Saturday 30 May 2015

K+S report Q1 2015


K+S, Q1, 2015, front page

My only mining company K+S arrived with their Q1 report for 2015 and the reading was indeed very pleasing for me and any other shareholder in this company. I am now only two weeks behind reporting and the actual publication of the report so that warms my soul.


For the report in full please click here and for the previous summary regarding this great company please go to K+S annual report 2014 and to find out more about them then please click on analysis of K+S 2015.

From the key figures we see that K+S has done very well this quarter with almost 16% plus in revenue coming both from increased prices with the Potash but also higher sales volumes of salt. They also mentioned that Uralkali have managed to / been forced to negotiate up prices that they had previously signed with customers in India. The earnings for the quarter was up by 40% and ended up with 1.04 € per share! A great value since the full year 2014 the EPS were 1.92 €. I would like to bring up one issue though... the Legacy project needs plenty of investments and they are on schedule there etc. but this year they are supposed to invest 1.3 billion € and in this first quarter they have only invested around 0.2 billion € so they will need to push in much more in the remaining quarters which means that we should not expect this kind of EPS in the other quarters.


K+S, Q1, 2015, key figures


Conclusion: K+S is doing very well and with increased prices in Potash, increased volumes with salt and the Legacy project well under way things are looking good. Since the commodities are being traded in USD there is currently also a currency benefit in comparison to one year ago. I will remain a happy shareholder in K+S for now.

3 comments:

wahlroos said...

Hi,

Any ideas regarding the Canadian takeoverbid, are you still holding on to KS shares?

Fredrik von Oberhausen said...

Hi Wahlroos,

the latest thoughts I gave to it can be seen on the analysis of PotashCorp in my discussion with Falk.

Seems as if the ball is again in the hands of the K+S management and them being able to prove that their value is more than 41 €. I hope that they will manage to do so... if not... then it sounded as if PotashCorp was prepared to make a hostile take over. I still wonder what if that will pass the competition regulations (in Germany / EU) when there are already so few companies on the market.

So I still hope to get my 50 € per share either with a friendly proposal or that I can get it during the hostile take over.

Fredrik von Oberhausen said...

There was a second bid arriving from PotashCorp and once again they offered 41 € and had a better explanation for what would happen with the business in Germany to at least calm down the German regions that have a large income from the K+S mining business.

K+S answered with the replies that they had received from their investors on a Questionnaire that I got one month ago or so. As a shareholder I of course replied to it and sent it back.

I think the Canadians have not really understood the German mentality and their long term owning capacity. Germans need to be over-convinced before agreeing to something as drastic as selling their shares. So far this have not been offered and I will still hold on to my shares even if I am not German.