On Hanes

Inelegant Investor has a post on Hanes. The post also links to The Stalwart.

Here are a few things to keep in mind with Hanes.

Two major players, Hanes Brands (HBI) and Fruit of the Loom (a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary), control most of the U.S. underwear market.

Hanes considers itself to be in the “apparel essentials” business which is to say the “t-shirts, bras, panties, men’s underwear, kids’ underwear, socks, and hosiery” business. In 2005, the U.S. apparel essentials market was about $44 billion. Apparel essentials have been growing faster than the overall apparel industry – still this isn’t a fast growing market. You’re unlikely to see sales growth exceed 5%.

Hanes divides its business into four segments: Innerwear, Outerwear, Hosiery, and International. The company doesn’t do much international business. Hosiery is a dying business with good margins. It generates cash; but, it’s going the way of the Dodo – fast.

That leaves innerwear and outerwear. Together these two segments account for something like 85% of Hanes sales.

Innerwear is underwear – and yes, it’s just as profitable by any other name. This segment is the heart of the company. It generates more than $2.5 billion in sales and plenty of free cash flow. Apparently, you can achieve low double-digit profit margins in this segment, which is impressive given the volume involved.

The innerwear business is a ridiculously high volume business. Looking at it solely in dollar terms doesn’t make that clear enough. So, let me give you some unit numbers.

Hanes manufactures and sells a billion socks a year – literally. That’s 500 million pairs of socks a year. Even the T-shirt business is high volume; Hanes produces about 400 million T-shirts a year.

The company’s biggest customers have high volume needs. Wal-Mart accounts for nearly 30% of the company’s sales. Does Wal-Mart have leverage over Hanes? Maybe. Does Wal-Mart have many other options? No. Hanes supplies them with well over $1 billion in product each year. It’s a cheap product that can only be produced in such volumes at competitive prices by a few companies on the planet. In the U.S., your choices are basically Hanes or Fruit of the Loom.

Furthermore, customers don’t contract this stuff. They simply buy what they need. The excess inventory costs on these high volume products could easily eliminate all the profit for any company that isn’t accustomed to producing on this scale. Hanes averaged total inventory reserves of just under $100 million a year over the last three years. That’s the cost of guaranteeing you have enough product to meet your customers’ needs.

Hanes employs a lot of people – and the workforce isn’t particularly cheap considering how cheap the product is to produce. Before the spin-off, Hanes employed close to 50,000 people worldwide. The vast majority of the company’s employees were located outside the U.S.; however, the vast majority of the company’s labor costs came from inside the U.S.

Using American labor to produce underwear isn’t particularly …

Interesting Items for Friday, July 20, 2007

Here’s an article discussing Energizer Holdings (ENR) and its acquisition of Playtex Products.

One of the Eight Best Investing Blogs, 24/7 Wall St., writes about Journal Register (JRC). Long-time readers of this blog may remember I wrote about the company in early 2006. The stock has gotten a lot cheaper since then. However, there are three problems here: 1) Newspapers Generally 2) Journal Register Specifically 3) Journal Register’s Debt.

The first problem is self-explanatory and hasn’t changed since early 2006. The second problem has to do with a bad acquisition made by the company that has changed what the company looks like. Journal Register was once focused on communities with excellent demographics and thus excellent economics for newspaper publishers. Now, not so much. The Michigan properties are a real problem.

Finally, the debt. The biggest problem with the debt is simply that it exists. Journal Register’s market cap makes the company look cheap, but you have to take out the debt as well. Is the company worth much more than its debt load? No. Probably not.

If it weren’t for the debt, Journal Register would actually be an exceptionally easy takeover target in the most anti-takeover of industries. The company doesn’t employ the gimmicky protections most old media companies do.

The combination of a cheap common stock with a heavy debt load will amplify any changes in the value of the enterprise. We’re not far from the point where a 10% change in the intrinsic value of the enterprise would lead to a doubling (or halving) of the value of the common stock.

In that sense, this is a highly speculative stock – for better or worse.

