield would be an eye-popping 7%.

this has happened before

In the early 1980s, T Boone Pickens, a brilliant financial engineer if no great shakes as an oilman, wildly overpaid for a number of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico.  Once he realized these properties would struggle to make back his initial lease payment and would never make money, he repackaged them as a limited partnership and spun it off. Around the same time, Marriott did the same thing.  It made a similarly unwise decision to build a number of very expensive luxury hotels.  When bookings started to come in, the company saw the properties would provide large cash flow–but never any profits.  So it rolled them all up into a limited partnership, which it sold to retail investors. In both cases, management “repurposed” assets to emphasize their cash generation characteristics rather than their lack of profitability.  Both also used a tax-minimization structure to enhance the assets’ attractiveness to income-oriented individual investors. REITS do the same thing. More tomorrow.

using days sales to measure inventory: a dangerous method

July 24, 2012 By in Accounting, Inventory Cycle, inventory days Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

an example

I started out on Wall Street as a securities analyst covering the oil industry during the oil and gas boom caused by the second OPEC “oil shock” of 1978-80.  The sharp rise in prices (which today looks a bit ludicrous) from $7 a barrel to $14–implying a spike in gasoline prices above $.50 a gallon!!!–caused a huge increase in drilling for new deposits.

One key shortage element was the steel pipe used to line the well hole already dug, to prevent the hole from collapsing in on itself.  Without steel pipe to line the well you couldn’t drill.  So one of my standard questions during the interviews I did with company managements as I was preparing to write evaluations of their stock prospects was how much steel pipe they had on hand.  It was usually only two or three months’ worth.  It was never enough.  And the makers of the pipe were never able to ramp up capacity fast enough to meet demand, no matter how fast they put up new plants.

Anyway, one day I was talking to the CFO of a small exploration company in Texas.  When I had last talked with him, a couple of months before, he had said his company had about two months’ worth of pipe on hand.  I asked the question again.  He said, “We have a year’s worth of pipe on hand.”

I said, “You must have finally gotten a big shipment in.  How did you do it?”  He replied. “No.  Our drilling plans have changed.”

This was my first concrete indication that the commodity bust, which often follows a big boom, had arrived in the oilpatch.  What the CFO in my story meant to say was that prices had already fallen to a level where the wells his firm had been planning to drill were no longer economical and he could no longer get financing to carry out the projects.

the cash conversion cycle

This is a measurement of how much cash a company needs under current conditions to turn a dollar invested in working capital to make a new product back into cash.  It’s the sum of three parts:  the time it takes from purchasing raw materials until the sale of a final product is made + days credit extended to purchasers – days credit extended by suppliers.

In most cases, the key time element is the first element, the time in inventory.  Hence, the focus on inventory days.

supply and demand is much more important

…as my oil company example shows.

housing

Just as the situation of extremely constrained inventories can prompt one to draw the misleading conclusion that conditions will always be tight, the situation where inventories are massive can also be deceptive.  Housing in the US may well be a current case in point.

Despite the evidence that the housing market has been picking up in the Us for the past year, until just the past two or three weeks media reports have been strongly biased to the negative side.  One of the key figures being cited is the large inventory of unsold homes available for sale.

Two elements are wrong with this analysis, in my view:

–after many years of languishing on the market, and presumably not being maintained, I think it’s questionable whether all the dwellings counted in that inventory number are actually salable.  Maybe a quarter aren’t.

–even small changes in demand can make large differences in the days- sales measure.  For example, the latest Department of Commerce figures show that the inventory of new homes available for sale in the US has shrunk by 29% in the past year to 4.7 months.  Half of that decline is from builders creating fewer new homes.  The other half is from an increase in demand.  It wouldn’t take much more demand to push that figure into shortage territory.

I’m not saying that demand will increase (although I suspect it will).  I just want o point out that relying on days-sales figures for conclusions is potentially dangerous.

 

 

 

chit funds, crowdfunding and p2p banking (II)

April 19, 2012 By in Accounting, Asian economic development, Banks, chit funds, chit funds, Current Market Thoughts, emerging markets, Industry Analysis, P2P lending Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

two lessons from history

Thailand

I was just getting acquainted with Thailand when the Ms. Chamoy Thipyaso chit fund scandal broke.  “Mae” (=Mother) Chamoy, the wife of a Thai Air Force officer, appeared to be running a very large chit fund investment operation that was stringing together a sequence of startlingly high investment returns.  She had agents throughout Thailand collecting new money for her.  Money was pouring in.

The fund turned out to be a gigantic Ponzi scheme, however.

The scheme sustained itself for an unusually long time.  It continued to operate even after it had become so large (US$100 million+) it was implausible to think Mae could find enough lucrative “secret” microfinancing opportunities in Thailand.  Several reasons for this:

–people wanted to believe.

–the fund appeared to have the backing of the military, the ultimate source of political and business leadership in Thailand.  This gave an implied assurance that the investment results were real.  Prominent high-ranking Air Force officers invested with Mae, and forcefully urged their subordinates to do so as well.

–investors who thought about withdrawing some of their “profits” were pressured not to do so, with the threat that if they took money out they would be blacklisted and not allowed to invest in the fund thereafter.

Interestingly, large investors in the Chamoy fund continued to urge their friends and work subordinates to plow money into the fund even after they realized it was a Ponzi scheme.  Their rationale?   …it bought them more time.  That extra time allowed them to continue to enjoy a lifestyle they knew was going to end when the fraud was discovered.  And it allowed them to arrange their financial affairs in a way that would minimize the negative impact on them personally.  To followers of the Bernie Madoff case in the US, this must certainly sound familiar.

my thoughts

In my reading about microfinance, it seems that Ponzi schemes have been a constant problem wherever third-party chit funds–not the ones where friends and neighbors lend to one another–operate.  That means virtually everyplace in South Asia and Africa.  There seems to be an especially large amount of study done of the industry in India, which I have no practical experience with (because the stock market isn’t easily open to foreigners–and I think the political environment is particularly unfriendly toward equity investors.)

