Category Archives: securities analysis

my take on Disney (DIS)

March 19, 2020 By in securities analysis, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Post the Fox Studios acquisition, DIS remains in three businesses:  broadcasting, theme parks and movies.  December 2019 quarterly operating income from the three (ex direct to consumer) was roughly $5 billion.  Of that, just under half came from theme parks, a third came from broadcasting and the rest from movies.

All three business lines have their warts:

–ESPN, the largest part of broadcasting, has long since lost its allure as a growth vehicle; ABC is breakeven-ish; I think there’s some scope for boosting results from Fox.  Pencil in slow/no growth

–theme parks are (were?) booming, but they’re a highly business cycle sensitive business.  We’ll see that, I think, in March- and June-quarter results.  so even though it’s Disney we should apply a discount multiple to these earnings

–movies are traditionally a low multiple business because of the irregularity of new releases and their typical hit-and-miss nature.  DIS has been exceptionally good for a long time under Bob Iger (it was pretty awful before him), but this is still inherently a low multiple enterprise.

 

This is the main reason the stock spent years bouncing around the $110 level with flattish $10 billion, $6 a share, in earnings.  In the era of human analysts, it wasn’t just the earnings that held the company back.  It was also knowledge of the slow demise of ESPN, the (in hindsight too conservative) sense that theme parks were nearing a cyclical peak, and the idea that the company’s incredible movie hot streak might come to an end.

Then there’s the streaming business, where–to pluck a number out of the air, DIS is spending 10% of its operating income to develop.

 

A couple of months ago no price seemed too high for Wall Street to pay for Disney+, with the stock peaking at $153.    If we say $25 of the rise was due to streaming, at the top the market was valuing Disney+ at $40 billion+, or roughly a quarter of the value of Netflix.

The stock has fallen by about 40% since.

Now, hang onto your hat:

If we assume that the implied value of Disney+ has fallen in tandem with NFLX, it’s now valued at $32 billion.  This gives a residual value for the rest of DIS of about $140 billion.

That would imply a multiple of 13x current earnings–or, alternatively, an assumed 20% decline in profits.  The decline would likely be mostly (I’m assuming entirely) in the parks and movie divisions, implying that area’s income would fall by somewhere around 30%.

So–in this way of looking at things, we are assuming substantial success for Disney+ and a decline in the most cyclical businesses of roughly half what the market is assuming for companies like Marriott.  It would be cheaper to create a “synthetic” DIS out of NFLX + MAR shares, although what would be missing would be the Disney brand.

My conclusion:  Mickey and Minnie aren’t screaming “Buy me.”

 

 

 

 

Boeing

January 16, 2020 By in Boeing, securities analysis, Uncategorized Tags: , 1 Comment

BA has lost about a quarter of its value since fatal accidents caused its newest 737 model civilain aircraft to be pulled off the market.  Stories are starting to circulate (that I’m hearing them suggests “starting” may not be the best word) that the Sage of Omaha is beginning to buy Boeing (BA) stock.   The rationale?   …a value investor‘s belief that the company’s woes are temporary and that all the probable bad news is already discounted in the stock price.  Buffett has positions in several airline companies and in at least one supplier to BA, so he arguably would have better insight than most into the BA situation.

initial thoughts

How plausible is this?  Is the rumor based on fact or simply launched by a third party with an agenda?  …if the former, is this a repeat of Buffett’s foray into IBM, another questionable trip down memory lane?  what’s BA’s price to book, price to cash flow?  I don’t know.

I’ve never owned BA during 25+ years managing other people’s money.  I’ve never felt a compulsion to investigate it, either, even though I worked for a long time in value-oriented shops where BA was often a topic of discussion.  But I was curious about what interest in BA might not only say about the company but also about the temperature of the market.  So I took a quick look.

I went to the Fidelity research area to get some relevant ratios, in this case the P/CF and P/B.  I found:  $185 billion market cap, P/B of negative $7+ or so a share and P/CF of 30x–not what I would have called a “value” buy.  I decided to take another step and look at BA’s September quarter 10-Q  on the SEC Edgar site.

the latest 10-Q (9/19)

random-ish figures:

–BA has total assets of $133 billion.  Of that $13 billion is plant and equipment, $12 billion is goodwill and other intangible assets and $75 billion is customer financing.  So this is not a plant and equipment story.  It’s about intangible assets, craft skill/ proprietary company know how, being a national champion.

–Book value is negative.  How so?  The most important reason is that over the years BA has spent over $50 billion buying back its own stock, including $1 billion+ during the first nine months of 2019.  Accountants deduct that expenditure from net worth.  Another $15 billion gets subtracted though”comprehensive loss” related to pension plans.  Ex those items, book value would be about $65 billion, meaning the stock is trading at about 3x adjusted book.  Again, not an obvious value story.

–Cash flow, which was about $12 billion during the first three quarters of 2018 is slightly negative for the comparable period of 2019.

my take

The idea behind the typical value stock is that the company has assets that have lost value for now because of economic circumstances or lack of skill of current management.  Once economic conditions improve and/or management is replaced by more competent executives, their value will shine through again.  That’s because the assets haven’t been destroyed, they’ve just been misused.

I don’t think that’s the case here.  The assets in question are intangible.  The strongest, I think, is that BA is one of only two global large commercial aircraft manufacturers–and the only one in the US.  As for the rest, if press reports are correct, BA tried to solve a hardware problem (very heavy engines) with software, a dubious proposition at any time, according to my coder son-in-law.  Worse than that, BA may have been less than forthcoming with regulators about potential risks with this solution.  As for myself, I’d go to considerable pains to avoid flying on a 737 MAX, given that the penalty for a mistake is so high.

