Gwalior Chemicals - Special Situation

Gwalior Chemicals announced on the 8th of June that it was selling its chemical business to Lanxess. The total enterprise value of the deal is Rs 536 crores with Lanxess taking over debt of Rs 156 crores. The equity value accruing to the company would be Rs 380 crores. The company would be still left with a plant at Ankhleshwar.

The management has gone on record saying that they intend to return 100 crores out of Rs 380 crores to the shareholders either thru a one time dividend or share buyback.

The current equity capital of the company is Rs 24.67 crores.

So we are saying that the shareholder will accrue a sale value of Rs 154 per share out of which the company intends to return approximately Rs 40 per share either in the form of dividend or share buyback.

The current stock price of the company is Rs 92. A classic Graham opportunity. Either the market hasn’t figured this out or there is something that I m missing here. Looks like a very attractive deal.

Infosys - Stable friend

I have laid my hands on the current years Infosys balance sheet. As always it a joy to read for both the quantity and quality of disclosures.

Consolidated income has gone upto Rs 21693 crores a jump of 29.96% over the previous year. Net profit has grown to Rs 6828 crores from Rs 4941 crores a jump of 38%. The company continues to improve performance on all cost varaibales as a % of sales with operating profit at 34.08% . Sundry Debtor cycle has been bought down and stands at 16.7 % of revenues as opposed to 19.8% of sales last year.

EPS increased by 31.1% to Rs 99.76 per share from Rs 76.2 per share. Return on capital employed has improved from 41.38% to 42.9%.

Infosys continues to be a high margin high ROCE business with impeccable management track record. I see a few challenging years ahead but Infosys has the management and the organisational competency to ride thru this challenging phase.

A few other observations.

Cost of Capital
I had written last year about Infosys’s computation of cost of capital and the management decision to look at a minimum return of twice the cost of capital on average capital employed and thrice the cost of capital on average invested capital. The current cost of capital for Infosys is 12.18%. it has come down from 13.32% last year as Infosys has factored in 7% as return on risk free capital as opposed to 8% last year for computing cost of capital.

Dividend policy
The company has stated and is maintaining a dividend payout ratio of 30% of net profits which they has listed down as a strategy last year.

Cash on the balance sheet :-(
Cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet have increased to nearly Rs 10000 crores which is invested in fixed deposits. This has been my only sore point with Infosys. I don’t get the logic on maintaining such high cash levels which is depressing ROCE.

Infosys management has always maintained that they would not be keen in looking at aggressive acquisitions to grow. It would invariably be niche acquisitions to fill skillset or geographical gaps. The business remains immensely profitable and throws out substantial amounts of cash every year. Infosys had also restructured its biggest cost variable - employee cost in the last downturn to incorporate a significant chunk of variable component in it to factor in significant downturns.
With so much buffer available in place I really don’t see the logic of maintaining such high cash levels. Ideally I would want the management to constantly buyback shares so as to reduce the equity base and improve EPS and ROCE.

I don’t even mind a lower dividend payout ratio and a higher share buyback program bcos share buyback is more tax friendly.

I continue to hold some Infosys shares and plan to retain them but not planning to add more as of now.

Out of body experience

Wikipedia defines an “Out-of-body experience” (OBE or sometimes OOBE), is an experience that typically involves a sensation of floating outside of one's body and, in some cases, perceiving one's physical body from a place outside one's body.

The ability to stand away from oneself and watch ourselves and our behaviour in a particular situation.

I want to take extend this concept to a “Out of market” experience. Can we take ourselves out of the market and observe our own thoughts and behaviour at every stage of the market ?

A few months back everybody and their grandmothers were talking about a market which having jumped off the cliff was very likely to continue falling. To quote Munger “ The light at the end of the tunnel appears to be of the incoming train”.

I remember a few participants in the market talking about a bear market rally and I specifically remember Shankar Sharma doing it. His thought was that though we are in secular bear market there could be swift bear market rallies which could take the market up by nearly 50%. I was at that point wondering how do market participants behave in a bear market rally?. Wouldn’t the belief/ knowledge that it is a bear market rally curb the rally or does one tend to alter outlook when one reaches the situation?

This brings me back to my original thought of “ Out of market” experience. Can I at this stage take myself out of the exuberance that I experience right now seeing my stock go up 20% everyday and ponder?

Ponder on whether is the worst over or are we amidst a sharp bear market rally and the jump from the cliff has landed us with Alice in Wonderland.

For ppl who have had the privilege to watch Darby, Tigger & Pooh along with their children( I do with my daughter) it’s the time to move that finger to their heads and “Think Think Think”.

Bull Market Blogger

I am at a risk of being labelled as the “bull market blogger” who appears when the markets perk up and disappears as the down cycle starts :-).

I have been fairly irregular on the blog over the last few months primarily due to the fact that I had to make a choice between saving my business and saving my blog :-). Clearing business won over the blog.

Plan to write more often and provide a update on the past ideas that I had listed in the blog.

Aditya Birla Chemicals ( Bihar Caustic) - Q3 results

Sensex - 8197
Price - 31.15

I had originally posted on Aditya Birla Chem here followed by updates on the Q1 and Q2 results.

The company’s Q3 results are back on track post slight downturn in Q2 because of the boiler blast which affected production. Sales has grown sequentially from Rs 46 crores in Q2 to Rs 49.8 crores in Q3. More importantly Net profit has grown from Rs 6.4 crores to Rs 12 crores where the Q2 profitability was affected due to one time expense on repair and maintenance. Quarterly EPS moved up from 2.78 to 5.14.

