Tuesday 19 February 2013

A leisurely update

Now I'm not expecting to do frequent portfolio updates as I don't trade very often and most short-term market movements are just noise anyway but quite a lot has happened to my portfolio in the past month and a half so I thought I'd better get my thoughts together. Yesterday, my largest position - All Leisure Group (LON:ALLG) - announced their 2012 results. It's risen quite a lot this year, ~57% even after the pull back after the results, but I'm getting increasingly bullish on this share and don't see any need to trim it yet. It's actually my pick this year (and last year!) for the Motley Fool's share competition and I did a write up here as well as follow up comments so I recommend reading that first before reading this blog post.

The results at first seem very subdued. Revenue takes a large jump up but full year profits were tiny at £0.8m. What's there to be excited about? Well, 2012 is pretty much a transitional year for ALLG. Due to a weak cruising market (partly due to the Costa Concordia tragedy) and a fleet in need of a revamp the directors took the decision to pull three (out of four) of their ships out of service for a good part of the year for upgrades. Also, for one of their ships a third party charter pulled out and left the vessel out of service (during which they decided to do the upgrades). As a result, their cruising division showed a stonking loss for the year of -£6.9m - they say the loss of the charter 'contributed significantly' to this loss. However, this is in the past and we now have a fleet that's been recently upgraded and ready to operate at full capacity again. This appears to be paying dividends already:
"At the start of the winter 2012, mv Voyager was in the exceptional position of being 82% sold for that season prior to her inaugural sailing. Currently revenues per diem for mv Voyager are forecast to be 20% higher than achieved 2011/12 on mv Discovery. This is driven by the increased number of outside and balcony cabins and less capacity."
"Over the winter 2011/12, mv Minerva was out of service for just over three months, whilst a substantial technical upgrade was carried out. During this time the ship also underwent an extensive upgrade to both public areas and the 197 cabins. 73% of the cabins are outside cabins and clever use of space increased the number of balcony cabins from 12 to 44. A new observation lounge added to Promenade Deck increases the on board facilities. Passenger response to the upgraded vessel has been extremely positive."
So if cruising caused such a big loss, what made up the difference? Here we get on to what I see as being a very exciting development for ALLG - the acquisition of Page and Moy Travel group. They first announced the acquisition here where the headline figures got my attention. They paid £4.2m for a group doing £107.6m in revenues! How did they get it so cheap? The catch - it made an operating loss of £5.6m in 2011. Not great. The previous owners were two banks - HSBC & Credit Agricole - who ended up with it after the previous private equity owners, HgCapital, went bust with it in the 2008 downturn. It's probably worth noting at this point that HgCapital paid £180m for it. Whoa. Clearly they were far too optimistic but it's clear this business has done pretty well before in the past to have warranted such a price. Naturally the banks here just wanted this loss making business off their books so weren't price sensitive allowing ALLG to swoop in and nab it for a relative song.

At the time of the acquisition I was a bit worried as it seemed a big risk to be taking on such a loss making business given the current one wasn't firing on all cylinders either. However the heavy degree of insider ownership re-assured me that if anyone was going to lose big here through hubris it was going to be the directors so I trusted they'd thought this through (I very, very strongly prefer owner-operator shares. Never forget the power of incentives!). The annual results give more detail on the acquisition so we can learn more about what's going on here. Let's take a look at some figures for Page & Moy in 2012:

Full year results:
Revenue: £93.9m, Profit: £4.6m

Contribution to results:
Revenue: £60.9m, Profit: £8.9m

Balance Sheet Pre-Acquisition:
Tangible Assets: -£14.7m

So this tells us another reason why they got the business so cheap - it has negative tangible assets. This has pros and cons: pro, it means the business probably operates on negative working capital (like the cruising business) so expansion is an extra source of cash which can be used in the business. con, it means if things turn south the business is in trouble. That being said, the directors also state the business is a "low-risk model and has no forward financial commitment for hotel costs, transportation costs, or aviation capacity", which it probably needs to be to make negative working capital operation safe and viable.

It also says that the timing of the acquisition flatters the profits by £4.3m, so the combined entities made a loss in this FY. However, the major plus is that management have already turned the £5.6m loss in to a £4.6m profit. It hence means they acquired the business for less than last year's profits! What a wonderfully shrewd move by management. Revenue is down from 2011, yes, but this is due to cutting unprofitable lines of business. To quote the results again:
Following a detailed strategic review of the Page and Moy Travel Group brands and product portfolio prior to its acquisition, a number of underperforming products and business lines have been discontinued for 2013. Ceasing to operate the ex UK coaching holidays and components of the Christmas programme was part of this strategy, along with the decision to phase out the Page & Moy brand and incorporate the profitable components of the business into Travelsphere's portfolio of tours. The Group then re-launched the Travelsphere brand as a value for money, yet quality product. The end of year results show this has been very successful and going forwards the flexible business model of our Tour Operating Division allows us to align our capacity to fluctuating demand.
This means the 'pro forma' results of the business in 2012 were:

