Some research discards – PDII

PDI, Inc. (Nasdaq: PDII) is a contract pharmaceutical marketing corporation. They managed to make it past my initial screen and I did some subsequent research. On initial glance, it does appear to be relatively cheap from a valuation perspective (revenues in relation to enterprise value is quite inexpensive), but the corporation suffers from significant customer concentration and they are strategically diversifying into partnering with diagnostic companies which creates a different element of investment risk – and valuing these risks from an external investor perspective adds even further complexity.

I generally do not like customer concentration and will pass on this, but will leave this for more enterprising readers out there to figure out if there is value here – my hunch is that the computer traders out there are looking at the low enterprise value in relation to other valuation metrics ($24 million vs. $75 million market cap, and $150 million revenues over the past 12 months), but are not paying enough attention on tangible book ($2.27/share) which means the downside risk is a bit lower (clarification, added December 24, 2013: downside risk referring to a lower price floor) than one would intuitively think.

In other words, without projecting some future external factors out there that would lead to ‘big pharma’ engaging firms such as these, or any intuition that these investments in diagnostics will succeed (there is no way of knowing), PDII is a pass on my books.

2 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Not related to this stock but post here as comments to Pinetree Capital is closed. The debt looks interesting on paper. But there are quite a few related party transaction (Augusta Industries) where basically Pinetree agrees to buy $X of Augusta Industries shares and Augusta Industries would buy $X of Pinetree capital shares – this type of transaction also happened at the beginning of the year. I find that quite troubling. I’m no accounting expert, but would this kind of financial engineering help it cure the debt-equity ratio mathematically while in reality, leaves the company in better shape financially.