Grifols (GRF): siguiendo de cerca la acción

Por cierto, hoy el gobierno a prohibido la OPA a Talgo, a ver si tambien interviene en Grifols. Al fin y al cabo es mas estratégica.

Lo de Talgo creo que tiene más que ver con que en la propiedad del adquirente está el Estado Húngaro (gobierno de extrema derecha + amigo de Putin).

 En prensa USA ayer se publicó 

This Reviled Pharmaceutical Firm Holds Promise of a Healthier Future

Story by Jon S.

26 Aug 2024
 

Pharmaceutical firm Grifols is wounded. The bleeding can be stopped.

Between the time it first listed on Spain’s stock market in 2006 and the onset of the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, the Barcelona-based company outperformed the S&P 500 almost fivefold thanks to its role as a supplier of blood-plasma-based medicines and its geographical diversification. Half of its revenue comes from the U.S. 
 

Ever since, though, the stock has become reviled and lost more than 70% of its value. During the pandemic, Grifols invested in research on the use of antibodies derived from the plasma of patients newly recovered from the coronavirus as a treatment. The results were disappointing, but that wasn’t the pandemic’s worst impact on the company. Lockdowns prompted blood-collection centers to close, resulting in a plasma shortage that contributed to a 69% drop in the company’s net income in 2021.

At the start of this year, the company suffered an even deeper cut in the form of a report released by Gotham City Research, the short-seller fund responsible for sinking Gowex in 2014. The Spanish wireless-network provider ended up admitting that it had falsified its accounts.

In the post-Theranos era, leveling a similar accusation against a blood-related company tends to make investors a little jumpy, and Gotham did raise some reasonable concerns. 

 One is that Grifols’s acquisition spree of the past decade and a half now looks ill-advised. Debt went from amounting to about three times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, to eight times at the end of 2023. During that time, operating margins went from 25% to 11%.

Another is that Grifols has an opaque relationship with one of its shareholders, an investment firm called Scranton Enterprises. Shortly after buying Haema and Biotest in 2018, Grifols immediately sold them to Scranton. It also signed a long-term agreement to get plasma from these firms and retained the option to repurchase them.

Because of the contraction of its core business, two-thirds of Grifols’s 2023 earnings were generated by what it calls minority interests—including the two companies it sold to Scranton, together with Grifols Diagnostics Solutions, of which it owns 55%. Gotham argues that Grifols misled investors by reporting results as if these enterprises were fully under its control, overstating earnings and understating debt. Its shares are “uninvestable and likely are worth zero,” the January report said.

 Gotham has also warned that Scranton is “a Grifols family entity.” The family members, which trace the origin of Grifols to 1909 and have held a tight leash on it since, claim that they are only minority investors. Grifols has sued Gotham, insisting that all transactions were done “at arms’ length” and were announced at the time.

Regardless of the legality of the whole affair, investors are right to be on guard. A disinterested third party would hardly have engaged in such transactions with Grifols. The pre-existing relationship with Scranton is indisputable, and Grifols seems to have used it to its advantage, acquiring costly firms while keeping the accounting as flattering as possible—or, in the words of the 2018 annual report, to “reinforce its financial structure.”

But this seems to contradict the claim that Grifols shouldn’t count earnings from these companies as its own. Indeed, Spanish regulators concluded in March that it does retain control over them. 

Concerns about the firm’s financial engineering linger, though. In their review, officials still scolded executives for not having provided debt ratios excluding minority interests in several reports. And, two months ago, Grifols had to restate its accounts from 2020 through 2023, admitting that it had treated its stake in Chinese firm Shanghai RAAS incorrectly.

Canadian asset manager Brookfield has been working on the possibility of helping to take Grifols private but, according to a Spanish online newspaper, it has hit snags because of accounting issues regarding RAAS. A more recent report from Bloomberg suggested a takeover is still possible.

The silver lining: Grifols has become extremely cheap. Its enterprise value is roughly nine times prospective Ebitda, while its closest competitor, CSL, trades at 21. For 2024 as a whole, a powerful postpandemic rebound in the plasma market has led analysts to expect Grifols’s core profit will be almost seven times higher than in 2023, once again dwarfing the contribution of the contentious minority holdings. Most of the RAAS stake has now been sold and has helped pay down debt. 

 Moreover, governance concerns have been addressed in recent months by naming new board members, replacing top executives and reducing the day-to-day involvement of the Grifols family.

A penchant for creative accounting is always a bad sign, but it doesn’t necessarily make a company worthless, especially if it is willing to repent. Whether the upside comes from a takeover or a revenue recovery, Grifols could be an interesting target for opportunistic investors—as long as they don’t faint at the sight of blood.  

  
 

La traducción del ultimo parágrafo:

"Ya sea que la oportunidad provenga de una adquisición o de una recuperación de los ingresos, 
Grifols podría ser un objetivo interesante para los inversores oportunistas, 
siempre y cuando no se desmayen al ver sangre"

 

Un relato, a diferencia de lo que venimos leyendo en la prensa patria, bastante objetivo de la situación; el periodista que lo ha escrito es catalán (y pro-indepe por lo que he podido inferir en su X) por cierto.

No obstante, difiero en el cálculo (9x) del EV / EBITDA al que cotiza: estamos en 1.8 Bn de EBITDA proyectado para 2024, con un ratio de DFN de 4.5x (unos 8.1 Bn), capitalizando 6.2 Bn (entre las A y las B). Ello arroja un EV de 14.3 Bn, que entre 1.8 Bn de EBITDA, me da algo menos de 8x.

Buenas.
Si no he calculado mal, a partir del cierre de hoy el tiempo ya juega en contra de los opantes.
Lo digo porque la media de 6 meses (127 días?) empezará a subir (pues dejarán de contar la cotizaciones anteriores a la gran caída del 29/2).
Así que tendremos a esa media subiendo (según dicen, una de las referencias que toma la ley) y la cotización también, con lo que el precio que quieran ofrecer cada vez tendrá una prima menos atractiva.
¿Podríamos estar a punto de ver el anuncio oficial?

Creo que no es así porque se cuenta los seis meses anteriores al anuncio, lo que pasa después no le importa mucho a la CNMV, aunque existen supuestos en los que podrá modificar el precio calculado.
 

Artículo 10. Oferta por exclusión. 
 

5. El informe de valoración a que se refiere al artículo 34.5 de la Ley 24/1988, de 28 de julio, del mercado de valores, contendrá una justificación detallada sobre la propuesta y el precio ofrecido basada en los resultados obtenidos a partir de los siguientes métodos:

a) Valor teórico contable de la sociedad y en su caso, del grupo consolidado, calculado con base en las últimas cuentas anuales auditadas y, si son de fecha posterior a éstas, sobre la base de los últimos estados financieros.

b) Valor liquidativo de la sociedad y en su caso, del grupo consolidado. Si de la aplicación de este método fueran a resultar valores significativamente inferiores a los obtenidos a partir de los demás métodos, no será preciso su cálculo siempre que en el informe se haga constar dicha circunstancia.

c) Cotización media ponderada de los valores durante el semestre inmediatamente anterior al anuncio de la propuesta de exclusión mediante la publicación de un hecho relevante, cualquiera que sea el número de sesiones en que se hubieran negociado.

d) Valor de la contraprestación ofrecida con anterioridad, en el supuesto de que se hubiese formulado alguna oferta pública de adquisición en el año precedente a la fecha del acuerdo de solicitud de exclusión.

e) Otros métodos de valoración aplicables al caso concreto y aceptados comúnmente por la comunidad financiera internacional, tales como, descuento de flujos de caja, múltiplos de compañías y transacciones comparables u otros.