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Geoff’s Avid Hog Watchlist: Catering International & Services (CTRG:FP)

The following stock may appear in a future issue of The Avid Hog.

Catering International & Services trades in Paris under the ticker “CTRG”. The company was founded in Marseilles, France in 1992. Two families control 71% of the shares. The founder, Regis Arnoux, controls the majority of the company’s shares. He still runs the company. Catering International provides remote site services (mainly catering) in extreme conditions. Revenue is about evenly divided between serving mining customers (51%) and oil & gas customers (47%). Operating profit – but not revenue (more on that later) – is about evenly divided between Asia/Pacific (54%) and Africa (46%). So, we’re basically talking about a company that caters for mines and oil fields in Asia and Africa.

Let’s start with how I found the company.

I ran a screen at Stockopedia looking for E.U. stocks sorted by their gross profits relative to net tangible assets. I then eliminated companies that either had lost money in one of the last few years or that now traded above 8 times EBITDA. I also eliminated companies where the business description suggested they were far from all 3 rings of my circle of competence: 1) consumer habits, 2) business support services, and 3) industry standards. This left a little over 40 stocks. I then looked for English language information on all 40 stocks. About 14 of these stocks had multiple annual reports in English. Catering International was one of them.

A few things appealed to me immediately about Catering International. The business sounded both mundane (catering) and niche (extreme conditions). It’s a business support services provider. Gross profitability was adequate.

A few things also concerned me right away. Catering International serves mining and oil & gas customers. That means the commodities these companies are extracting – their reasons for being at these sites – are at bubble levels. I’m not saying they are in a bubble. The supply of oil and gas is finite. So you can argue that bubble prices relative to the past could be justified throughout the future. But there is no long-term history of prices being this high. Therefore, we don’t have a relevant record of consumer or producer behavior to go on. We don’t know how marginal – high cost and high risk – some of these sites are. Catering International has been a very fast growing company. Some of that growth was driven by customer interest in more extreme conditions which high prices for commodities like oil and gold have to encourage.

The good news is that you don’t have to expect a lot of future growth to invest in Catering International. Using the most aggressive estimates of EBIT and enterprise value you get a price of 6.5 times EBIT for the company. Using the most conservative estimates of EV and EBIT you get a ratio of 8.2 times. Any price less than 10 times EBIT seems quite fair for a company like this – even without a lot of growth.

I need …

The Inevitables

In his 1996 letter to shareholders, Warren Buffett explained his strategy of investing in “inevitables”:

Companies such as Coca-Cola and Gillette might well be labeled “The Inevitables.”  Forecasters may differ a bit in their predictions of exactly how much soft drink or shaving-equipment business these companies will be doing in ten or twenty years…however, no sensible observer – not even these companies’ most vigorous competitors, assuming they are assessing the matter honestly – questions that Coke and Gillette will dominate their fields worldwide for an investment lifetime.

I happen to have a Standard & Poor’s Stock Market Encyclopedia published in 1967. So, I figured I could check just how persistent the profitability of these “inevitables” is.

Here are the operating margins of 5 such inevitables.

New Value Investing Blog: Moatology

There’s a new value investing blog called “Moatology”. This post on Pulse Seismic is a good example of what the blog does best. Moatology brings you good businesses you haven’t heard of. If you’re looking for a value investing blog to add to your reading list, check out Moatology.…

How to Quantify Quality

Someone who reads the blog sent me this email:

I kind of understand the quantitative part of stock analysis (such as number crunching, valuation) but really struggle to understand the qualitative aspects which determine quality. What kinds of questions to ask yourself in order to gain more insights into the qualitative?

A qualitative analysis does not have to be any less evidence based than a quantitative analysis. However, you do have to gather the evidence yourself.

What counts as evidence? How can we separate our own biases, speculation about the future, etc. from actual observations of quality? Evidence is fact based. Facts come in several flavors.

Number

Example: Tiffany’s New York Flagship Store had $305.54 million in sales in 2012. That is $6,671 per square foot. Based on calculation made from data given in Tiffany’s 10-K on percentage of sales at flagship, worldwide net sales, and gross retail square footage of flagship.

Quote

Example: John Wiley, Reed Elsevier, Springer, etc. have bargaining power with their customers.

The largest (academic journal) publishers wield the power…as a former colleague of mine once said, ‘the more journals you have, the higher your usage stats are and the more money you can charge.”

Based on discussion with a university press editor.

Anecdote

Example: Over the last 10 years, I have placed an average of one order every 4 to 10 days with Amazon. At no point in the last 10 years, have I ever made less than one order every 10 days. I have been a member of Amazon Prime since 2006. The number of orders made each year has roughly tripled from 2003 to 2013. It doubled after I became a Prime member.

Based on information found in my own order history for 2003 to 2013 at Amazon.

History

Example: The 4 most successful periods in animation were at 3 companies: Disney (twice), Pixar, and DreamWorks. At the time of their success, these companies were run by Walt Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg, John Lasseter, and Jeffrey Katzenberg (again). All worked at Disney at some point in their career.

Based on more than half a dozen books on Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks.

Experiment

Example:

377 participants were assigned to (Weight Watchers), of whom 230 (61%) completed the 12-month assessment; and 395 were assigned to standard care, of whom 214 (54%) completed the 12-month assessment. In all analyses, participants in the commercial programme group lost twice as much weight as did those in the standard care group.

Based on a journal article appearing in The Lancet.

As you can see, there is no need to be less evidence based when analyzing a business’s quality than you are when analyzing its price. However, you have to impose an evidence based discipline on yourself. You have to go through the primary sources and extract the relevant facts on your own. They will not be presented in as easily digestible form like an EV/EBITDA ratio on Yahoo Finance. When it comes to quality, you need to gather …