Cumulative EPS for first nine months 13.6 and annualise EPS works out to be Rs 18.33. The stock currently is trading at nearly 1/3rd its book value and a P/E ratio of 1.71 times.

The company also got rechristened to Aditya Birla Chemicals from Bihar Caustic. I continue to hold the stock and add at opportunities

Odds & Ends

On one of my previous post regarding Alex from Moneyvidya posed a question to me and I quote him

“Are margins of safety not based on intrinsic values which can only be estimated from the fundamentals. Do you know of a way to create or measure a margin of safety for an investment which protects you from the possibility that all your knowledge of the fundamental properties of the security are incorrect?”

I think one of the most important things in investing or in all aspects of our lives is to understand the concept of probability and the potential payoff arising out a probable event.

When we buy a lottery ticket lets assume the following structure
Scenario 1

Price of ticket – Rs 1
No of participant - 100
Potential payoff = Rs 100 – Rs 10 ( Lottery provider’s fees) – Rs 20 ( Government taxes)= Rs 70

So for a probability of 1 in a 100 we have a potential payoff of 70 times.

The net payoff of this transaction is 1*(70) + 99*(-1) = -29

Most lotteries/ casinos are structured in such a manner where the participants lose money.

Scenario 2
Now let us assume that the lottery provider waived of his fees and the government its taxes and some benevolent donor added a extra Rs 25 to the kitty. Lets examine the structure now

Price of ticket – Rs 1
No of participant - 100
Donor contribution Rs 25
Potential payoff = Rs 100 + Rs 25 = Rs 125

So for a probability of 1 in a 100 we have a potential payoff of 125 times.
The net payoff of this transaction is 1*(125) + 99*(-1) = +26 times

In scenario 2 the odds are structured in our favour and hence a margin of safety is built in the trade. This need not necessarily mean that you will win the lottery but the odds are stacked in your favour.

Lets take this forward to stocks. When I evaluate stocks my starting point is management. What is the margin of safety in terms of management?. When I see a promoters personal yacht being put on the companies books it doesn’t necessarily mean the promoter will take the company down like Satyam but for me the odds are against me on this variable. There is a higher probability that the promoter will siphon out a bigger chunk on a latter date or indulge in corporate actions that is detrimental to shareholders.

I remember in one of my chats discussing real estate with one of my fellow bloggers and he telling me how can u expect ethical promoters in a business which is intrinsically unethical in India. It was a wonderful insight. So whether there is a problem today or not the odds are extremely high of encountering a black swan event in a real estate stock because of promoter action.

Will it happen? Not necessarily but the odds are stacked against you. To compensate for this is the margin of safety high enough on the financials in terms of intrinsic value to price and on a net off basis factoring both this variables is the odds in your favour.

Let us say that one has a portfolio of 10 stocks with positive payoffs on each stock. Lets look at the following structure

Number of stocks - 10
Probability of + returns on each stock - 60%
Probability of – returns on each stock - 40%
Can I eliminate a potential black swan event in a individual stock? The answer is no. To answer Alex’s question, we might encounter a black swan event in a single stock which cannot be eliminated but by building a margin of safety in each stock position one will on a overall portfolio basis achieve positive returns.

Déjà vu

This story is about a organisation which was structured to look at potential mispricing in the bond markets in terms of spreads between 2 instruments and look at those spreads reaching the long term average. The organisation worked its models around bonds, mortgages, equities and derivatives across myraid asset classes. The organisation spearheaded extensive use of quant and modeling in bond trading.

The organisation worked on magnifying its return by taking enormous amount of leverage 30:1. In a 5 year tenure it delivered a return of over 40% per annum. However its enormous leverage in the derivatives market of over $1 trillion wend bad in a month when markets across the world collapsed with a correlation of 1 throwing all the models out of the window. So we reached the stage where the organisation was on the verge of bankruptcy and threatened to take the entire financial system down with them. The huge counterparty risk coupled with fear threatened to freeze markets across the globe.

The bankers of course rushed to the big daddy FED who promptly worked out a bailout package to save the organisation and the markets. And we all lived happily ever after or did we?

I m sure most of us will look at this and the names that will come to our mind are Lehman Bros, AIG, Citi etc

Well this was about a hedge fund called Long Terms Capital Management which went down under in 1998 before the bailout.

The fund was started by John Meriwether ex head of bond trading for Salomon Brothers where he was forced to resign after his top bond trader admitted to falsifying bids in the US treasury auction. J M managed to rope in Nobel price winners Robert Merton and Myron Scholes of the famous Black Scholes model as partners and the funds partners were positioned as a intellectual breed apart. I just finished the book When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein. Interesting read.

There is a strong sense of déjà vu that creeps in as you see the same cycle repeating itself bringing financial markets to a crisis and I can lay a bet that we will see it play out again. “We learn from history that we don’t learn from history” - I had earlier written a blog on this.

PS: Here’s the amazing follow up to the storyline - John Meriwether post the LTCM fiasco went on along with his colleagues to start JWM partners which floated a Relative Value Opportunity Fund where the fund document stated that it would keep its leverage down to 15:1.

The funds posted gains for several years, but in the first quarter of 2008 posted losses, of 31% in the flagship Relative Value Opportunity bond fund.

JM quotes “While we are clearly disappointed by our recent performance, we remain optimistic about the current opportunity set,".
"While we do not welcome the increased volatility in our returns, we believe that increased market volatility is one of the primary preconditions for creating interesting relative value situations," he added
And this was first quarter last year. Bond spreads kept widening significantly post that. History repeats.