Category Archives: activist invstors

falling sales, rising profits…

November 4, 2015 By in activist investing, activist invstors, Discounting, falling sales, growth vs value, rising profits, stock market Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

…are usually a recipe for disaster on Wall Street.  Yet, in the current earnings reporting season, a raft of companies are reporting this presumably deadly combination   …and being celebrated for it, not having their stocks go down in flames.

What’s happening?

the usual situation

First, why falling sales and rising profits don’t usually generate a positive investor response.

To start, let’s assume that a company reporting this way is maintaining a stable mix of businesses, that it’s not like Amazon.  There, investor interest is focused almost solely on its Web Services business, which is small but fast growing, and with very high margins.  AWS is so valuable that what happens in the rest of the company almost doesn’t matter.

Instead, let’s assume that what we see is what we get, that falling sales, rising profits are signs of a mature company slowly running out of economic steam.

So, where does the earnings growth come from?

Case 1–a one-time event.  Maybe the firm sold its corporate art collection and that added $.50 a share to earnings.  Maybe it sold property, or got an insurance settlement or won a tax case with the IRS.

All of these are one-and-done things. How much should an investor pay for the “extra” $.50 in earnings?  At most, $.50.  There’s no reason to make any upward adjustment in the price-earnings multiple, because the earnings boost isn’t going to recur.

Similarly,

Case 2–a multi-year cost-cutting campaign.  AIG, for example, has just announced that it is laying off 20% of its senior staff.  Let’s say this happens over three years, and that the eliminations will have no negative effect on sales, but will raise profits by $1 a year for the next three years.

How much should we pay for these “extra” $3 in earnings?  Again, the answer is that the earnings boost is transitory and should have no positive effect on the PE multiple.  So the move is worth, at most, $3 on the stock price.

Actually, my experience is that in either of these cases, the PE can easily contract on the earnings announcement.  Investors focus in on the falling sales.  They figure that falling earnings are just around the corner, and that on, say, a stock selling for $60 a share, the non-recurring $.50 or $1 in earnings is the equivalent of a random fluctuation in the daily stock price.  So they dismiss the gain completely.

why is today different?

I don’t know.  Although early in my career I believed that earnings are earnings and the source doesn’t matter, I’m now deeply in the only-pay-for-recurring-gains camp.

I can think of two possibilities, though:

–Suppose Wall Street is coming to believe (rightly or wrongly) that we’re mired in a slow growth environment that will last for a long time.  If so, maybe we can’t be as dismissive as we were in the past of the “wrong kind” of earnings growth.  Maybe company managements that are able to deliver earnings gains of any sort are more valuable than in past days.  Maybe they’re on the cutting edge of where growth is going to be coming from in the future–and therefore deserve a high multiple.

–I’m a firm believer that most mature companies formed in the years immediately following WWII are wildly overstaffed.  I also think that even if a CEO were willing to modernize in a thoroughgoing way–and I think most would prefer not to try–it’s immensely difficult to change the status quo.  Employees will simply refuse to do what the CEO wants.  As a result, this makes companies showing falling sales prime targets for Warren Buffett’s money and G-3 Capital’s cost-cutting expertise.  In other words, such companies become takeover targets, and that’s why their stock prices are firm.

the Market Basket saga: taking Arthur S’s position

August 29, 2014 By in activist investing, activist invstors, book value, family owned companies, mergers and acquisitions, supermarkets Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Market Basket is a privately held New England discount grocery chain controlled by two third-generation branches of the founding family.  One branch, owning 50.5% of MB, is led by Arthur S. and has no role–other than being on the board of directors–in the day-to-day running of the firm.  The other is led by the largest single shareholder, Arthur T.

MB recently deposed Arthur T. as CEO and replaced him with two non-family members.  Warehouse and delivery workers struck when they heard the news (with the encouragement of Arthur T., some have suggested), preventing the 71 stores from restocking and effectively hamstringing the firm.  Recently, the Arthur S. branch has agreed to sell its shares of MB to Arthur T. for $1.5 billion.

