Scudbucket Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 How do you guys think about customer concentration in terms of all airplane manufacturers having similar risk exposures affecting their businesses at the same time (like rising oil prices) and therefore capital spending? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
loganc Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 Anyone have access to Credit suisse's new report? I'd be curious to see how they justify a 230 price target. Thanks in advance. Here's the CS piece. Awesome. Thank you, sir. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 How do you guys think about customer concentration in terms of all airplane manufacturers having similar risk exposures affecting their businesses at the same time (like rising oil prices) and therefore capital spending? They make the real money on the aftermarket, so their profitable customers are more those who operate the planes than those who build them. Not much concentration there. As long as planes fly, they'll need replacement parts, and if you look a chart of revenue passenger miles, even 9/11 just made things plateau for a while and 2008-2009 was a small dip, so it would take a lot to keep enough planes grounded to really make a difference... Even in bankruptcy airlines keep flying. Even if all the manufacturers had a big slowdown, individual planes have such long lifes and the new additions from a single year are such a small part of the total fleet that it would take many years of that to make a meaningful difference. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cunninghamew Posted July 18, 2014 Share Posted July 18, 2014 I was curious what people thought about the leverage metrics? The absolute amount of debt the company runs with is very high $5.7 bill (in terms of debt to ebitda). They have cash of $475mm. The interest coverage ratios are good and tend to fall in around 3x (EBITDA to interest expense). I am just curious, because on one hand I have no concern (EBITDA could take a good hit and we would be fine) and on another I am concerned (total debt is very high, years to pay off debt is high). Also, wondering if we have been in a long bull cycle for the biz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 19, 2014 Share Posted July 19, 2014 I was curious what people thought about the leverage metrics? The absolute amount of debt the company runs with is very high $5.7 bill (in terms of debt to ebitda). They have cash of $475mm. The interest coverage ratios are good and tend to fall in around 3x (EBITDA to interest expense). I am just curious, because on one hand I have no concern (EBITDA could take a good hit and we would be fine) and on another I am concerned (total debt is very high, years to pay off debt is high). Also, wondering if we have been in a long bull cycle for the biz Like a Malone business, you have to be confortable with the leverage, and trust that management is an expert at creating a capital structure that is optimized, but not too optimized. The current leverage is pretty high because they just levered up and paid big special dividends, but if you look at it historically, they delever pretty fast after these recaps, and a lof of their debt isn't due for a while. As with Malone, the question is: Are their cash flows durable enough to support that leverage. Each investor has to answer that question for himself... I kind of doubt they've just been riding one cycle. They went through all kinds of stuff just in the past 15 years and navigated all those situations admirably. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jay21 Posted July 27, 2014 Share Posted July 27, 2014 I am starting to do work on this one. The leverage is very high, so I don't see it becoming a large position. However, if you can pull of a PE model, you can have very attractive returns. Apparently PE runs in the Howley's blood. Mike Howley is the managing partner of a PE fund (Bratenahl Partners) where Nick is on the investment committee: "Bratenahl Capital Partners (BCP) is located in the historic warehouse district in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. BCP operates with a substantial amount of our own committed capital, as well as access to significant additional capital through our other investment partners. We are able to move quickly to assess and decide on opportunities. To date, BCP has completed more than 30 fund investments and 24 co-investments. Over an 8-year span, BCP has achieved greater than a 50% IRR on 16 exited investments, and a cash-on-cash return of about 3.4 times our invested dollars. Bratenahl Capital Partners was founded in 2003. Michael Howley, the current Managing Partner, was an original founder." http://www.bratenahlcapital.com/about/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 27, 2014 Share Posted July 27, 2014 Good find, Jay. I didn't know about Mike. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted August 5, 2014 Share Posted August 5, 2014 http://www.transdigm.