Personally, I’d worry more about Ponzi schemes in the US springing up among the firms that the JOBS Act will allow to raise equity.  These are the entities that won’t have adequate financial controls or accounting statements for shareholders.

My chief p2p banking concern is a more prosaic one–that the present very low loan loss rates will prove to be more a function of the industry’s newness rather than of the creditworthiness of borrowers.  Time will tell.  And, unlike fraud, this is a risk we can take precautions for.

Taiwan

There was a unique twist to the Taiwanese chit fund industry that I encountered in the mid-1980s.   Chit fund loans were secured by post-dated checks issued to the borrowers by the lenders.  In Taiwan at that time, “bouncing” a check–having insufficient funds in the account to cover payment–was a felony, punishable by the check writer serving time in prison.

The threat of jail time was thought to be sufficient incentive to ensure repayment.  So no one worried too much about the creditworthiness of the borrowers, which–as it turned out–included large publicly-traded companies.  American accountants I met, who’d been sent to Taiwan to break into the auditing business there, told me that they could see the fact of unaccounted-for money sloshing around in potential client companies.  They just couldn’t see how much.  Because of this, they were reluctant to take any engagements.  And they were continually undercut by local accounting firms who charged virtually nothing for “audits.”   American bank lending officers told me the same thing.

The chit fund business received a major shock, during a mild economic downturn, some large companies had made hundreds of millions of dollars in chit fund loans–all unrecorded in the financial accounts–that they couldn’t repay.  Bankruptcies resulted.

my thoughts

This is another potential problem for equity holders in firms crowdfunded under the JOBS Act.  Without audited financials, it’s impossible for an outside investor to determine what the capital structure of a company is.

I also think, à la Taiwan, a legitimate auditor will simply walk away from a suspect company rather than make a public outcry.  Non-disclosure agreements may force it to do no more.  A less fastidious auditor, one nobody ever heard of, might take the business and issue a clean opinion.  After all, Bernie Madoff got one for years, didn’t he?

higher taxes on dividends? –implications for stock markets

February 17, 2012 By in cash flow/share vs. earnings/share, Constructing a Portfolio, currency effects, Current Market Thoughts, Dividends, Industry Analysis, Investment firms, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action, Strategy Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

the Obama proposal

President Obama has recently proposed that the current tax preference for corporate dividends paid to individuals be eliminated.  Instead of being taxed at most 15% of the amount received, dividends would be considered ordinary income and taxed by Washington at as high a rate as around 40%.

Personally, I’d prefer an overhaul–and simplification–of the current tax code instead of tweaks around the edges.  Rather than putting a foot into the  the quagmire of possible political motivations, however, let’s just take a look at what I think are likely results for US capital markets if it’s implemented.

what doesn’t change

1.  Tax-exempt and tax-deferred accounts would be unaffected.  For pension plans, 401ks and IRAs, and for non-profits, it will continue to make no difference whether they make money in the form of interest or dividend income, or of short-term or long-term capital gains.

2.  Aging Baby Boomers are developing an increasing preference for steady income over capital gains, which are sometimes there, sometimes not.  That won’t change either.

what does

3.  I think the biggest effect will be on company decisions to start making dividend payments or to increase a payout they already have.

It seems to me that most publicly traded corporations recognize the Baby Boom-induced change in investor preferences now happening in the US.  Understanding that a substantial, and rising, dividend is a positive for their stock, companies have been happy to return profits to shareholders this way.  They do this despite realizing that if you combine federal and state/local income levies, up to 25% of the payout will go to the taxman.

If dividends lose their tax preference, the percentage taken by the taxes will approach 50%.  That means a big drop in what the shareholder will retain, both numerically (a third) and psychologically.  For most companies, I suspect, it will tip the balance in favor of devoting free cash flow to share buybacks rather than dividend increases.

For my money, that takes a lot of the shine away from what I consider to be the most attractive part of the dividend-stock universe–companies with above-average dividends today and for which you can reasonably project a quickly rising free cash flow over the next few years.

4.  If the government continues to  keep interest rates at emergency lows and, by accident or design, it also removes much of the incentive for individuals to buy dividend-paying stocks, how do investors adjust?  Maybe there’s a boost in demand for junk bonds, although income-oriented investors have been buying riskier forms of fixed income for a long time.

I think biggest effect would be for investors to broaden their horizons further.  The 7%-8% yields on EU telecom stocks will suddenly look more attractive, despite currency risks.  So, too, emerging market securities, both bonds and dividend-paying stocks.

5.  Looking at #3 another way,  provided they’re large enough to lower the share count, stock buybacks raise earnings per share.  All other things being equal, that should mean a higher per share stock price.  If so, the higher share price would likely offset some or all of the negative effect of dividends increasing at a slower rate.  In other words, the mix of returns (price appreciation + dividend income) changes, and in a way that increases risk.  But the crucial investment question is whether the total return from both sources will be higher or lower than before.

No one knows the answer.  But if the total return is lower–that is, if the effect of higher taxes on dividends is to decrease the long-term value of US equities–then one would expect US investors of all stripes to look increasingly to stock markets outside the US.  In addition, on the margin, US companies might also begin to look to foreign venues to raise new capital, if they could achieve higher prices for their stock by doing so.

My bottom line:  this proposal is one to watch closely.  Like a snowball that starts rolling down a hill, its consequences could be far greater than just to raise taxes on older, upper middle class city dwellers.