Yellow Media (TSX: YLO) common shares have climbed up from their ultimate low of 12.5 cents on October 3, 2011 to 32 cents presently. There has been no news from them other than a press release stating they have been named one of Canada’s top 100 employers for the 6th year running.
Instead, this appears to be a matter of the stock being taken down to the basement level by a stampede of funds trying to desperately get out. Now that anybody that wanted to get out did, supply in the market seems to have been alleviated and the price is now rising.
The business fundamentals remain the same after a month – the company is highly leveraged, but is cash flow positive and has a feasible plan to paying off its debt through internal operations assuming the revenue decay is not too extreme.
Preferred shares continue to trade strangely, with the Series 3 (TSX: YLO.PR.C) trading with a yield about 4.5% higher than Series 5 (TSX: YLO.PR.D). I guess nobody reads the prospectus on these things anymore.
The equity-linked preferred shares, Series 1 (TSX: YLO.PR.A) and 2 (TSX: YLO.PR.B) continue to be coupled to the price of the Yellow Media equity. Series 1 will probably be converted into shares of Yellow Media (12.5 shares per preferred share if the common stock price is less than $2.05/share) on April 2012, while Series 2 stands a good chance of being converted in July 2012, depending on financial results.
While the Series 3 preferred shares trade at around 19 cents of par, convertible debentures are at around 33 cents.
The next big data point for the company is November 3, 2011, where they have already pre-announced a $2.9 billion goodwill write-down. While this will of course result in a grossly negative earnings per share for the year, it is a non-cash charge and the remaining questions for investors will be focusing on the cash flow statement at this release date. As I have repeatedly stated, if the company can produce results that are less than disastrous, they will stand a very good chance of surviving and being able to pay generous cash flows to their shareholders that are senior to the common.
In the favourable scenario, I would expect the market would see that Yellow Media will have the capacity of being in the position of paying off its obligations through internal cash flows and be in a position to raise financing sometime in the second half of 2012. If this occurs, the common shares should trade higher, but the preferred shares should also slowly rise to the 8-10% yield level, which translates into a $17-21/share price for the Series 3. The debentures in this case would also trade 1-2% richer than the preferreds, around 90 to 98 cents on the dollar.
The risk is that they won’t be able to make these financial targets and will be forced to restructure. The preferred shareholders will get wiped out along with the common shareholders. The unsecured debenture holders will likely get very little in such a reorganization.
The risk-reward was high and very high, respectively, and this is why I continue remaining long the preferred shares and debentures of Yellow Media. This is a relatively binary outcome with little middle ground which makes it a fairly unique opportunity.