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=196053&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1955222&highlight= Net sales of $610.6 million, up 25.0% from $488.6 million; EBITDA As Defined of $275.6 million, up 18.8% from $231.9 million; Declared and paid a special dividend of $1.43 billion, or $25.00 per share, and related dividend equivalent payments; Net income of $16.2 million, down from net income of $76.7 million, primarily due to one-time refinancing expenses; Loss per share of $1.66, down from net earnings per share of $0.71, primarily due to dividend equivalent payments and previously mentioned refinancing expenses; Adjusted earnings per share of $2.02, up 6.9% from $1.89; and Revisions to fiscal 2014 financial guidance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted August 26, 2014 Share Posted August 26, 2014 Company has bought back 421k shares for $72m (average price of: $171) in the recent quarter (from memory) and the CEO just did this: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1260221/000120919114054146/xslF345X01/doc4.xml (Update:corrected mistake above) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jouni1 Posted August 26, 2014 Share Posted August 26, 2014 Company has bought back 400m in the recent quarter (from memory) and the CEO just did this: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1260221/000120919114054146/xslF345X01/doc4.xml hmm. last year he was selling at 140+ usd. wonder if something has made him more positive on the business, or was he hoping to get back in cheaper after the special dividends and added leverage? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted August 26, 2014 Share Posted August 26, 2014 hmm. last year he was selling at 140+ usd. wonder if something has made him more positive on the business, or was he hoping to get back in cheaper after the special dividends and added leverage? I expect management of TDG to frequently sell pretty big amounts of stock because of the way their compensation is set up -- I don't read much into selling for this company, but buying is a clear signal. They say it themselves: They under-pay in cash and over-equitize to better align management (management owns about 10% of the business. Their options are 100% performance vested. They need 10% IRR to vest at 25%, and to vest at 100% they need to be above 17.5% IRR). This means that just to have as much money in their pockets as the management of other similar companies in the industry, they need to periodically sell stock. But with those hurdles, at least they truly earned the money. No time vesting like in other companies, where you get stock just to sit around long enough. http://i.imgur.com/3Mi4ham.png http://i.imgur.com/uTm1ODX.png http://i.imgur.com/X00ooOc.png Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jouni1 Posted August 26, 2014 Share Posted August 26, 2014 seems sensible when you put it like that, yes. i have no idea how much they make but yahoo finance shows 48 million in pay for howley. if that's the case, it's just two weeks salary which isn't relatively that much yet. however, berkshire partners seems to have been buying(quite a lot) in june around these prices also. they have rob small on the board so they probably have a better view in to the business than me. might have to start getting comfortable with the valuation. i'm still a bit angry at mr. market for not discounting the company enough after the special dividends :( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted August 26, 2014 Share Posted August 26, 2014 seems sensible when you put it like that, yes. i have no idea how much they make but yahoo finance shows 48 million in pay for howley. if that's the case, it's just two weeks salary which isn't relatively that much yet. however, berkshire partners seems to have been buying(quite a lot) in june around these prices also. they have rob small on the board so they probably have a better view in to the business than me. might have to start getting comfortable with the valuation. i'm still a bit angry at mr. market for not discounting the company enough after the special dividends :( About Howley, that's another thing they have explained in a recent meeting. Howley only got that much because he had a bunch of options vest at 100% at the same time (basically a multi-year compensation plan that paid all at once, afaik) because the company did so well in recent years plus some of the huge special dividends they did recently. But he's only getting what shareholders are getting, not a huge separate salary. You can see the break-down in one of the slides above (with the pie chart). His actual salary and bonuses are 4% of that amount. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jouni1 Posted August 26, 2014 Share Posted August 26, 2014 thanks for breaking it down for me! all these compensation structures are totally foreign to me. looking at it, it seems to be built to incentivise the management correctly, which seems rare. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted August 26, 2014 Share Posted August 26, 2014 No problem. They're pretty different from other companies and it took me a while to get comfortable. I recommend you find audio or transcripts of the investor days they hold yearly. These are like 3 hours long, but there's a lot of good info in there about how they operate and structure things. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fmnpartners Posted September 2, 2014 Share Posted September 2, 2014 Has anyone considered the potential downside effects of the Dividend Equivalent Payment (DEP) feature of management's stock options? While it is nice the DEPs are only available on vested options which (as others have already noted) are based on the achievement of some fairly high performance targets, the feature itself does strike me as a bit odd given the significant amount of capital distributed over the last few years. Since the first quarter of F1Q13, the company appears to have paid out roughly ~$3.2b in cash for dividends and spent just over ~$1b on acquisitions (all data from CIQ). As one might expect, Total Debt/EBITDA also looks to have risen from around ~4.5x at the end of fiscal 2012 to around ~7.5x on current LTM 6/30/2014 numbers. Thus, management seems to have been borrowing significant amounts of money to make special dividend payments equating to roughly 2.8-3.0x annual EBITDA while deploying just a third of that amount into acquisitions. This train of thought is not meant as a judgment on overall capital allocation and certainly it's not a dealbreaker for me, but it does perplex me somewhat, especially when one considers the fact management is not putting up capital for its share of the cash dividends, recent open market purchases notwithstanding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 2, 2014 Share Posted September 2, 2014 Their reasons for borrowing money have been explained on various conference calls. They consider high yield debt to be very mispriced currently and decided to reduce their cost of borrowing and load up while they had a chance. They also recap every few years to keep their leverage on target (they're a bit above it now, but they delever quickly); they generate more cash than they can deploy in M&A, hence the special dividends (and sometimes buybacks). Part of how they create value is definitely leverage. It's up to each investor to determine if they think their businesses are predictable and resilient enough to support that leverage. http://i.imgur.com/r6AVRlR.jpg Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elevensecsrt4 Posted September 4, 2014 Share Posted September 4, 2014 I've been researching this company and really am impressed with management Liberty it seems Nicholas bought another block of stock in late August. I'm doing more research and just curious as to what you think the CEO sees in adding now. It sure seems he would know business health better than most. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 4, 2014 Share Posted September 4, 2014 Liberty it seems Nicholas bought another block of stock in late August. I'm doing more research and just curious as to what you think the CEO sees in adding now. It sure seems he would know business health better than most. It's hard to say, but I think he's a long-term kind of guy, so it could just be that he see things just continuing to go well overall for the indeterminate future. He made a lot of cash with the recent special dividends, so it could just be that he wanted to reinvest some of his new liquidity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gamecock-YT Posted September 4, 2014 Share Posted September 4, 2014 Liberty it seems Nicholas bought another block of stock in late August. I'm doing more research and just curious as to what you think the CEO sees in adding now. It sure seems he would know business health better than most. It's hard to say, but I think he's a long-term kind of guy, so it could just be that he see things just continuing to go well overall for the indeterminate future. He made a lot of cash with the recent special dividends, so it could just be that he wanted to reinvest some of his new liquidity. That'd be my guess. You pull down $60 mm in compensation for the year, it has to go somewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elevensecsrt4 Posted September 5, 2014 Share Posted September 5, 2014 Does anyone have a position in tdg at the moment. Just curious. Management appears to be getting the job done for quite a while now. It definitely isn't cheap. But I'm contemplating a position for my children's education fund. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 5, 2014 Share Posted September 5, 2014 Does anyone have a position in tdg at the moment. Just curious. I do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
no_thanks Posted September 5, 2014 Share Posted September 5, 2014 Does anyone have a position in tdg at the moment. Just curious. Management appears to be getting the job done for quite a while now. It definitely isn't cheap. But I'm contemplating a position for my children's education fund. I do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cunninghamew Posted September 5, 2014 Share Posted September 5, 2014 same Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jouni1 Posted September 13, 2014 Share Posted September 13, 2014 another insider buy, james skulina (executive vice president) bought 1.2 million dollars worth of stock. i might have to "close my eyes" and follow suit. ;D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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