Analysis of Ladbrokes

Company: Ladbrokes

Business: A UK betting and gaming company. They are active with retail bookmaking and have over 2,800 betting shops as well as being active online but they admit to have been not aggressive enough with the online activities. Currently they are trying to change that with for instance partnership with Playtech.

Active: Their home market is UK and then they are market leaders in Ireland, Belgium and Spain. Currently stepping into China as well as Australia.

P/E: 7.5

Analysis of Severn Trent

Company: Severn Trent

Business: A UK water provider and waste water treatment company and are active with filtration and disinfection equipment to contract operations and analytical services for their customers.

Active: Strong focus UK, but are also active on Ireland, North America, South America, China, Egypt, Spain, Italy, China and Singapore.

P/E: 19.2

Comment: Another one that was shown as having a P/E of well below 10 in the screening program but did not according to my analysis.

Greenlight Capital: David Einhorn Q4 2013

David and Greenlight had a very busy quarter with the addition of several companies to their stock portfolio.

The new companies were:

Anadarko Pete Corp. - Oil and gas exploration and production company.

BP - British Petroleum the UK oil giant that I am shareholder in.

Chicos Fas Inc - A fashion company for women 30+.

Analysis of Powszechny Zaklad Ubezpieczen (PZU)

Company: Powszechny Zaklad Ubezpieczen SA

Business: The largest Polish insurance company. It is divided into three parts: Property and Casualty Insurance (market leader with 31% of the market), Life Insurance (market leader with 30% of the Polish market) and finally Open-End Pension Funds (third largest in Poland with 2.2 million customers).

Active: Poland which means no company diversification benefit but on the other hand Poland is booming at the moment so it might be good to focus.

P/E: 11.3

Analysis of Mobistar

Company: Mobistar

Business: A Belgian telecommunication company. They offer mobile telecom products and services as well as DSL with fixed telephony and high-speed internet. For companies they offer free telephone calls between colleagues etc.

Active: Belgium and Luxembourg

P/E: 4.4

Dalal Street: Mohnish Pabrai Q4 2013

The dealings of the extremely careful and copycat investor Mohnish Pabrai are here presented. This quarter contained high level of activity! Last quarter he did absolutely nothing. Maybe he took a well deserved vacation for three months or he simply found there to be nothing at all of interest.

Here is a link to the previous quarter of Dalal Street.

Conclusion: Mohnish made a significant addition to Horsehead Holding and the addition to General Motors were less then 1,000 shares so nothing. He also sold off around one third from his Goldman Sachs shares and it makes sense they start to be overvalued. Warren Buffett did not buy the shares in Goldman Sachs according to the market price in Q4 2013 because then he would probably not have bought any.

Analysis of Cez

Company: Cez

Business: A Czech electricity producer and distributer. Besides from electricity sales they are also active with telecommunications, informatics, nuclear research, planning, construction and maintenance of energy facilities, mining raw materials, and processing energy by-products.

Active: Very active in the Czech Republic that is the home market with an increasing presence in several central and eastern European countries such as Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Rumania as well as in Turkey.

P/E: 7.3

Analysis of Unilever

Company: Unilever

Business: A Dutch-British consumer product giant. They have several well known brands such as Dove, Axe, Lipton, Ben & Jerry's, Knorr, Vaseline, Cif, Bertolli etc. For the more complete list of brands please look here however they have in total over 400 brands so they only show the most successful ones.

Active: World wide. Their products are sold in over 190 countries of which 55% of the revenue comes from the emerging markets.

P/E: 17.4

Comment: I have started to see a couple of Happiness Stations appearing here in Berlin and sometimes it is only the Happiness Station and sometimes it is with the Dutch pancakes that are either made sweet or are made into something similar to pizza. This Happiness Stations with the "heart brand" ice cream (different country different name... Wall's, Langnese etc.). Each time I go past one of them it is completely full with people standing in line to buy ice cream. I am sure that for Unilever this is a only a small stream of revenue but what I like is that they have started up a new concept to push out their own ice cream directly to the consumer without being forced to share revenue with the ice cream sales person. The also step in with an alternative to pizza. When I see things like this happening close to me then I guess they have a good management that are also making clever decisions elsewhere. But maybe that is just wrong.

Berkshire Hathaway: Warren Buffett Q4 2013

To me there was one very dramatic change in the portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway and that was that Warren apparently decided to sell off Washington Post now that the family owner decided to sell his part and Warren I guess had no interest to be a co-owner with Jeff Bezos. That investment have served Berkshire Hathaway well for many, many years and Warren was with certainty emotionally attached to the company due to his past and due to him honouring the deal he made many years ago with the most sophisticated woman he had ever met with not buying any more shares. You can read all about that in The Snowball by Alice Schroeder.

There were some new additions to the stock portfolio and those were:

Analysis of Groupe Casino

Company: Groupe Casino

Business: A French supermarket and retail group. They have several supermarket chains as well as several own brands. They have over 12,000 stores and around 300,000 employees.

Active: France (34% of profit), South America (53% of profit) and Asia (12%). It seems as if many French companies are "invading" South America and being good at it!

P/E: 8.2

Comment: When I lived in France the supermarket closest to me was a Casino. Since it was close by I very often went there and especially when I could not be bothered to take the car to go to the XXL Carrefour store.

Analysis of BKW Energy

Company: BKW Energy

Business: A Swiss energy company that covers all stages of energy supply: from production and transmission to trading and distribution. They have a total of one million customers that receive their energy from a mixture of hydroelectric and nuclear power plants, gas-fired combined-cycle power plants as well as renewable energy.

Active: Switzerland (main part), Germany, Italy and to a small part in France.

P/E: 11.6

Broker run stock competitions

My mother recently contacted me asking if I had joined a stock competition that was run by one of the stock brokers. My response was no, I have not joined in and I also do not consider it good to join in on those things so I would prefer if she did not do it. I unfortunately did not tell her the last part straight out but this competition had already started so she could not join anymore anyway.

That made me start thinking about what is the target for the stock broker to arrange to types of competitions. Usually there is a very nice price for the winner of the competition and I think that should be the starting point of each persons thought.

If the stock broker is prepared to pay the winner/winners sum X in cash then that means they are minimum getting that back and most likely they are looking at a benefit that is the double of what they are paying out.

The question is then... how are they getting their money back?

Analysis of Lagardère

This company turned out to be a complete failure but my decision is that each company that I decide to analyse I will also publish. I ended up looking closer at this company due to a screening site that I used that claimed that Lagardère paid dividend in the size of 4.5% and had a P/E of 2.4. One of the two was correct and the other one was far, far away in a different galaxy.

Company: Lagardère

Business: A French media group that are standing on four pillars: Publishing (books for general and educational purposes, among the top five companies in France, UK, Spain and the US), Active (publishing of magazines, radio and TV productions), Services (distribution and travel retail) and the final pillar is Unlimited (sport industry and entertainment)

Active: France and Europe is their strongest ground but they are also taking up some space on the US market. In total they are represented in over 30 countries.

P/E: 41.9 (so pretty close to the 2.4 reported...)

Analysis of Ganger Rolf

Company: Ganger Rolf

Business: A Norwegian investment company that are focused towards sea and sea activities. Their five investment areas are: Offshore-Drilling (shares in Fred Olsen Energy), Renewable Energy (shares in Fred Olsen Renewables), Cruise (shares in Fred Olsen Cruise Lines) Shipping / Offshore Wind (shares in First Olsen and in Fred Olsen Windcarrier) and finally Other Investment (which is shares in a media group as well as in some property). They seem to like Mr. Olsen and his company diversification towards the sea side.

Active: With their own investments only in Norway. However the companies that they have invested in are active on an international level.

P/E: 10.7

Changes to the blog

Lately I have been trying to perform some changes to the blog as some of you might have notice. The mobile version has now been even more improved and I am happy with how clean it looks and it is very easy to read the five latest articles and they are being represented in a nice way if someone has any complaints or further changes that I should do then please notify me.

On the web blog I have implemented a more stricter way of publishing things which I hope makes it look nicer and become easier to read and to follow the analysis that I am making. I am still trying to find a nice picture for the monthly summary and for the inside trading. In both of them I am stuck with the ugly drawings I made.

Since some time ago the Brandenburger Tor image (which is seen above also) has been converted into a button which will give upon clicking on it a random article so if you feel bored and has nothing to do besides from cleaning your belly-button then you might as well see if there are any old publications from me that you have missed by giving the button a go.

The reason for this implementation is because I have realised that there start to be a substantial amount of articles now on this blog and sometimes a new company and new investment can maybe be found by not using the monkey (can be hard to get hold of) and a dart board filled with companies but instead the "My contrarian adventure" logo.