Throughout this highly public dispute, Arthur T. has been portrayed as a benevolent retail genius, creating an immensely successful business with fanatically devoted employees and extremely loyal customers.  Arthur S., on the other hand, has been seen as a money-grubbing child of privilege who wants to fund his yacht and string of polo ponies by pillaging the workers’ retirement plans.

A lot of this may be true, for all I know.  And the issues rocking MB are all pretty routine third-generation family owned company stuff (see my earlier post on MB).  But in the feel-good story line being taken by the media, one fact is being overlooked.  From what little has been in the press about MB’s profits, it doesn’t appear to be a particularly well-run company.  Arthur S. is probably right that Arthur T. isn’t a good manager.

the case for Arthur S.

Let’s say I’m a member of the Arthur S family and I hold 5% of MB’s outstanding stock.  I receive a yearly dividend of $5 million.  My genetic good fortune is significantly better even than winning the Megamillions jackpot.  So in one sense I should have no complaints.

On the other hand, my share of the assets of MB is worth about $175 million.  Therefore, my annual return on that asset value is 2.9%.  That’s about half the return on assets that Kroger achieves.  It’s also just over a third of what Wal-Mart generates, but I’m confident MB doesn’t aspire to be WMT.

I presumably also know that good supermarket locations are extremely hard to find in New England and that those MB has established over prior generations are immensely valuable.  It’s conceivable that if MB were to conceptually divide itself into two parts, a property owning one and a supermarket operating one, and have the property arm charge market rents to the stores, MB would see that the supermarket operations lose money and are only kept afloat by subsidies from the property arm.  (This situation is more common than you’d think.  It was, for example, the rationale behind the hedge fund attack on J C Penney.  That fact that inept activists botched the retail turnaround doesn’t mean the underlying strategy was incorrect.)

Even back-of-the-envelope numbers suggest something is very wrong with the way MB is being run.  Personally, my guess is that the inefficiency has little to do with employee compensation or with merchandise pricing, although the former has apparently been the focus of the AS’s discontent.  I’d bet it’s in sourcing and in how shelf space is allocated.

At the same time, Arthur T is presumably blocking my every attempt at finding stuff out and is rebuffing board suggestions that he bring in help to analyze why his returns are so low.  If MB were a publicly traded company, I could sell my shares and reinvest in a higher-return business.  I’m probably not able to do this with MB.  Even if I were, the public intra-family feuding would suggest the stock wouldn’t fetch a high price.

I have two choices, then.  I can accept the status quo, or I can try to create a consensus for the family to sell the firm.  That latter is what Arthur S. chose to do.

Signet (SIG) buying Zales (ZLC): a takeover scorecard

June 3, 2014 By in activist investing, activist invstors, mergers and acquisitions, stock market, takeover rules Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Last week, shareholders of mall jewelry company Zales (ZLC) voted to approve the takeover of the firm by its rival Signet (SIG).  SIG, a UK-listed company owns Kay and the more upscale Jared, as well as a number of (much less interesting, in my view) UK brand names.  The acquisition price is $21 a ZLC share, or about $670 million.

When I was working I liked luxury goods in general and the jewelry business in particular.  My portfolios contained Tiffany (TIF) and SIG more often than not, and Bulgari (now a part of LVMH) from time to time.  ZLC never.

What I’m primarily interested in today is to outline ownership percentages that are important in any US-based takeover.

1.  at 80% ownership, the acquirer can file a consolidated tax return, meaning losses in one part of the company can be used to offset otherwise taxable income in another.  As well, funds can pass freely from one part of the combined company to another without being considered (taxable) dividends.

2.  at 90% ownership, under the law in Delaware (where virtually every publicly traded US company is domiciled) the acquirer can force the other 10% to tender their shares.  Not having a minority interest makes running the combined company much easier administratively.  Specifically, the firm doesn’t have to concern itself with a tiny number of shareholders whose sole aim may be to become enough of a nuisance to be bought out at a higher price.

