Income trusts are starting to announce conversions to corporations and the effects on their unit/share prices are quite telling. For profitable companies, they will have to announce distribution/dividend cuts to compensate for the effect of the upcoming tax on trust distributions.
Davis and Henderson is a business services company, doing about $482M in revenues for 2009. They are primarily an acquirer and consolidator of smaller companies and they have been fairly good at streamlining synergies with these acquisitions. Their balance sheet is messy (negative $235M in tangible equity, little cash and about $200M in revolving term loans as debt) but they generate hefty cash flows. They also distribute, just like most profitable trusts, the vast majority of their free cash flow. However, they pass my ‘trust test’ which is that they generate more in net income than they distribute in cash.
They announced that they will be converting to a corporation and with it their distributions will be going from $1.84/unit to $1.20/share in 2011 because of the tax impact. This is a 35% reduction in distributions and they rationalized the 64 cent cut by saying that had they been a corporation in 2009, they would have had to pay $0.60 to $0.66 in taxes. Their communications person must be a good spin doctor since they didn’t mention that the projected tax would effectively have to be paid on a larger income amount than $1.84/share – after backing out the intangible amortizations, the company generates about $2.27/unit in cash and a 28% corporate tax take is appropriate. In addition, the corporate tax rate will be dramatically decreasing in Canada in 2010, 2011 and 2012. In 2011 it will be 16.5% federal, and roughly 11% provincial, while in 2012 it will be 15% federal and roughly 10% provincial in the major jurisdictions (BC, Alberta, Ontario).
The point is that the distribution cut is going to be more than covered by the company’s cash flows, and they can use the surplus to pay down debt and reduce leverage on their balance sheet.
I know how a lot of retail investors think, and whenever they see a dividend cut, they will panic and sell. So that, they did:
Trading instinct is a difficult thing to describe, but since I’ve been stalking Davis and Henderson for quite some time now, I knew this would be a good time to pounce. When examining their release and annual report, I estimated investors will take down the stock between 5-15% for the day, so I layered an order to buy shares continuously between 6-12% and got enough of a fill to get a 3% position in the company – I was prepared to take 6%, so this was better than nothing. The low for the day was 8.8% below the previous day’s trading price. As you can see, institutional investors and myself likely cashed in on the retail panic.
People that are not in the upper tax bracket can receive Canadian dividend income virtually tax-free. Starting in 2011, I will be getting about 7.6% “tax-free”, and this should be a sustainable yield on my investment given the financial state of the company and the relatively boring businesses they are involved in. The largest risk to this company (other than the slowdown in the business services they are involved in that will exhibit a natural decline, such as cheque-printing and processing) is rollover risk of their $200M term loans. They can equitize the debt with about 19% dilution to existing holders and the history of the company suggests that their relationship with the banks are stable and it is unlikely we will see an attack on their equity by hedge fund artists that want to bet on a recapitalization.
With Rogers Sugar being my other major equity holding, they are due to announce what they plan on doing with their corporate structure. As it is likely they will be contemplating the same thing, investors would be wise to look at trusts that are planning conversions and seeing if they can realize short term trading opportunities. I know that in 2011 the structure of my registered accounts will be looking different since I want to move dividend-bearing securities outside the RRSP because dividend income will be virtually tax-free.