Enjoy!

Commerzbank preliminary results 2013

Also Commerzbank decided to graze us with the preliminary results for 2013 and it can be found here. All the following information is taken from that source.

The report seemed to be well accepted by the market and the share price directly jumped up a couple of %-age units. So why are everyone happy? And more importantly am I happy?

Analysis of Sainsbury

Company: J Sainsbury

Business: A British supermarket and convenient store company that are currently running 1106 stores. The segments are the: Stores (XL as well as smaller ones), Online Sales (food + cloths), Property Portfolio (not only their own stores), Bank (insurance, credit card, savings and loans), Energy (looking over peoples homes and offering competitive energy tariffs) and finally Entertainment (movies, music, books, games etc.).

Active: Hmmm... I could not find anything besides from that they are active in the UK so they have yet to leave their island.

P/E: 10.7

Analysis of Debenhams

Company: Debenhams PLC

Business: A British multi-brand cosmetics and retails company. Besides from having their own design labels they also sell all kind of well-known brands in their stores. They have besides from their own stores also franchise stores especially in Asia. Their online stores are well developed and even in the stores you can make online orders at machines to have things delivered home.

Active: Main activity is UK, Ireland and Denmark with around 172 stores and in total they have 240 stores across 28 countries. With their online stores they are available in 70 countries.

P/E: 7.4

Contrarian stocks of interest February 2014

I once again decided to make an update of the contrarian stocks of interest list which can be found here. We have plenty of additions to the list and those are:

Accell Group
Picanol Group
Rheinmetall
Turbon
Talanx
Agrana

There were also some companies that were kicked out and I think that I will push that border lower and lower as the list is growing. So the border is now at 100% which is still too high since that means there is no space for further improvement according to my assumptions unless the company really push up their earnings or the share price drops like a stone. And here are the companies that were kicked out from the list:

Besides from the kicked out companies and the newly added ones there were no huge dramatic changes. The new values were also added for BP as well as DBAG since they were freshly analysed with the figures from 2013.

Analysis of CNP Assurances

Company: CNP Assurances

Business: A French insurance company. They are active within three fields: Savings products (save for your death in France! This product makes it possible to give over 152k € to children etc. without the heavy French taxes for inheritance), Pension products (additional pension for individuals) and finally Personal risk insurance (Disability, Health and Loans).

Active: Europe to s certain extent put strongly especially in France (53% revenue). Have also established themselves in South America and specifically in Brazil that today contribute as much as 36% of the revenue and is their strongest growth market.

P/E: 9.6

Analysis of Agrana Group

Company: Agrana Group

Business: An Austrian agricultural downstream processor. They are divided into three segments: Sugar (~35% revenue, traditionally their core business of processing sugar and isoglucose and selling under well-known brands), Starch (~25% revenue, from potatoes and corn sold to food, paper, textile, construction and the pharmaceutical industry some also goes to biofuel) and finally Fruit (~35% revenue, prepared fruit and fruit juices that are sold to the Dairy industry, the Bakery goods sector, Ice-cream manufacturers as well as Soft beverage producers)

Active: With Sugar and Starch mainly in middle, south and eastern Europe. With their fruit section they are active in 40 countries on each continent. 50% of total revenue is however from Austria itself.

P/E: 8.3

Analysis of British Petroleum (BP) 2014

Company: British Petroleum

Business:  A British energy company that are dealing with mainly oil both upstream (extracting it from the earth) and downstream (making all kind of chemicals that are needed for polymer production etc.). They are currently also a shareholder in the Russian Rosneft since they sold off the TNK-BP consortium to Rosneft.

Active in: BP is present in every continent in the world either with oil extraction, chemical production or sale.

 P/E: 6.3

British Petroleum (BP) annual report 2013

British Petroleum arrived with their annual report for 2013 this week and the report seems to have been accepted ok and can be found here. Nothing much happened with the share price and the reason for why the price has jumped up in the last couple of months (from around December) is probably mainly due to their share buy-back program.

Analysis of Deutsche Beteiligungs AG (DBAG) 2014

Company: Deutsche Beteiligungs AG

Business: A German investment company that invest in successful mittelstand (small and medium sized) companies whose products and services have gained them outstanding positions in their markets. The focus is on growth-driven, profitable, internationally operating companies.

 

Active: Mainly active in Germany but also in other European countries. The company they invest in are however active globally. For the full list please look here.

P/E: 9.1