3.  at 90% ownership, dissenting shareholders do have the right to appeal to the Delaware Court of Chancery.  There, they can argue that they–but not the vast majority who have accepted the takeover offer–deserve a higher price.  Whatever the outcome, they are still compelled to sell their shares.

The process can be time-consuming.  It’s also risky.  The dissenters’ funds are tied up while the appeal is being heard–and if they lose, they’ll end up with the takeover price, less their legal expenses and will get the money maybe two years from now.

4.  SIG and ZLC are in the same industry.  If I understand US tax law correctly (a big “if”), this fact makes the accumulated tax losses of ZLC more readily available to SIG than would normally be the case.  This could be important, since my cursory reading of the ZLC 10-k suggests ZLC lost just under $500 million in the US during 2009-2012.  Those losses would be worth around $140 million to SIG if they could be used immediately, even if ZLC already used some of them in 2009 to recapture earlier taxes paid.

this may well be an interesting chancery court case

Several large institutional owners of ZLC shares have voiced their intention not to tender all/some of their shares to SIG and to seek a higher price in chancery court.  This may simply be bluster.  If not, I think the case will be an interesting one.

SIG has said that it expects to improve ZLC’s operating results by $50 million a year by using the SIG sourcing apparatus and by another $20 million by plugging ZLC into SIG’s administrative structure.  It expects a final $30 million from sales growth and repairs.  Then, of course, there’s that $140 million in potential tax benefits.

What I find interesting is that just about all this extra value is created by the fact that SIG is the new owner.  A private equity buyout, for example, wouldn’t have anything like the same positive effect, since it wouldn’t have the appropriate sourcing and repair infrastructure (I’ve visited the SIG diamond vault, by the way).  And their use of ZLC tax losses would be far more restricted.

Are minorities entitled to share in value being created solely from intellectual any physical property owned by SIG?  If it come to chancery court, the argument should be interesting.

 

 

 

 

 

value investing, American-style–riskier than it seems

March 5, 2014 By in activist investing, activist invstors, book value, Current Market Thoughts, distressed assets, growth vs value Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

First, my usual caveat when I write on this subject.  I’m a dyed-in-the-wool growth stock investor.  But I my initial training was as a value investor.  And I practiced that craft for my first eight years in the business.  (Then I began to research mid-cap Pacific Basin stocks in earnest.  They had, at the time, a unique combination of extremely low valuations and unusually high growth.  After a couple of years of owning these hybrids I woke up one day and realized I had morphed into a growth stock investor.) Since that time, I’ve worked side by side with value colleagues for most of the rest of my career, though.

Growth investing is all about finding situations where a company is likely to expand its profits much faster than the consensus expects, and/or at an above average rate for much longer than the consensus believes.  It’s about where the company is going, not where it is now.

value investing

Value investing, in contrast, is all about where the company is now.   It’s about finding companies whose equities have been beaten down excessively by overemotional holders who have abandoned ship because of temporary earnings disappointment.  This disappointment can come from any number of causes.  Common ones include:  highly cyclical companies entering the down part of their business cycle, a big misstep by a normally competent management, or flat-out terrible corporate managers.

As an astute former value colleague put it, “There are no bad businesses, only bad managers.”  Put another way, there is enduring worth in a company’s tangible (think:  factories and inventories) and intangible (think: brand names, market positioning) assets that persists despite whatever earnings disappointments the firm may be experiencing at present.

In the first two causes I cite, time will cure the earnings deficiency.  Wayward shareholders will rediscover their zeal for the name and bid the stock price up aggressively.

