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...)
The P/E of Lagardère is extremely high with 41.9 and the P/B so, so with 1.3 which gives according to Graham a clear no, no. Their earnings to sales are bad with 1% and the ROE is bad with 3%. The book to debt ratio is also not looking good since it is at 0.5. In the last five years they have managed to have a yearly growth of -2.2% so pretty bad and it gives is a motivated P/E of around 8 or maybe even less which means that they are today highly overvalued by the market. They do however pay a nice dividend of 4.6% which however represents 191% of their earnings and even more interesting... they have in the last five years paid out more in dividend then what they have earned. So... question is how long they will manage to keep that one up.
Conclusion: Do not buy this company! Both Graham and I give a very clear no to this one and if you own it already why do you do that? Due to the nice dividend? If yes, then ask yourself how long that will last.
If this analysis is outdated then you can request a new one.
2 comments:
Where did you get your data?
According to Reuters PE is 22, P/B is 3.6 and ROI is 9,6%.
All inline with the chart-pattern.
You might compare LE with Bollere and Vivendi. All are doing extremely well, most probably anticipating a success of the french way to overcome the crisis.
Hello Hartmut Bischoff,
I got all the data from their annual report from 2008 and from 2012. Unfortunately the 2013 was still not out when the analysis was made. I cannot sy what Reuter based their data on.
Bollore i know very little about but the investors in Sweden have started to sell their Vivendi shares since they consider them already to be expensive.
But I have analysed neither of them so i cannot say any more.
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