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Moelis Australia
Overview
Moelis Australia is the Australian offshoot of Moelis & Company, an American investment bank founded in 2007. Moelis and Company have made a name for themselves as one of the leading “Boutique investment banks,” smaller specialised investment banks that have become increasingly popular since the GFC largely thanks to their perceived ability to give more independent advice. In one of their most impressive wins to date, Moelis and Co was recently announced as the sole lead on what will probably be the biggest IPO in history, the giant Saudi state owned oil company Aramco.
In Australia, Moelis has been similarly successful, though not without controversy. While they have been involved in numerous successful IPO’s, they were also the lead manager for the botched Simonds Group IPO in late 2014, with shares now trading at less than a quarter of their floating price. More recently they have made the news for apparently buying up Slater and Gordon debt at significant discounts, supposedly for some debt for equity scheme they are planning.
After the IPO, Moelis & Co will retain a 40% stake in Moelis Australia and a partnership between the two entities will remain with Ken Moelis himself, the founder of Moelis and Co taking a seat on the board.
IPO details
25 million of a total 125 million shares will be sold through the IPO at $2.35 per share, raising $53.8 Million once the costs of the offer have been taken into account. The Market capitalisation at listing price is $293.8 million, making it one of the biggest Australian IPO’s this year to date.
CEO
The CEO of Moelis Australia is Andrew Pridham, more famous for his role as Chairman of the Sydney Swans and his occasional spats with Eddie Mcguire than for his career as an investment banker. Pridham’s career has been impressive; he was appointed the Managing Director of Investment Banking Australasia for UBS at only 28 and has also held senior roles at JP Morgan before helping start Moelis Australia in 2009. He has been less successful in his ventures into the art collecting world though, making headlines a couple of years back when he purchased what turned out to be a forged painting for 2.5 million dollars. When Melbourne radio hosts started making fun of him about this, Pridham’s response somehow managed to go from victimhood to snobbery in one sentence.
However, as long as Pridham doesn’t decide to turn Moelis Australia into an art gallery, his dubious taste in Australian art shouldn’t trouble potential investors, and overall he seems like a pretty capable and intelligent guy. Also, for the CEO of an investment bank worth nearly three hundred million dollars his salary is quite reasonable, at only $450,000 a year plus bonuses. That he is looking to make most of his money through performance bonuses and increases in the share price is a positive for investors, and something that other recent listings (Wattle Health anyone?) Could learn from.
Expansion plans.
One of the things that worries me about the Moelis Australia IPO is the 44.2 million of the total 58.8 million raised that will be set aside for the vague purpose of “growth capital.” This is expanded upon in another section of the Prospectus with the below statement:
"Moelis Australia is actively assessing a number of strategic asset and business acquisitions. None of these opportunities are certain of proceeding at the date of this Prospectus. Any one of, or a combination of, these acquisitions could result in Moelis Australia applying a substantial part of the Offer proceeds to fund the acquisitions of potential assets or businesses being assessed."
While some investors will see this as a growth opportunity, something about the combination of a CEO with no shortage of self-confidence, a professional services business and statements like this make me a little nervous. As any financial academic or Slate and Gordon stockholder will tell you, business acquisitions by listed companies have a tendency to destroy rather than create shareholder value, and I doubt Pridham is going to be able to sit on his hands for long with $54 million in his pocket. While it’s possible he might make the deal of the century, it’s also possible he might end up biting off more than he can chew.
Significant Investor Visa Funds Program
Another thing that concerns me with the Moelis IPO is its involvement in the Significant Investor Visa Funds Program. This is a program the federal government introduced a while back where Investors who invest over 5 million dollars in approved Australian investments are able to gain an Australian Visa.
These sorts of visa programs have come under a lot of criticism both in Australia and internationally, and in the USA in particular have become a target for fraudulent activities.
Canada cancelled their own program after finding it delivered little benefit and an Australian productivity commission report in 2015 advocated scrapping the program as well, arguing that it led to too many visas being granted to elderly people with limited English skills.
While the current Liberal government appears to be committed to the scheme, you would imagine that all it would take is a change of government or a few highly-publicised scandals for things to change. Moelis themselves appear to be well aware of the risks this would pose to their business, as evidenced by this detailed response of theirs to the 2015 productivity commissions report.
Moelis does not break down the revenue for each separate sector, though the prospectus does state that average assets under management grew from 161 million to 624 million in 2017 largely thanks to this program, so we can assume that if this program was to be cancelled it would have a significant impact on the business.
