Canada – Page 42

Morneau Sobeco Income Trust announces corporate conversion

Morneau Sobeco specializes in outsourcing HR services. They have an annualized distribution of $0.94/unit, but they recently announced a corporate conversion which will take effect in 2011:

“Today, we are announcing our plans to convert to a corporation at the end of 2010,” said Bill Morneau, Executive Chairman of the Fund. “We intend to maintain our current distribution level for 2010 and provide an effective 10.6% after-tax increase in 2011 for unitholders taxable at the highest marginal rate.”

The conversion is being undertaken in response to the legislative changes enacted by the federal government that will apply a tax at the income trust level on unitholder distributions commencing January 1, 2011. The current monthly distribution level of $0.07871 per unit (or $0.94 per unit annualized) is expected to remain unchanged for the balance of 2010. Starting in January 2011, the monthly dividend level is expected to be $0.065 per share (or $0.78 per share annualized) with a sustainable payout ratio of 65% to 80% of cash flow. This dividend policy will facilitate the repayment of debt, while providing investors with an attractive yield. Going forward, the Fund’s intention is to continue to reward its investors with dividends in line with business performance. A special meeting of unitholders will be held in the second half of 2010 to obtain unitholder approval of the conversion.

A 94 cent to 78 cent reduction in distribution is a 17% decrease in distributions, and is somewhat less than what would otherwise be expected on an after-tax basis. It is not surprising that trust units are not trading too far down – about 3% at the time of this writing.

My valuation exercise on the company indicated they are trading at their fair value range, so I have not even bothered to place any orders for the units. The units are trading at $10.19 a pop, which is a 9.22% yield on their current distribution, or 7.65% in 2011. Given the risk involved, this is appropriate.

Federal Budget 2010 – brief thoughts

The budgetary cycle this year from both the federal and provincial government can best be described as “nothing changing, we are staying the course”.

The federal government, in particular, managed to crunch 424 pages of relatively little of political substance in their budget document. A lot of the documentation (as always) discusses the fiscal outlook which is interesting from a macroeconomic standpoint. In terms of government operations, the summary table, as follows, is what one really needs to look at:

Once you remove the effects of the stimulus package, spending continues to increase at a slow rate. This rate is actually a faster rate of spending when you compare it to the equivalent in the 2009 budget (the tables are different sizes in the documents so you will have to click on this image to see the numbers more clearly):

It is obvious that the non-action is highly political – if the government decided to slash and burn spending and government programs, the opposition would likely topple the government and force an election about “providing government programs to Canadians”. In a minority government, the status quo is the safest political approach, to the detriment of the rest of the country. It is only until a clear majority of the public and/or the Liberal opposition starts calling for real spending cuts (compared to the Mickey Mouse “we made tough choices” line given by the Finance Minister) will it be likely that we will see less largess in the present government.

Some commentators have noted that the government is heavily depending on revenue increases to balance the budget in 5 years (which is such a far-off time horizon that nobody will be kept accountable for this plan) – I think the revenue ramp is actually reasonable, not aggressive but not conservative either. It really depends on whether companies will start to hire people, but considering the government sees the big picture with respect to investment capital and corporate tax rates (which, federally, will be dropping from 18% to 16.5% in 2011 and 16.5% to 15% in 2012), this, combined with a reasonable stability in commodity markets, should help the country get back on track economically.

The last note is that interest rates will have a large effect on the bottom line – however, the government has assumed an accounted for a 3-month T-bill rate of 0.7% for 2010 and 2.4% in 2011, both reasonable projections.

“Wait and see” seems to be the message for this budget. It has been the least exciting budget so far in this government’s administration, but this is probably a good decision given the political constraints in the House of Commons. I am not happy with the huge expense ledger, however.

First Uranium gets whiplashed

I have written earlier about First Uranium’s woes – they had an environmental assessment permit that was critical to their business venture pulled.

Today they announced that they have it back.

This is what I was referring to the political instability risk concerning investing in companies that have major operations overseas – judging how burdensome the local government is very difficult unless if you are living there and have a “feel” for them.

First Uranium equity today jumped by 39% and closed the day at $1.81/share. This gives them a market capitalization of $300 million. Before this fiasco began, their equity was valued at about $2.50/share. I suspect their equity is under-valued, but I am not interested in the equity – I am interested in the debt. The equity still has other risks (dealing with governance, management compensation, composition of the near-majority shareholder, etc.) that I am not interested in taking. In addition, there still is the operational risk of actually being able to get the gold refining project up assuming anybody wants to finance the operation. The operation will likely be financed with some combination of equity and debt. Future dilution is something equity holders will face, but this is already baked into the relatively low share price.

