Category Archives: Basic Concepts

Disney (DIS): the valuation issue

February 10, 2017 By in Cable, earnings surprise, Entertainment, securities markets, strong earnings, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 4 Comments

Long-time readers may recall that I became interested in DIS in late 2009, the company acquired Marvel Entertainment, a stock I held, for stock and cash.

corporate structure

I hadn’t looked at DIS for years before that.  I quickly learned that DIS was a conglomerate, that is, a type of company where the most useful analysis comes taking the sum of its constituent parts.

I knew the company’s movie business had been struggling for some time and the theme parks were being hit hard by recession.  Still, I was more than mildly surprised that ESPN (plus other media that we can safely ignore) made up somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of DIS’s operating earnings.  Why did they still call it Disney?

multiples

Given that the parks are a highly cyclical business and movies moderately so–meaning the PE applied to those earnings should be relatively low–and that ESPN was showing all the characteristics of a secular growth business–meaning high PE–I thought that ESPN represented at least 80% of the market capitalization of DIS.  (That’s despite the fact that the market would apply a higher than normal multiple to cyclically depressed results).

So DIS was basically ESPN with bells and whistles.

ESPN’s turning point

In 2012, ESPN made a major effort to enter the UK sports entertainment market.  To my mind, this wasn’t a particularly good sign, since it implied ESPN believed the domestic market was maturing.  Worse, ESPN lost the bidding, closing out its path to growth through geographic expansion.

It seemed to me that DIS management, which I regard as excellent, understood clearly what was happening.  It began to redirect corporate cash flow away from ESPN and toward the movie and theme park business, which had better growth prospects, and where it has since had unusually good success.

2014-16 results

Over the past two fiscal years (DIS’s accounting year ends in September), the company’s line of business results look like this:

ESPN +        revenues up by +11.9%, operating earnings by +6%

parks           revenues up by +12%, op earnings  +24%

movies        revenues up by +30%, op earnings +74%

merchandise   revenues up by +4.6%, op earnings +33%.

the valuation issue

ESPN has gone ex growth.  This implies these earnings no longer deserve a premium PE multiple.  To me, the fact that ESPN now treats WWE as a sport (!!) just underlines its troubles.

The other businesses are booming.  But they’re also cyclical.  So while improving efficiency implies multiple expansion, earnings approaching a cyclical high note implies at least some multiple contraction.

Because the two businesses are so different, I think Wall Street is making a mistake in treating earnings from the two as more or less equal.

calculating…

DIS will most likely earn $6 a share or so this fiscal year.  That will be something like $3 from ESPN and $3 from the rest.

Take the parks… first.  Let’s say I’d be willing to pay 18x earnings for their earnings.  If that’s the right number, then these businesses make up $54 a share in DIS value.

Now ESPN.  If we assume that the worst is over for ESPN in terms of subscriber and revenue-per-subscriber losses, we can argue that the future earnings stream looks like a bond’s.  If we think that ESPN should yield, say, 5% (a 20x earnings multiple), that would mean ESPN is worth $60 of DIS’s market cap.  If we’d still on the downslope, that figure could be a lot too high.

$54 + $60 = $114.  Current stock price:  $109.

my bottom line

My back of the envelope calculation for the parks… segment may be a bit too low.  I could also be persuaded that my figure for ESPN is too rich, but it would take a lot to make me want to move the needle higher for it.

Yes, most of DIS’s earnings are US-sourced, so the company could be a big winner from domestic income tax reform.

But if I were to be holding a fully valued stock on the idea of a tax reform boost, I’d prefer one with more solid underpinnings.  At $90, maybe the stock is interesting.  But I think ESPN–the multiple as much as the future earnings–remains a significant risk.

 

 

 

 

Trump on corporate income taxes

January 24, 2017 By in corporate income tax reform, income tax rates, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I think corporate tax reform is potentially the most significant item on the Trump administration agenda, as far as US stocks are concerned.

The Trump plan appears to have two parts:

–reduce the top corporate tax rate from 35% to, say, 20%.  For a firm that has 100% of its income in the US and which has no substantial current tax breaks, reducing the corporate tax rate would mean a one-time 23% increase in after-tax profit.

–eliminate foreign tax reduction devices.  American multinationals, facing high domestic corporate taxation, have resorted to two general types of tax avoidance devices.  They have: (1) transferred intellectual property (brand names, patents…) to low-tax foreign jurisdictions like Ireland, and (2) located distribution subsidiaries in similar places.  Hong Kong, where the income tax on profits generated by foreign companies is zero, is a favorite.

How this structure works:  a US-based multinational uses a Hong Kong subsidiary to pay a contract manufacturer in China $150 for a mobile telecom device.  The Hong Kong subsidiary sells the device to its US marketing subsidiary for $250.  The US company pays the Irish subsidiary a $100 royalty for the use of the firm’s proprietary technology and brand name.  It sells the device to a US customer for $600, recognizing, say, a $200 pre-tax profit in the US, and paying $70 in federal income tax.  Without Hong Kong and Dublin, the firm would have a pre-tax profit of $400 and pay $140 in tax.

If I understand correctly, President Trump’s intention is to tax this hypothetical multinational on the entire $400 of pre-tax earnings on sales made in the US–no longer allowing cash flow to be syphoned off to foreign tax havens.  At a 20% rate, the firm would pay $80 in federal income tax.

The bottom line:  while tax reform of the type I think Mr. Trump has in mind might leave large multinationals no worse off than they are today, it would be a significant benefit to small and medium-sized firms, which tend not to have elaborate tax departments and to be much more US-focused.  Just as important, it would eliminate the motivation to create offshore profit centers.

As/when the timing of corporate tax reform becomes clearer, I’d expect further rotation on Wall Street away from multinationals and toward domestic-oriented stocks.  A quick-and-dirty way of locating beneficiaries–look for corporate tax rates at or near 35%.

reading a financial newspaper

January 11, 2017 By in Uncategorized, using research Tags: , 1 Comment

Early on in my investing career, I came to realize that it’s better to read financial newspapers by starting on the back page and working toward the front.

How so?

As investors, we’re searching for information that is potentially important but not yet well known.  Arguably, the best information won’t yet be in print.  But as it does appear, it will usually come in the form of small articles on the back pages.  Typically, when information is on the front page, or when it appears as a magazine cover, investors normally begin to think hard about adopting the contrary stance.

At first blush, reading from back to front is hard to do with online news services.  Worse,  the order of online news is constantly being curated, meaning that the most popular items are pushed toward the front.  The less well-received–that is, the more interesting for us–are progressively pushed toward the rear.

Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times both have introduced what is being described as a “new” way of reading the newspaper, a digital form of the print newspaper.  Personally, I prefer the print newspaper.  But I find this digital form just as useful when I’m on the road.

US corporate tax reform (ii)

December 14, 2016 By in corporate tax reform in the US, deferred taxes, income tax rates, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

There are likely to be losers from corporate income tax reform.  They’re likely to be of two types:

–companies that currently have sweetheart tax deals, which, as things stand now (meaning:  subject to the success of intensive lobbying), will go away as part of reform.  A related group is multinationals who’ve twisted their corporate structures into pretzels to locate taxable income outside the US

–companies making losses currently and/or that have unused tax-loss carryforwards.  The value of those unused losses will likely be reduced by a lot.  This is a somewhat more complicated issue than it seems.  In their reports to public shareholders, money-losing firms can use anticipated future tax benefits to reduce the size of current losses.  The ins-and-outs of this are only important in isolated cases, so I’ll just say that for such firms book value is likely overstated

Another potential consequence of tax reform is that investors may begin to take a harder look at tax-related items on the income and cash flow statements.  Could markets will begin to apply a discount to the stocks of firms that use gimmicks to depress their tax rate?  Thinking some what more broadly, it may mean the markets will take a dimmer view of other sorts of financial engineering (share buybacks are what I personally hope for).  It might also be that companies themselves will reemphasize operation experience rather than financial sleight of hand when choosing their CEOs.

US corporate tax reform

December 13, 2016 By in corporate tax reform in the US, income tax rates, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

 why look at the corporate tax rate?

As I’ve mentioned on occasion in other posts, one of the features of today’s US stock market is that it seems to pay no attention at all to the rate at which publicly traded companies pay tax.  All that counts is (after-tax) eps and eps growth.

A generation ago, when I entered the market, the opposite was the case.  Acting on the assumption that a company couldn’t sustain a super-low tax rate for a long time, analysts scrupulously adjusted, or “normalized,” a company’s tax rate, usually to the statutory maximum.  Of course, it has turned out that some firms–and some industries–have been able to maintain a sub-par tax rate for far longer than anyone imagined possible back then.

the US tax system

There are two main issues with the current US corporate tax system, as I see it.  The statutory rate of 35% is very high in comparison with the world average of around 20%.  So, if there isn’t a crucial reason to locate here, the US is financially a bad place for a company to have operations.  Also, politically savvy industries–oil and gas drilling, for example–have been able to lobby for special breaks that make the tax code unduly complex and the amount that the IRS collects less than it should be.

reform likely

President-elect Trump is promising to address this issue by lowering the federal corporate tax rate to perhaps 15%.  Implied, but not yet stated, is that the tax code will also be simplified by wiping out special exemptions for certain industries.  There seems to be widespread support for both parts of such reform.  So it seems to me that the effort, which has always previously been derailed by special interests, has a good chance to succeed.

market consequences

This means, though, that for the first time in a long while, analysts will be scrutinizing company financials to try to separate winners from losers.

potential winners

The obvious winners are firms that have large amounts of US taxable income and that pay cash taxes at the full 35% rate.  The pharmaceutical industry is one.  No surprise that most of the tax inversions of the recent past have been in pharma.

More tomorrow.