Revenue: £160.4m
Operating profit: -£3.5m

However we now have all ships upgraded and back in action. Given the non-acquired business did £66.5m this year but did £80.4m in 2011 implies at least a boost of £14m in revenues just from ships coming back in. Stockopedia reckons that the brokers are putting them on £202m of revenue for 2013 (although these same brokers reckoned they'd do £192m of revenue this year and make a 5.2p profit - no idea how they thought that was possible!!) which seems high but potentially achievable given the ship upgrades in capacity and quality. For fun, let's imagine a set of  'pro forma' results that take the 2011 ALLG numbers (with no ships out of capacity) and the 2012 Page & Moy numbers and combine them:

Revenue: £174.3m
Operating profit: £8.0m

So this puts this hypothetical year (which is probably closer to an average year) on a P/E of 3 at the current share price! Now in this hypothetical year the directors are still complaining about how poor the results are due to the economic climate (they were in 2011 and in 2012's results,) so clearly they still see the margins here as being poor at ~4.6%. ALLG was doing solid >11% margins pre-2009 so clearly there's scope for improvement there (although I've no idea what P&M's average margins are). So, we have a business on a pro-forma P/E of 3 despite the E being disappointing. This is why I'm so very bullish on these shares and think there's still plenty more upside available when the true earnings power is revealed here in the next few years of results and the business gets re-rated to a more sensible valuation.

What are the risks here? Well, besides all the ones I've mentioned before in my other posts I think the big new one is balance sheet risk. The weak balance sheet of P&M means that the combined business only has £9.3m of net tangible assets and the previous tangibles are now intangibles. I think the benefit of increased earnings power here outweights this though.

That's my updated thesis on ALLG. Since my last update I've also added CLIG & SIGG to my portfolio. I got the idea for CLIG through a Motley Fool write up here (and there's more here) and I especially liked their shareholder-orientated incentive structure (as well as the dirt cheap price and wonderful business economics). This quote from the annual report really got my attention:
As shareholders are aware, we run a business with a very simple business model. We collect fees from our clients for our services, we pay our bills which are both forecastable and to a great extent fixed. We don't use leverage, nor off-balance sheet instruments, nor do we trade derivatives as principal (other than occasional low level hedging). There are no associated companies or minority interests within the Group. We do not use tax havens. We do not handle client monies. We have a significant amount of cash in the bank relative to our size and we basically stick to what we know.
With regard to remuneration we continue to distribute 30% of our profits as profit-share. Our staff, clients and shareholders understand this formulaic approach. It's a pity that this approach has not been embraced by the financial service industry generally. As it is, in many parts of the financial services industry it seems as if losses are not the responsibility of mangers rather it's the shareholders who take the rap. Whilst our formulaic approach seems out of keeping with many in our industry, at least our shareholders have an idea that our returns go up and down together with theirs.
We have continued to manage our business very conservatively. We have continued to attempt to keep costs down. We do not spend shareholders' funds entertaining and we generally attempt to manage our business as if shareholders were present in our offices every day of the week. One reason I would suggest that expenses are kept down is because staff are either shareholders themselves or own shares via the CLIG ESOP. At present staff own (including ESOP ownership) 27.9% of CLIG shares, and 75 out of 82 of us are incentivised in this way (a handful of more recent recruits do not yet hold options).
As for SIGG I got the idea from @marben100 on Twitter and read some notes @BrianGeee1 kindly sent me. Essentially it's a wind-up play for 96.4p of assets compared to a market price of 57p. There's a lot of worry on ADVFN about the quality of the assets and how illiquid they appear to be. The new management however take a low management fee of 0.5% but are largely compensated as to how quickly and effectively they can realise the assets for shareholders so I'm glad our incentives are aligned here. Even at a big hair-cut and a relative slow asset realisation process my IRR should be decent here. I currently also have one other share on buy list but I'm waiting for cash to build up before I buy it - I'll reveal more when I actually pick it up!

In other news, my big write up on LCG came good when not one but three potential bidders appeared! I made some comments in my stockopedia post here as to what I think could happen. I'm still very bullish on the shares. MGNS also announced their results today and they were pretty disappointing - especially the big dividend cut. The outlook is still grim but the price is so low for a business that is clearly only suffering from a cyclical downturn that I'm happy to still sit tight and wait it out. It's another owner-operator share and John Morgan has stepped back in as CEO to take charge so our incentives are aligned here - I trust him to focus on long term shareholder value.

We're clearly in a full on bull market in UK small caps at the moment, with the FTSE Small cap index (ex. investment companies) up 8.25% YTD and the AIM index up 6.64%. I'm a bit torn between the worrying signs of increasing optimism from other investors however I still think I can find companies on cheap valuations so I'm not taking money off the table yet. I've had a good start to the year so far - I made only one short-term performance prediction in my 2012 performance review and that was that there was no chance I'd better my IRR of 97% (which I made entirely through lucky timing). Currently I'm being proved very wrong and my IRR for 2013 YTD is 166% as my portfolio is up 13.8%! As much as I'd love to put this down to skill I have to hold my hand up and admit I'm just the lucky beneficiary of a bull market - a lot of my out-performance has been driven by a handful of concentrated positions (especially ALLG) so it's statistically meaningless unless I can repeat this over many, many years.

Right, that's the end of this update. My current portfolio allocation can be seen below (Disclosure: I own all the shares shown):


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