It would also be a good investment if I was sure the value of the enterprise is clearly in excess of the debt. As it is, I think there’s a risk that the value of the enterprise and the value of the debt are too close for comfort. That doesn’t mean I think Journal Register will fail to make its payments any time soon. It just means I don’t think there will be a lot left over for shareholders when you consider I expect the bottom line to decline in the long-run along with the industry.

Of course, it is tempting to take JRC’s market cap and divide by what the company earned in the past. But, on an EV/EBIT basis the business isn’t nearly as cheap as the stock. That’s what I mean when I say this is a speculative stock – you only have to be right or wrong by a small amount in your estimate of the business value to make or lose a lot of money on the stock.

If you’re looking for a stock where leverage will amplify your returns, I still like Hanes Brands (HBI). It’s not as leveraged as Journal Register (though it has plenty of leverage) and it’s a much better business. Hanes was the most interesting spin-off of …

Interesting Items for Friday, July 13th, 2007

Energizer Holdings (ENR), a stock I’ve written about before on this blog, announced it will acquire Playtex Products (PYX) for $18.30 a share in cash (total consideration of approximately $1.9 billion). The size and nature of this acquisition looks like a perfect fit.

Energizer had made no secret of its desire to make such an acquisition. Playtex has some very strong brands. Of course, this will only broaden the front on which Energizer competes with Procter & Gamble (PG) – and that’s already the biggest mark against Energizer in most peoples’ minds. But, these are good businesses and it’s often better to be a smaller player in a good business than a larger player in a bad business despite what it does to your ego.

Posco (PKX) is another stock I wrote about here (and in my now defunct newsletter). Today, there’s only one problem with Posco – the price. When I first wrote about the stock in the April 2006 issue of my newsletter, the ADRs were trading under $65 a share. Now, they’re around $150 a share. Then, I wrote about the stock on this blog in March (after Berkshire’s annual report showed it owned about 4% of Posco). At that time, the ADRs were trading at over $90 a share. So, they’ve come a long way even from that post. I also reprinted my July 2006 review of Posco where I gave a “Best Guess” price of $124 a share and a “Suggest Selling” price of $190 a share and I wrote this:

The wide discrepancy between my best guess price ($124/share) and my suggest selling price ($190/share) for Posco is due to my being extremely conservative on the best guess price. Posco at $124 a share probably is fairly valued as a steel company – however, it’s probably not fairly valued as Posco, because Posco is a great steel company even if it isn’t a truly great business.

So, if you take me at my word and say that $124 a share was a conservative intrinsic value estimate and $190 a share was a good dividing line between investment and pure speculation you can split the difference and call it an honest estimate – without any undue conservatism – and that gives you $170 a share. I know that $190 and $124 don’t average out to $170, but the estimates do because of the difference in time – those value estimates were made in July of 2006, assuming I discounted by 8% (which is basically what I do whenever the long bond is below 8%) the average 2007 value would be something like $170 a share. A year later, that sounds about right.

The point of this little revisitation exercise isn’t to say Posco is worth $170 a share – I have no way of knowing that – but to remind you that (those of you who subscribed to the newsletter) were getting my views on the stock at $65 a share, those who read …

Suggested Link: Mohnish Pabrai Interview

Here’s an excellent interview with Mohnish Pabrai – by far the best I’ve ever read.

There’s a lot worth thinking about in there. It’s definitely worth reading a couple times over.

Read Interview…

Interesting Items for Thursday, July 5th, 2007

Rick of Value Discipline (one of The Eight Best Investing Blogs) has a good post on what goes into value creation. It’s an especially good post for new investors or anyone who isn’t intimately familiar with all of a company’s financial statements and how they interact. You don’t hear a lot about working capital management for instance and you almost never hear a serious discussion of cash flow that isn’t centered around the EBITDA multiples various acquisitions were (or might be) made at. The post is actually an excerpt from a piece Rick wrote for Market Thoughts.

