In der letzten Ausgabe des Newsletters “Graham & Doddsville” (herausgegeben von den Studenten der Columbia Business School) geben Tweedy, Browne & Company ein ausführliches Interview zu ihrem Anlageprozess und interessanten Opportunities. Tweedy Browne ist einer der ältesten (gegründet 1920) value-orientierten Asset Manager. Die Firma verwaltet u.a. eine Reihe von Aktienonds, die einen Value-Ansatz verfolgen.
Interessant aus meiner Sicht, welche Bewertungsmethode sie nutzen:
G&D: What types of valuation metrics do you use? John Spears (JS): We look for “a satisfactory owner earnings yield.” For example, if you take a company’s operating income after tax and divide that by its enterprise value, and that produces an owner earnings yield of 8-10%, you’re getting a pretty good return.
Und etwas weiter unten:
G&D: How do you use NOPAT (Net Operating Profit After Tax) to EV (Enterprise Value) in evaluating opportunities? Do you compare it to long-term government bond yields? JS: To an extent. We also look at it relative to other companies. If you rank 100 companies on EV to NOPAT, how does it shape up in comparison to deal valuations? TS: However, we don’t go much below an 8% owner earnings yield. You have to be reasonable and say, “If multiples in the market are 20x EBIT, we are simply going to pass on that because it doesn’t make any economic sense, assuming some normalization in interest rates.” The analysis is both absolute and relative. Bob Wyckoff (BW): Earnings are less predictable. In conducting our analysis on earnings-based businesses, we spend a lot more time today on qualitative factors, factors that might impact that earnings stream over time. We try to estimate the earnings power of the business, the sustainability of that earnings power, and what the growth of that earnings power might look like over time. It does involve an evaluation of qualitative factors which might not have been as prevalent in our analysis 40 or 50 years ago. (…) Frank Hawrylak (FH): Previously, you didn’t have to do that. You could find a stock that was trading at 60% of net current assets, and you might glance at the annual report – which used to be 18-20 pages instead of 250 pages – to get an idea of what the business did. All you had to do was get comfortable with the inventory or accounts receivable. G&D: How has this impacted valuation? BW: The valuation framework remains the same – we’re still trying to buy companies at significant discounts from a conservative estimate of the underlying intrinsic value of the business. We tend to be pretty conservative appraisers. Today, we often value businesses at 10-13x pre-tax operating income – compared to 6-8x when I first started at Tweedy in 1991 – and try to buy those businesses somewhere between 6-9x. The expansion in our valuation multiples is largely due to this march to the bottom in interest rates. In 1980, when I arrived in New York, the prime rate was north of 20%. You see what has happened since then. Interest rates, with a hiccup here and there, have been in decline for over 35 years, and that has had a significant impact on what people are willing to pay for a business. You see it in corporate transactions and the values people are willing to pay in acquisitions. Debt to EBITDA multiples in leveraged buyouts are very high today. Invariably, if interest rates are low, people are going to borrow a lot of money, and that’s going to inflate multiples.
Zentral ist für Tweedy also der Operative Nettogewinn nach und vor Steuern. Bei NOPAT handelt es sich um den Operativen Nettogewinn nach Steuern, welcher zum Unternehmenswert (Enterprise Value) ins Verhältnis gesetzt wird. Weiter unten wird auf den Operativen Gewinn vor Steuern verwiesen, welcher (wahrscheinlich) zur Marktkapitalisierung ins Verhältnis gesetzt wird. Beim NOPAT/EV erwarten Tweedy Browne eine Rendite von 8-10% um von einer interessanten Investmentoption zu sprechen. Beim Verhältnis von Market Cap/Operativem Vor-Steuer-Gewinn sehen sie ein Multiple von 6-8 als interessant an. Obwohl die Methodik hier nicht weiter ausgeführt wird, kann man doch einige interessante Rückschlüsse ziehen:
(Normalisierte) operative Gewinne sind ein, wenn nicht der wichtigste Bewertungsindikator. Free Cash Flow findet keine Erwähung.
Asset-basierte Chancen (wie z.B. Net-Nets) sind heute selten.
Bewertungs-Multiples sind nicht fix, sondern hängen von gewissen ökonomischen Rahmenbedingungen ab (z.B. langfristiges Niedrigzinsszenario lässt Multiples steigen).
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