Valuation
Looking around at most investment banks, they seem to cluster around a P/E of just under 15. Goldman Sachs is currently at 13.96, JP Morgan Chase is at 14.1, and Morgan Stanley is at 14.53. The big four Australian banks have similar P/E ratios. Moelis Australia are no doubt aware of this, and have presented an “adjusted” Price to Earnings ratio of 14.6 in the prospectus. On the surface this makes the valuation seem like a pretty good deal. As a relatively small player, their growth prospects are more significant than the larger banks, so to be priced at the same discount rate would represent a great opportunity. However, this is a good example of when it pays to do your own research before trusting adjusted ratios cooked up by investment bankers. When I divide Moelis Australia’s profit from the 2016 calendar year (9.8 million) by the post-listing market capitalisation of 293.8 million I get a price to earnings ratio of 29.97, more than double the ratio quoted in the prospectus. Although you might think this is because my calculator isn’t as fancy as the ones used at Moelis Australia’s head office, Moelis have actually made two rather questionable adjustments to get this lower ratio.
To start with, while P/E ratios are almost always calculated using previous earnings (trailing twelve months). in Moelis Australia’s adjusted P/E ratio, they have instead used their forecasted Pro Forma earnings for the 2017 calendar year of 16.8 million. While for a small growing company it may make sense to use forecasted earnings in a P/E ratio if the business is just starting, I fail to see how it is justified for an established investment bank with a proposed market capitalisation in the hundreds of millions. Moelis Australia are not planning to change their operations significantly in the next twelve months, so their reason to use forecasted earnings simply seems to be so they can get a more attractive P/E ratio.
The other adjustment they have made is to the price side of the P/E formula. Moelis Australia have taken the odd approach of subtracting the net offer proceeds of 57 million from the market capitalisation for the adjusted formula. This is supposedly justified because their acquisition plans are not included in their projected earnings, though as a potential shareholder, the actual market capitalisation is how the market will evaluate the stock, and the total shares outstanding will determine your share in any future earnings. While P/E ratios are based on earnings from the past and the market value today, by some odd form of wormhole accounting Moelis have ended up presenting a ratio based on future earnings and a market value from the past.
Of course, I’m sure Moelis Australia could wheel out to a batch of highly paid accountants who would explain why the adjustments they made are reasonable and their P/E ratio is accurate, but then again Goldman Sachs had maths PHDs that could explain how CDOs were a great idea in 2006 and we all know how that ended up. I would argue that any future investor would be much better served using the 29.97 figure I calculated when deciding if Moelis Australia is a good investment, as this is how P/E ratios for other companies are quoted.
Verdict
When you use the actual P/E ratio of 29.97 to evaluate the deal, the Moelis Australia IPO looks reasonable, but hardly exciting. If you think that Moelis Australia is a great up and coming Corporate Investment Bank with a proven track record and that Pridham is a genius who will be given the new freedom of 50 odd million dollars in free cash to launch some amazing acquisition, then a P/E ratio double that of the larger investment banks is perhaps reasonable. From my perspective though, the Significant Investor Visa Program is not something I would want any investment of mine relying on long term, and with what I know about the track record of acquisitions, I would probably rather have the cash on the balance sheet invested in an index fund than whatever plan Pridham has cooking up.
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Tianmei Beverage Group Corporation Limited
Overview
Tianmei Beverage Group Corporation Limited is a Chinese company based in Guangzhou with two arms to the business. The first is as a distributor and promoter of packaged food products, placing different suppliers’ goods at convenience stores and supermarkets. The second is a bottled water company that sells water produced by a Chinese water processing plant they have a contract with. They are using the Prospectus to raise 10 million dollars, selling 25% of the company in the process. The money will be used to buy the water bottling plant they currently source their water from and to start importing Australian food products to China and promoting it at their contracted stores.
Valuation
From a pure valuation perspective, Tianmei China is a fantastic deal. According to the Prospectus they made a profit of over 4.3 million dollars in the first half of 2016, and the IPO values the company at 34 million, meaning the Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio is well under five if you annualised those earnings. On top of this, both arms of the business are in massive growth areas: The bottled water market in China has seen double digit annual growth due to pollution concerns and the growth in demand for Australian food and health products in China has been astronomical. You can see this in the impressive premiums that the market places on any Australian company that is exposed to Chinese consumers: Bellamy’s was trading at a P/E of 40 a little while ago, and even after sacking their CEO and concerns about their accounting, the share price has only shrunk to a P/E of 10. The A2 Milk company is trading at a massive P/E ratio of 68 and Blackmores is trading at a P/E of 20 largely thanks to growth potential in China.
It’s basically impossible to come up with a valuation that isn’t higher than Tianmei’s listing price using a discounted cash flow analysis. Even if you put a ridiculously high discount rate of 20% and assume a conservative growth rate of 6% for the next 8 years before levelling off to 1%, you still end up with a company value of over $40 million. The way I see it then, if you are evaluating this stock, investigating the exact growth rate of the bottled water market or Chinese supermarket conditions is a waste of time, as whatever you come up with is going to show the stock is a good buy. Instead, the simple question for any potential investor is can we trust this company? As a relatively unknown company operating in a country that doesn’t exactly have a spotless reputation for good corporate governance, it is hard not to be suspicious. The story they are selling through their accounts is one that anyone would want to invest in. The question is, is this story true?