Here’s a long video of “safe and cheap” value investor Marty Whitman of Third Avenue Value Fund. The link is through Value Investing News which is currently undergoing a face lift of sorts. That site is excellent as always. Save the video for when you have the time to enjoy it – the run time is about an hour. There’s a lot of great stuff in there.

Finally, here’s an interview with the CEO of Tesco. The link is through Shai Dardashti’s Reflections on Value Investing.…

On the Northern Pipeline Contest

When Standard Oil was broken up, eight of the resulting companies were small pipeline operators. Wall Street didn’t pay much attention to them. Little was known about their finances – and they liked it that way. Their “income accounts” literally consisted of a single line. They didn’t provide detailed balance sheets.

Ben Graham spent a lot of time looking through information provided by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), a regulatory body that oversaw the railroads (among other businesses). One day, as Graham was looking through an ICC report, he found some statistics clearly furnished by the pipeline companies. The statistics were accompanied by a note that read “taken from their annual report to the Commission“.

Graham realized that the pipelines were filing reports with the ICC that contained information not known on Wall Street. So, he requested a blank copy of the report from the ICC. The blank form included “a table which required the companies to set forth a list of their investments at cost and market value.”

Ben left for Washington the next day. He reviewed the reports for all eight pipeline companies. What he found amazed him:

“I discovered all of the companies owned huge amounts of the finest railroad bonds; in some cases the value of the bonds alone exceeded the entire price at which the pipeline shares were selling in the market! I found, besides, that the pipeline companies were doing a comparatively small gross business, with a large profit margin, that they carried no inventory and therefore had no need whatever for these bond investments. Here was Northern Pipeline, selling at only $65 a share, paying a $6 dividend – while holding some $95 in cash assets for each share, nearly all of which it could distribute to its stockholders without the slightest inconvenience to its operations. Talk about a bargain security!”

Northern Pipeline had the greatest amount of securities per share relative to its market price; so, Graham focused on buying shares of that company. He bought slowly but surely. Eventually, he was able to acquire a 5% stake in Northern Pipeline. Not surprisingly, the Rockefeller Foundation was still the largest shareholder. The foundation held 23% of the shares outstanding.

Graham didn’t count on a contest. There were no such things as “activist investors” in those days. Besides, Graham didn’t see any need for activism. The correct course of action was clear. He would simply explain the situation to management and they would distribute the excess cash.

Graham met with the company’s President and General Counsel (they were brothers). He explained the situation and what needed to be done.

The Bushnell brothers explained they couldn’t distribute the cash, because the par value of the stock was too high. Graham explained how they could reduce the par value and treat the distribution as a return of capital. The brothers explained they needed the capital. Graham asked for what. The brothers said the investments were a depreciation reserve. Graham said fine …

On Disney, Pixar, and Ratatouille

One of the Eight Best Investing Blogs, Cheap Stocks, has posted the second part of its look at Disney (DIS).

Another one of the eight best investing blogs, 24/7 Wall St., has a new post entitled “Disney’s Pixar Purchase: Never Give a Sucker an Even Break“. The post mentions that this weekend’s estimated $47.2 million opening for Disney/Pixar’s “Ratatouille” was the worst Pixar opening in nine years.

Regardless, Ratatouille was number one at the box office despite tough competition from films such as Live Free or Die Hard and Evan Almighty – well, not exactly tough competition in the latter case as Evan Almighty has been a big financial disappointment.

You could see it coming. If you look at any list of top grossing movies (adjusted for inflation) comedies don’t do particularly well, especially considering how many get produced. The recipe for a huge money maker is simple – and goes back to long before the beginning of movies – make it epic, make it exciting, make it fantastical or historical (just don’t make it commonplace), and make it for all ages. Most comedies don’t score well on those counts. I suppose Evan Almighty does better than most comedies in aping the epic dramas that work. In fact, it matched them a bit too well with a price tag around $175 million.

