It’s a Bleak Mid-Winter

It’s a bleak mid-winter, everybody is hunkering down against the icy winds, Royal Mail have given up delivering post even in the London suburbs, and retailers are suffering. Well no, actually it’s the second day of Spring but the first was the coldest one on record.

But the stock market is drifting down and the news from many companies is dire. Let’s review some of those to start with. Note: I hold or have held some of the companies mentioned.

Safestyle (SFE) sell replacement plastic windows. You would have thought households would be rushing to replace their tired and leaking windows in the bad weather but apparently not. On the 28^th Feb they announced a profit warning and the share price fell 37% in the next two days. Is that because of difficulties in installing in the bad weather? No, that will come later no doubt. The problem was lack of order intake so far this year. The real problem is “the activities of an aggressive new market entrant” in an “already competitive landscape” – the latter presumably referring to consumers cutting back on big ticket items. Historically the company showed great return on capital and good profits but the old problem of lack of barriers to entry of competition seems to be the issue.

Carpetright (CPR) also issued a profit warning yesterday. They now expect a loss for the year and blame “continued weak consumer confidence”. It seems they need to have a chat with their bankers about their bank covenants, but the latter “remain fully supportive”. I suspect the real issue here is not consumers (most buyers replace carpet in one room at a time so they are not exactly big purchases) but competition, including from Lord Harris’s son (Phil Harris was the founder and Chairman of Carpetright for many years). Other carpet suppliers (such as Headlam which I hold) have not seen such a major impact, but perhaps they are not as operationally geared as Carpetright. Or the bad news will come later.

Many retailers have faced a changing market – the market never stands still, with internet sales impacting many. Both Toys-R-Us and Maplin have gone into administration. The latter have no doubt been particularly hit by the internet and Amazon, but they have also suffered by private equity gearing up their balance sheets with very high levels of debt. Neither seemed particularly adept at keeping up with fashion. Might just be a case of “tired” stores and dull merchandise ranges. But why would anyone buy from a Maplin store when they could order what they needed over the internet (from Maplin, Amazon or thousands of other on-line retailers) and get it delivered straight to their door in 24 hours? In addition, many such on-line suppliers avoid paying VAT so Maplin was going to suffer from price comparisons.

But there has been some better news. IDOX (IDOX) published their final results yesterday – well at least there was no more bad news. They issued previous profit warnings after a dreadful acquisition of a company named 6PM, and the CEO, Andrew Riley, then went AWOL on health grounds. In addition there were problems with inappropriate revenue recognition, a common issue in software companies. Mr Riley has now definitely departed permanently and former CEO Richard Kellett-Clarke continues to serve as interim CEO.

The latest financial figures report revenue up 16% for the year although some of the increase will be from acquisitions. The profit figures reported on the first page of the announcement are best ignored – they talk about EBITDA, indeed “adjusted EBITDA” and “adjusted earnings”. I simply skipped to the cash flow statement which indicated “net cash from operating activities” of £13.4 million. That compares with a market cap at the time of writing of £152 million, so the cash earnings yield might be viewed as 8.8%.

They did spend £24.3 million on “investing activities”, mainly financed by the issue of new shares, last year and much of that might effectively have been wasted. But cash flow going forward should improve. Unadjusted diluted earnings per share were very substantially reduced mainly due to increased overheads, higher amortisation and high restructuring and impairment costs. These certainly need to be tackled, but the dividend was increased which shows some confidence in the future.

The share price perked up after the results announcement but some commentators, such as my well-known correspondent Tom Winnifrith, focused on the balance sheet with comments such as “negative current assets” (i.e. current ratio less than one) and less polite phrases – he does not pull his punches.

Any accountant will tell you that a company with a current ratio (current assets divided by current liabilities) of less than 1.4 is likely to go bust simply because they risk running out of cash and will not be able to “meet their debts as they become due” (i.e. will become insolvent).

Am I concerned? No because examination of the balance sheet tells me that they have £19.8m of deferred income in the current liabilities (see note 18). This represents support charges which have been billed in advance for the year ahead. Such liabilities are never in fact crystalised in software companies. So deducting that from the current liabilities results in a current ratio that is a positive 1.7.

The balance sheet now does have substantial debt on it, offset by large amounts of “intangible” assets due to capitalisation of software development costs which many folks would ignore. The debt certainly needs to be reduced but that should be possible with current cash flow, and comments from the CEO about future prospects are positive. That is why the share price rose rather than fell I suggest on the announcement, plus the fact that no more accounting issues had been revealed.

There are promises of Spring next week, so let us hope that this will improve the market gloom that seems to be pervading investors of late. Even retailers may do better if shoppers can actually get to their shops. We just need the sun to come out for a few days and flower buds to start opening, for the mood to lighten but I fear my spring daffodils have been frozen to death.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )