Apple running up against the law of large numbers

Apple’s 3rd quarter results: I find it funny when analysts report a company making $8.8 billion in net income from $35 billion in sales to be a “miss”, but indeed that is what they are reporting today. Sales figures on notebooks, desktops, iPods and iPhones appear to be flattening out. The iPad continues to exhibit significant growth and is probably in the midpoint of its growth trajectory before it finally starts to taper out.

Apple has grown so large that it will become more and more difficult to post high percentage growth figures. Before this release, the market is saying that the entity is worth about $560 billion (noting that at the end of June the company now has $117 billion in cash on its balance sheet). In after-hours trading, the stock is down 5%, so that shaves off about $30 billion off of its capitalization, to about $530 billion.

Extrapolating the last quarter’s results into a full year gives a P/E of 15, or if you subtract the cash stack, a P/E of 12. When you factor in that growth will not quite come as easily for the company, one can get a semblance of how this $530 billion capitalization is not going to become a trillion dollars anytime soon. Still, when you ask yourself if Apple is going to go the way of the dodo like Nokia and Research in Motion, the answer is instinctively no, but nobody thought those other companies would be surpassed so quickly either. Apple has one huge asset in its advantage that its competitors currently do not: it is a fashion icon.

Kevin Graham on Microsoft

Kevin Graham writes about why he is long on Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) despite quoting reviewers’ ominous warnings about the usability of the new Windows 8 interface.

Certainly from historical financial measures, Microsoft is a cash machine and he does illustrate this.

Does anybody remember the release of Office 2007, with its new ribbon interface? Here is a reminder:

Almost everybody that I talk to said that this new interface required many, many painful hours of re-learning to find out where the functional equivalents were in the older pull-down menus from Office XP and before. It is one reason why I still run Office XP today – I find that the ribbon makes it about three times as difficult to remember where the function is that you are looking for and memory retention is significantly worse.

Windows 8 is going to be a similar analogy to the difference between Office 2003 to 2007. It is throwing away a lot of the “intuition” people have built up using the Windows interface, which will result in increased training time to acclimatize to the new operating system.

While the “Windows and Windows Live” division of Microsoft is responsible for about 40% of its profits, the office (business) division is just over 50%. Businesses have very little choice but to keep with office because of the fact that most staff you can hire will already know it (including the ribbon interface). Microsoft did not lose relevant business for the interface change, albeit, I do not think they were doing themselves any favours.

Windows 8 is probably going to be another incarnation of Windows Vista. With the “appletization” of computing being the new wave of software, the operating system is continuing to be less and less relevant. It is why you still have about a quarter of the population still using Windows XP, while Windows Vista users have gone below 1%. Basically people that had Vista went and upgraded to Windows 7 as soon as it was available, while those that have Windows XP machines are keeping them until they purchase new hardware with the newer version of Windows (and I am of that type – using my old and trusty Windows XP notebook that I purchased over 3 years ago).

This is the primary reason why Microsoft-centric hardware vendors like Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) are taking it in the chin.

This upgrade cycle – upgrading your software when you purchase a new computer system – is likely extending from an upgrade every two years to an upgrade every three, four, five or even more. The new features of the upgraded systems are becoming less and less relevant to actually getting work done and as a result, Microsoft’s business metrics should also slow down, albeit still gushing cash.

At a glance, if Microsoft gave out a $6 dividend tomorrow and promised not to blow money on stupid acquisitions (including their own stock, or buying out Yahoo), you still have a company that is generating roughly 15% of its value in cash a year, which is a fairly decent return when compared against the bond market. The remaining risk is how long companies and consumers will put up purchasing licenses of Windows and Office. Even if Windows 8 is a user interface disaster, I still don’t see people migrating from Office for a long time.

I do not see the stock itself, however, becoming a quick “double” or anything radical like that. If anything you will see some P/EV compression as the cash continues rolling into the bank account.

More Canadian oil assets snapped up by foreign companies

One of the larger Canadian oil and gas entities, Nexen (TSX: NXY) has been the recipient of a cash US$27.50/share takeover offer from CNOOC (NYSE: CEO), which is a Chinese state-owned corporation.

A deal this size also incurs political risk – it has to be cleared by the Minister of Industry.

About a quarter of Nexen’s operations are in Canada, which means that the deal is more likely to proceed than get killed off. Notably, Nexen owns 7.23% of Syncrude – and with Sinopec owning another 9.03% of Syncrude, that means China will have about 1/6th of Syncrude (16.26%).

Yellow Media recapitalizes

Yellow Media has published a recapitalization proposal. It needs to be approved by the various shareholder parties before it can commence.

To put a long story short, if you were to purchase preferred shares (specifically the “A” series) and the common shares the day before this was floated, you would have made out like gangbusters today.

The surprise here is that the common shareholders and preferred shareholders get quite a bit of value relative to previously trading market values. This is probably structured as such to get the entire proposal passed in a shareholder vote.

Unsecured subordinated debenture holders will, to use less than polite terminology, get screwed – about 0.39% of the shares of the new entity. They are able to get pillaged because of the structure of the recapitalization vote – they are either lumped in with the medium term note/credit facility holders, or lumped with the common/preferred shareholders (if they choose to convert!). In either case they will be dwarfed by a group that has a much higher interest to vote in favour for the restructure.

The debtholders on the top of the food chain will receive 62 cents of debt/cash consideration (48 cents in newly issued debt, 14 cents in cash) plus an 82.6% equity stake in the new company (which can presumably be dumped for some market value). At 12 shares per $1,000 par value, this is around 24 cents extra in consideration, or about 86 cents total recovery. Not bad, and I will see them voting for it. They could get greedy and go for a 100% recovery in bankruptcy proceedings, but this is a much more messy alternative than what is on the table.

The new entity will also have about $850 million in debt outstanding, most of which matures in 6 years. There will be 26 million shares outstanding.

Common shareholders will receive about 10% of the new company, which is a heck of a lot more than they would have had otherwise (zero through a non-structured arrangement) – they will vote yes for the arrangement. Likewise for the preferred shareholders – they receive 7% of the new entity.

My paper napkin calculation suggests that the math behind this recapitalization assumes a $20 share price of the newly issued Yellow Media stock. If this is the case, then present common shares would have a market value of around $0.10/share, and this would also imply the preferred shares are worth… $1.25. They are trading at around half of that right now, and a nimble trader would have been able to make a ton of money on this by reading the 8:45am (eastern time) press release in advance – somebody on the Pacific Coast wouldn’t usually be awake to do, unfortunately.

This implied $20/share value assumes the company’s operational performance remains steady. If their operational performance continues to decline, then this valuation of course gets thrown out the window, so the risk-free trade is not as easy as it may seem. Basically if you weren’t trading the thing in the first hour, there is little point now. Pays to keep awake I guess.

Negative interest rates

Negative interest rates have a very odd effect on the financial math. Certain European countries are selling short-term debt at negative yields, which is somewhat odd. Specifically if you bought a bond from Germany with a 2-year term, you would receive a yield to maturity of -0.06%. If you just held your Euros under the bed, you would receive a yield of 0%.

This is somewhat of an interesting statement by the market in that holding Euro cash is more risky than holding German debt. The decoupling of sovereign debt and its underlying currency is quite steadfast in Europe, while it is highly unlikely you will see such an occurrence in Canada or the USA unless if investors have a good reason to believe that the Canadian dollar or the US dollar will be broken.

I will not talk at this point about Quebec separation and the impact to the Canadian dollar.