Why have I spent a full paragraph on Evan Almighty when I’m supposed to be writing about Disney, Pixar, and Ratatouille? Because price matters. Here’s some of what 24/7 Wall St. had to say about Disney’s acquisition of Pixar:

It would appear that Jobs sold at the top. It would also appear that Disney got a lousy deal. It’s their own fault. Jobs was able to get more for the company than it was worth. The markets have learned not to underestimate him…But, Disney got burned.

I’m sticking with that I wrote about a year and a half ago:

Is Pixar worth $7 billion (or whatever the offer ends up being)? That’s a complicated question. First of all, you have to ask if $7 billion of Disney’s stock at today’s market price is actually worth more or less than $7 billion. What’s the chance that Disney’s stock is currently undervalued and Pixar’s is currently overvalued? It’s a real possibility.

On the plus side, this could mean Disney CEO Robert Iger wants to take Disney in a different direction from what we’ve seen lately. I’ve always thought the real value at Disney would come from providing content not distributing it. If the company really wants to be some sort of “diversified entertainment company” wouldn’t a company built around kids make more sense?

A company focused on animation, theme parks, the Disney Channel, etc. would make more sense to me. In fact, a few years ago, I would have been very happy if Disney announced an acquisition of a toy maker, video game publisher, or licensing company that had something to

On the Dangers of Homogeneity

One of the Eight Best Investing Blogs, Value Discipline, has an excellent new post entitled “The Dangers of Homogeneous Thinking.” Diversity of thought and interpretation is an important concept.

A lack of variation within any population is a dangerous thing. An evolutionary system in which an overall sense of conservatism (carrying what has worked in the past into the future) combined with a lot of variation at the margins (sometimes in extreme and eccentric ways) has often succeeded in consistently creating truly remarkable and effective outcomes that could never have been devised by a single omniscient actor.

This is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. Unfortunately, there is a tendency for success to sow the seeds of future failure, because the greatest enemy of great new ideas is acceptable old ideas.

Major League Baseball is an extreme example of a system in which variation is surprisingly stifled. I’ll use it, because although large corporate bureaucracies display some of the same attributes (and thus outcomes), any discussion of specific corporations would be both less concrete and somewhat more controversial – because it’s closer to the topic I normally write about here.

Pitching techniques are surprisingly uniform in Major League Baseball. There’s basically no evidence to suggest that any physical constraints should cause such bizarre uniformity. Historical evidence shows that other techniques are pretty effective. Furthermore, employing an unusual technique should be especially effective during a period in which a batter is highly accustomed to pitches thrown at different angles and speeds from a different release point following from a different motion. In other words, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that pitching counter to a batter’s overall experience and his expectations of a certain situation should (all other things being equal) work better than pitching like everyone else does and like the batter expects (both generally and in a specific situation).

Anyway, pitching techniques don’t vary a lot in the major leagues today. Try to pick a range of speeds and a range of release points that will encompass a large percentage of all the pitches thrown in the major leagues. It’s not very hard to do. The range won’t be that wide. Why is this?

I’ve come to only one good conclusion. I’m not sure if it’s the right conclusion; but, it’s the best I can come up with for this very important question – and the question really is important, because a system like professional baseball should display a lot of variation in this regard if it works the way most such systems do.

My best guess is that it doesn’t. I think the relationship between the major leagues and the minor leagues is the answer. Not all professional baseball players are doing everything they can to win. Some are doing everything they can to advance.

There’s a huge difference between those two motivations. If winning is the key to success at all levels, then techniques (however …

Berkshire Owns More Than 10% of Burlington Northern

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) has disclosed a greater than 10% stake in Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNI). Through three insurance subsidiaries (Columbia, National Indemnity, and National Fire & Marine) Berkshire beneficially owns 39,027,430 shares of Burlington Northern common stock according to an SEC filing made on Friday, April 6, 2007.

Berkshire’s most recent reported purchase was made on Thursday, April 5th, and consisted of 1,219,000 shares purchased at $81.18 each.

