Monday, November 1, 2010

Making Money But Losing Value

L.S. Starrett (SCX), a company we have previously discussed as a potential value investment, recently returned to profitability having achieved sales and gross margin growth of 65% and 80% respectively in its fiscal fourth quarter. But despite the company's strong operating performance, the value of the company continued to fall. How can this be?

This occurs because not all company losses are shown on the income statement. Changes in the funded status (i.e. the difference between the pension plan's assets and the present value of what it owes) of a company's pension plan, for example, are not required to be immediately recognized as losses on the income statement. But to shareholders, a funding shortfall in a company pension plan is a very real liability that will have to be made up by future cash payments unless positive developments (e.g. strong returns from the plan's investments) occur that reduce the shortfall. But one cannot count on such positive developments!

For some companies, pension plan shortfalls are a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the company's operations. This is not the case with Starrett, as post-retirement plan shortfalls represent more than 1/3 of the company's market cap!

In order to properly estimate the intrinsic value of companies, shareholders should be sure to consider liabilities (such as pension shortfalls) that are not fully reflected on income statements. This requires subtracting funding shortfalls from company valuations based on their balance sheet values, or by following the progress of such shortfalls on the company's statement of comprehensive income.

Disclosure: Author has a long position in shares of SCX

5 comments:

vdbergh said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
vdbergh said...

Interesting article, Barel...
Just a small question t check if I have t correct:
The amount to substract from the valuation is it the 19.107M$ that I find in the latest annual report as Funded Status under Domestic and UK plans combined?
Thanks

Michael said...

Good finding! I never noticed it back to last year when I noticed this company kind of cheap at $8.40. I even noticed that the FIFO LIFO difference as well. However, one big concern for me is the company has over 2000 employees. Average revenue per employee is only 110k/year. Even only half of the 2000 are in US. I still think it is too low. How much gross profit they should made just to support those workers? Saj, do you ever have any concern about revenue per employee number for a stock?

Saj Karsan said...

Hi Mark,

Yes I believe that's correct.

Hi Michael,

I don't put much stock in the number of employees vs revenue. There are too many variables involved for me to make any useful comparisons. Some companies outsource certain work while others do it in-house, and in some companies some employees do a ton of value-added work while in others employees are easily replaced. It's hard to get a handle on these and other factors just from the number of employees on the payroll.

Saj Karsan said...

Hi Mark,

If I remember correctly, they also have an unfunded medical plan, so you may want to subtract the present value of that outstanding commitment as well.