The debentures are trading at bid/ask 68/71. Now with their business prospects significantly enhanced (providing that they can raise $100 million of capital that would be require to get the project going), I believe there is a material chance that these debentures ($150M par value) will be paid off at par in 2.3 years to maturity. I am guessing that once the project gets established and the revenues come in as projected (which will be substantial) that sometime in 2011 or early 2012, the cost of capital for the company will be considerably lower and I will get paid off at par. At 69.5 cents, the debt has a 23% annualized combined yield-capital gain for an acceptable risk.

Physics always trumps marketing

One reason why Robert Rapier is such a powerful writer (and a wonderful one to read) is that he rarely strays into dogma and talking points (and the times he does so, he usually signals it); his articles are quite analytical and verifiable. In his latest post, he rips into Range Fuels and Cello Energy, and also states that venture capitalist Vinod Khosla had no idea what he was investing in.

In summary, I will point out that the two primary sources of cellulosic production being counted on by the EPA for 2010 were Range Fuels and Cello Energy. Both are Vinod Khosla ventures, and neither has come remotely close to delivering despite lots of funding and taxpayer assistance. I don’t think these are isolated cases. I think they are a symptom of things to come. We have gotten a lot of overpromises, because face it, that has worked to secure funding. But what this leads to are completely unrealistic expectations regarding our energy policy, and numerous bad decisions regarding where tax dollars should be spent.

Finally, I want to make one thing crystal clear. I am not criticizing failure here. That is normal and expected. Failure is a part of what it takes to learn and move forward. What I am criticizing is the nature of the failure; that it was primarily because inexperienced people were making claims they shouldn’t have made, and taxpayers are going to get stuck with the bills. Personally, I have a problem with my tax dollars being squandered away by smooth-talking salesmen.

The underlying science (mainly the first law of thermodynamics – not even process engineering is required to understand the issue) will show that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get a net energy return on the production of alcohol-based (methanol/ethanol) fuel. Essentially, such fuels require energy inputs far greater than their desired output, so why not just use the input directly in whatever application you require the energy for?

There are some applications where energy conversion will be desirable anyway, despite a net energy loss – for example, the conversion of a diffuse source of energy (corn) into a concentrated source (ethanol), but if you are using a source of energy with even higher energy concentration and equal portability (natural gas), what is the point?

The government and a lot of people in the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) got sold a bill of goods, and they took the bait, hook, line and sinker.

Here in Canada, provincial governments are enacting legislation to blend in ethanol into fuels, which is a grave mistake. Also, the emphasis of hydrogen as a fuel to eventually replace gasoline is misguided; my thoughts are that hydrogen’s potential lies with energy storage rather than replacing conventional fuels.

Politicians get sold a bunch of fancy marketing and great promises in the hope that taxpayers’ dollars will get allocated toward whatever special interest of the day is being pitched at them (in this case, “less reliance on oil” is the message, although in the case of ethanol-blended gasoline “clean fuels to prevent global warming” is the message). The politicians and staff do not have the scientific capability of properly analyzing the proposals, and they get slick marketing pitches to sell them. Next thing you know, millions of dollars of taxpayers money are wasted with inefficient proposals and the end-consumer will pay for it when governments inevitably have to raise taxes to recover their losses on the project.

In the end, physics trumps marketing, but not after a lot of money is wasted once people scale up operations are realize they have no chance of delivering what they promised.

Canadian exchange traded debt statistics

There are 168 issues of exchange-traded debt available over the TSX. A lot of these issues are illiquid – 58 issues today did not trade.

None of these issues are trading below 60 cents.

There are 5 issues (3 issuers) that are trading between 60 and 69.9 cents.

There are 8 issues (6 issuers) that are trading between 70 and 79.9 cents.

There are 9 issues (8 issuers) that are trading between 80 and 89.9 cents.

There are 23 issues (21 issuers) that are trading between 90 and 99.9 cents.

The rest of the issues (123) are trading at 100 cents or greater.

If you compared these statistics with the same statistics one year ago, it would have been significantly different – there were lots of issues that were trading well below 80 cents.

The exchange traded debenture market on the TSX right now is mostly a done deal and investors should not look toward them to provide disproportionate returns beyond coupon payments. I have thoroughly analyzed the various issues that are trading cheaply, and there is limited value.

The events that occurred in late 2008 and early 2009 was likely a once in a decade opportunity in the corporate debt market. Time to start looking at equities again once everything matures.