So I don’t get bullishness about BA for two reasons:  I think intangibles like craft skill and industrial software can melt away in short order in the way, say, a chemical processing plant can’t.  Also, given what I think is the severity of BA’s problems, I don’t think a loss of a quarter of the company’s stock market value is an overreaction.  If anything, I think it’s an underreaction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

public utilities and California wildfires

November 7, 2019 By in public utilities, securities analysis, securities markets, Securities regulation, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

public utilities

The idea behind public utilities is that society is far worse off if a municipality has, say, ten companies vying to provide essential services like power and water to citizens, tearing up streets to install infrastructure and then maybe going out of business because they can’t get enough customers.  Better to give one (or some other small number) a monopoly on providing service, with government supervising and regulating what the utility can charge.

The general idea of this government price-setting is to permit a maximum annual profit return, say 5% per year, on the utility company’s net investment in plant and equipment (net meaning after accumulated depreciation).  The precise language and formula used to translate this into unit prices will vary from place to place.

The ideal situation for a public utility is one where the population of the service area is expanding and new capacity is continually needed.  If so, regulators are happy to authorize a generous return on plant, to make it easier for the utility to raise money for expansion in bond and stock markets.

mature service areas

Once the service area matures, which is the case in most of the US, the situation changes significantly.  Customers are no longer clamoring to get more electric power or water.  They have them already.  What they want now is lower rates.  At the same time, premium returns are no longer needed to raise new money in the capital markets.  The result is that public service commissions begin to reduce the allowable return on plant–downward pressure that there’s no obvious reason to stop.

In turn, utility company managements typically respond in two ways:  invest cash flow in higher-potential return non-utility areas, and/or reduce operating costs.  In fact, doing the second can generate extra money to do the first.

How does a utility reduce costs?

One way is to merge with a utility in another area, to cut administrative expenses–the combined entity only needs one chairman, for example, one president, one personnel department…

Also, if each utility has a hundred employees on call to respond to emergencies, arguably the combined utility only needs one hundred, not two.    In the New York area, where I live, let’s say a hundred maintenance people come from Ohio during a blackout and another hundred from Pennsylvania to join a hundred local maintenance workers in New York.  Heroic-sounding, and for the workers in question heroic in fact.  But a generation ago each utility would each have employed three hundred maintenance workers locally, most of whom have since been laid off in cost-cutting drives.

Of course, this also means fewer workers available to do routine maintenance, like making sure power lines won’t get tangles up in trees.

the California example

I don’t know all the details, but the bare bones of the situation are what I’ve described above:

–the political imperative shifts from making it easier for the utility to raise new funds (i.e., allowing a generous return on plant) to keeping voters’ utility bills from increasing (i.e., lowering the permitted return).

–the utility tries to maintain profits by spending less, including on repair and maintenance

The utility sees no use in complaining about the lower return; the utility commission sees no advantage in pointing out that maintenance spending is declining (since a major cause is the commission lowering the allowable return).   So both sides ignore the worry that repair and maintenance will eventually be reduced to a level where there’s a significant risk of power failure–or in California’s case, of fires.  When a costly failure does occur, neither side has any incentive to reveal the political bargain that has brought it on.

utilities as an investment

In the old days, it was almost enough to look at the dividend yield of a given utility, on the assumption that all but the highest would be relatively stable.  So utilities were viewed more or less as bond proxies.  Because of the character of mature utilities, no longer.

In addition, in today’s world a lot more is happening in this once-staid industry, virtually all of it, as I see things, to the disadvantage of the traditional utility.  Renewables like wind and solar are now in the picture and made competitive with traditional power through government subsidies.  Utilities are being broken up into separate transmission and generation companies, with transmission firms compelled to allow independent power generators to use their lines to deliver output to customers.

While the California experience may be a once-in-a-lifetime extreme, to my mind utilities are no longer the boring, but safe bond proxies they were a generation or more ago.

Quite the opposite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

business line analysis and sum-of-the-parts

January 23, 2018 By in business line analysis, securities analysis, Stock ideas, stock market, sum of the parts analysis, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

This is mostly a reply to reader Alex’s comment on a post from early 2017 about Disney (DIS).

The most common, and in my opinion, most reliable method securities analysts use to project future earnings for multi-business companies is doing a separate analysis for each business line.  This effort is aided by an SEC requirement that such publicly traded companies disclose operating revenues and profits for each line of business it is in.

In the case of DIS, it’s involved in:  broadcast, including ESPN; movie production and distribution; theme parks and resorts; and sales of merchandise related to the other business lines.

There is plenty of comparative data–from trade associations, government bodies and the financials of publicly traded single-business firms–to help with the analysis.  And every company has, in theory at least, an investor relations department that answers questions put to it by investors. ( My experience since retiring as a money manager for institutional clients is that many backward-thinking well-established companies–DIS and Intel come to mind–can be distinctly unhelpful to their most important supporters, you and me.  (To be fair, I haven’t spoken with DIS’s IR people for several years, so they may be better now.))

Analysis consists in projecting revenues/ profits for each business line and using the results as the key to constructing a series of whole-company income statements–one each for this year, next year and the year after that.

The trickiest part is to decide how to value this earnings stream.  The ability to do this well either comes with experience or from having worked for a professional investor who’s willing to teach.

 

More tomorrow, or in a day or two if I don’t get my film editing homework done today.