Personnel
According to John Hempton, a role model of mine and someone who inspired me to start this blog, the best way to find out if a company is dodgy is to look at the history of the key management personnel. Hempton’s hedge fund Bronte Capital does just that, following people who they believe have been involved with companies that were fraudulent for potential targets to short sell.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to find nearly any English information on most of the key people in the company and I don’t speak Mandarin, so the only person I can really look into is the chairman, an Australian guy called Tony Sherlock. Tony Sherlock has been around for a long time in the M & A and finance world. He was the chairman of Australian Wool Corporation, worked at PWC in the risk division for ten years and co-founded Bennelong capital, a boutique corporate advisory firm. Judging by his Linkedin profile he looks like he is in his late sixties at the youngest, as he finished a Bachelor of Economics in 1969. Would a guy nearing the end of a successful career working risk his reputation promoting a company that wasn’t above board? It seems unlikely. He’s built up a solid reputation for himself over the years and it would be strange for him to risk it that late in his career. Of course nothing is certain, and it’s possible he’s got some secret gambling condition that makes him desperate for cash or simply doesn’t know that the company is fraudulent, but overall it seems like a positive sign that he is the Chairman.
History
One of the initial things that made me suspicious of Tianmei is its age, as according to the prospectus the company only started in 2013. Trying to unpick the exact history of Tianmei China is a painstaking undertaking, as there are a ridiculous amount of holding companies that have been created along with business name changes. As far as I can understand it though, it looks like the Tianmei business was created in 2013 by Guangdong Gewang, a Guangzhou based business started in 2010 that sells supplements of selenium, a chemical element that Guangdong Gewang claim is vital to human health. While I was initially suspicious of a company selling a supplement that I’d never heard of, after doing some research it actually looks
legitimate. Although selenium deficiency is very rare in the West, apparently it is a problem in some parts of China due to crops being grown in selenium deficient soil. During a restructure in 2015 Guangdong Gewang separated the selenium supplement business from the water and FMCG businesses, and as a result created Tianmei. Interestingly enough, Guangdong Gewang is applying for admission to the Nasdaq for their own IPO currently. Guangdong Gewang still hold 22.5% of Tianmei through Biotechnlogy Holding Ltd, a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. (Both these companies seem to have a real love of the British Virgin Islands, Tianmei’s ownership also is funnelled through a British Virgin Islands company.) While the history isn’t exactly stable, there are no obvious red flags I could find to turn me off investing in Tianmei.
Ownership
One of the things I like about this IPO is that the initial listing at least isn’t just a way for the owners to cash in. As a jaded, though still cautious believer in the theoretical benefits of capitalism, it’s nice to see an IPO doing what a stock market is meant to do; allocating capital to a business that wants to grow.
A strange thing about the ownership structure is that the equal largest shareholder with 22.5% ownership is a woman called Han Xu, an Executive Director who from her photo looks to be in her mid-twenties. How does someone who finished their bachelor’s degree in 2011 and a Masters of International Finance in 2013, afford 7.2 million dollars’ worth of shares in the company? Perhaps a more basic question is how can someone who left university three years ago and never studied law end up as the ‘legal expert’ and executive director of a soon to be publicly listed entity, when fully qualified lawyers of her age are still working 70 hour weeks as Junior Associates? The most obvious explanation would be she is the daughter of someone important. After doing some digging around I found that one of the co-founders of the original Selenium supplement company was a guy called Wei Xu. While I don’t know how common the Xu last name is in China, it seems reasonable to assume that they could be related.
Is this potential Nepotism enough to be a concern? I don’t really think so. While she might not be the most qualified person for the job, If anything it’s reassuring that the co-founders of the company are maintaining their holdings. The third largest shareholder of Tianmei is a guy called Mengdi Zhang, whose father Shili Zhang was another initial co-founder of the Selenium business according to Guangdong Gewang’s filings for their Nasdaq IPO.
Verdict
Overall I think this looks to be a pretty good IPO. While of course there are always risks with investing in a company this young and especially one operating in a foreign country, the price is low enough to make it worthwhile. It seems the listing is about both raising capital as well as creating a link with Australia so they can start importing Australian foods, which perhaps explains why they have listed at such a low price; the benefits for them isn’t just the capital they intend to raise. If the market gains confidence that Tianmei is legitimate, the company could well double its market capitalization in the next 12 months and I will definitely be along for the ride.
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