Upon presenting the familiar table of Berkshire’s major investments in his most recent letter to shareholders, Buffett wrote:

“We show below our common stock investments. With two exceptions, those that had a market value of more than $700 million at the end of 2006 are itemized. We don’t itemize the securities referred to, which have a market value of $1.9 billion, because we continue to buy them. I could, of course, tell you their names. But then I would have to kill you.”

It appears that Burlington Northern was one of the two large positions Berkshire was accumulating. Clearly, Berkshire has been a big buyer of Burlington Northern shares since Buffett wrote his letter to shareholders, because Berkshire’s position now has a market value of approximately $3.2 billion.

The size of the Burlington Northern investment will make it one of about a half dozen very large positions held by Berkshire. This investment dwarfs each of Berkshire’s investments made during the past few years – it is already considerably larger than any other single investment recently disclosed by Berkshire including the investment in Posco (PKX), US Bancorp (USB), ConocoPhillips (COP), Anheuser Busch (BUD), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), USG (USG), Wal-Mart (WMT), and Tesco (TSCDY).

This is the biggest single common stock investment made by Berkshire in a long time.

It’s big news – and it seems to have caught most Buffett watchers off guard. GuruFocus, a site that tracks Buffett’s moves religiously, announced that its contest to name the two mystery investments alluded to in Buffett’s annual letter had failed to turn up any guesses that Burlington Northern would be among the pair.

Burlington Northern Santa Fe operates one of the largest rail systems in North America. The system includes 32,000 route miles of track of which 23,000 are owned route miles.

In recent years, Burlington Northern Santa Fe has been buying back stock. The company expects share repurchases will remain the primary use of its free cash flow. In fact, Burlington Northern may allow “a moderately higher level of debt” so the company can “devote additional financial capacity to share repurchases”.

In that respect, at least, it is a typical Berkshire investment.

Visit GuruFocus…

On the Mueller Mispricing: “A” Shares vs. “B” Shares

Some smart investors see value in Mueller Water Products (MWA). They’re probably right; but, Mueller isn’t the kind of situation that jumps out at me as a clear bargain I can understand. However, there is something peculiar about this situation that makes it worth writing about.

A or B?

There are two shares of Mueller Water Products common stock – Series A common stock and Series B common stock. There are roughly three times as many B shares as A shares. The A shares and B shares have identical economic rights. So, ownership of all of the B shares would provide a roughly 75% economic interest while ownership of all of the A shares would provide a roughly 25% economic interest.

Here’s where things get interesting. “Shares of Series A common stock and Series B common stock generally have identical rights in all material respects except Series B shares have eight votes and each Series A share has one vote per share.”

So, what’s the premium on the B shares? There is none. The last trade on Mueller A shares (MWA) was at $13.98; the last trade on Mueller B shares (MWA.B) was at $13.64. Buyers of the A shares are currently paying $0.34 a share more to reduce their voting power by 87.5%.

You can’t convert A shares into B shares or B shares into A shares. If you could, there would be a profit in simply buying, converting, and selling. Unfortunately, you can’t do that. So, there’s no “manual” arbitrage opportunity here. Obviously, you can bet that the discount on the B shares will be eliminated – but, the market has to close the gap for you.

Regardless, there is a nonsensical discrepancy in price between the A shares and the B shares.

Anyone looking to make a new investment in Mueller should buy the B shares. There’s no reason to even think about touching the A shares until they are trading at a discount to the B shares.

Owners of Mueller A shares who currently hold those shares in a manner that would cost them less than $0.34 a share to sell should immediately begin selling their A shares and putting the proceeds into the B shares. Doing so would slightly increase their economic interest in Mueller’s business (because they would end up with more shares), greatly increase their voting power – and, over the long-term, possibly provide additional appreciation in the share price, if and when the B shares consistently trade at a premium to the A shares.

Do the B shares have to trade at a premium to the A shares? Technically – no. But, in the future, it’s possible that circumstances may make the B shares far more attractive to certain investors. The A shares are extremely unattractive to any large shareholder who isn’t committed to complete passivity as nearly 96% of the votes are tied to the B shares – the A shares are essentially non-voting shares.

Furthermore, …