But what if the management is genuinely awful?  In this case, value investors believe that the incompetents will be shown the door and be replaced by more highly skilled individuals.  The board of directors may do this, because, after all, that’s their job.  Or shareholders may demand a change.  (Fat chance of either of these happening, in my view.)  Or–and this is particularly American–either activist investors or hostile acquirers will swoop in and force a change.

two risks

As far as I can see, this last American idea–that justice will be served and the bad management tossed out–is valid in the US, but almost nowhere else.  Just look at the experience of activist value investors over the past quarter century in Japan or in continental Europe.  Yet, oddly enough, otherwise rational American value investors try the same tactic over and over, each time in the expectation of a different result.

This risk has been around for a long time.  The second hasn’t.

One of the deep underlying assumptions of value investing is that a company’s assets have an enduring economic worth, despite current headwinds.  All we need is some spark, some catalyst that will enable this worth to shine through.  And we can wait, since the value of accumulated assets is unlikely to deteriorate.

This is the sense behind the observation that a stock is trading at a discount to book value–that is, to the total sum of the assets the company owns, after subtracting out anything it owes to the rest of the world.  Calculations of “book” are based on the actual historical cost of acquiring the assets, which very often understates (usually by a lot) what it would cost to replace them.

Two new, still poorly understood, threats to this view:  the internet and Millennials.

Take suburban shopping malls as an example.  Millennials, at least more affluent ones, seem to like to live in cities, not the suburbs.  Internet shopping has reached the point where retailers are openly saying (they’ve probably secretly know this for much longer) that they have too much mall retail space.  Who to sell it to?

In other words, demographic/technological change is accelerating.  This increases the chance that balance sheet assets are writeoffs waiting to happen rather than “straw hats in winter,” needing only a change of season to flower.

 

breaking companies apart: the cons

February 10, 2014 By in activist invstors, economics, hedge funds, Portfolio management Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Many times, separating a conglomerate into its component parts creates value.  Sometimes, it can produce enormous gains.  Spinoffs of corporate stepchildren are often particularly lucrative.  Take Coach (COH) for instance.  Its stock rose by 40x in the first five   years after it was spun off, unloved and starved for expansion capital, from Sara Lee.

There are other instances, however, where breakup can be disastrous.  This may not be evident at first in the stock price action of the separate components, but the ultimate bad news can happen in a number of ways:

1.  Onerous corporate liabilities–debt, lawsuit liabilities, incompetent executives…may all be shunted into one of the new parts, which is more or less designed to fail.  No one will say this, of course.

The first place to look for this kind of imbalance is in the part where the CEO and other top executives aren’t going.  Often, executives in the disfavored part of the split will be so excited to finally be the top dog that they’re delusional about their ability to deal with the negatives they’re being loaded down with.  After all, Davy Crockett might have survived the Alamo if he’d been a step quicker;  the Donner party might have gotten through those mountains…

2.  Sometimes a proposed split will end up forcing apart two businesses which need each other to be successful.  In the current hedge fund era, when individuals with little operating experience can wield large amounts of financial capital, this is a particular danger.  Activists. for example, have wanted Target (TGT) to sell/divest its credit card operations a couple of years ago.  Yes, TGT would receive a large one-time payment, and its stock would probably go up.  But its credit-related operating costs would rise.  And the company would have lost the considerable “Big Data” advantage that it gets from being able to see all the credit transactions of its cardholders–not merely transactions done at Target stores.

I think the current talk of splitting up Microsoft (MSFT) is well worth monitoring in this regard.  Sure, spin off  the consumer device business.  To my mind, though, splitting Windows, Office and the cloud from one another is just asking for trouble.

3.  Another issue that has emerged in recent years–the activists may be bunglers.  Look at J C Penney (JCP).  Activists correctly saw that JCP was crediting profits it got from its control of valuable real estate to its retailing operations.  That covered up the true weakness of the company’s retail offering.  But their attempt to “fix” retailing before breaking up the company went horribly awry.  Worse, they persisted in their mistaken direction so long that they created a downward spiral the company has yet to pull out of.  The stock, which some speculated could be worth $50 a share, has dropped from around $30 to $5 or so as a result of their “stewardship.”