C&G Industrial holdings

C&G Industrial holdings had a ninja 2QFY08 announcement on 3rd August, yesterday. It is rare to see a company giving its result announcement on Sunday. Caught me off guard, so to speak :) I noticed it when I saw a big drop in % change - around 27% drop - when I checked my watchlist.

Not going to do any detailed analysis. I thought this is a good candidate for pure Graham's play. The big drop is likely due to the bad 2Q08 results. Revenue dropped 7.2% compared to the 2Q07, gross profit dropped 17.4% and net profit dropped 66.5%. What caught my eye is actually the huge administrative expenses chalked up - to the tune of 23.9 million RMB, an increase of 362.4% from 2Q07.


A few factors caused the 2Q08 results to stink:

1. Revenue dropped because sales are affected by snow story in early 2008. But I think the more important fundamental change in their revenue stream is due to the fact that their yarn products are now confined to functional yarn, combed yarn and compact combed yarn. These are products with higher margins and those normal yarn products with lower margins are not longer manufactured or outsourced since Feb 2008. I think this creates a short term drop in revenue, but can potentially bring about greater good in the future.

Selling price were also reduced during 2Q08. This is worth looking closer because if a company had true competitive edge over others, I wouldn't expect selling prices to be cut. Is there a problem with tough competition eroding their selling prices and hence profits?

2. Net margins dropped due to the drop in revenue but no corresponding drop in the cost of sales. From around 19% net margins in 1H07, it dropped to 15% net margins in 1H08 (extraordinary gains are inclusive). 28.8 % gross margin dropped to 27.8% during the same period too.

To me, it's a short term problem. If their plans to manufacture and sell higher margin products succeed, this short term drop in net margins and gross margins will correct itself.

3. Other income - this is due to the exchange rate gains made in 2Q07 to the tune of 4.3 million RMB while there is a exchange rate loss made in 2Q08 around 1 million RMB. Did they do some form of hedging?

4. Administrative expense increases a lot because of an increase in consultancy fee for research and development (14.7 mil RMB). I suppose this is one off and will not recur every quarter. If this 14.7 mil RMB is added to their 1H 08 results, the drop in net profits is only around 8%, and not the 26.6% report in the results.

In other words, this could just be another temporary problem, just like their net margins and possibly revenue drop.


Graham's play?

What is so interesting about C&G is that they are sitting on a huge pile of cash and cash equivalents - 560.873 million RMB. Taking 468,000,000 as the number of shares outstanding, this gives us a cash/cash equivalent per share of 0.234 SGD.

I'm not sure where the cash comes from, but I think it's likely coming from the net proceeds from issue of shares of 218,514 million RMB made in FY07. This amount is just carried over to the current FY.

Let's be really conservative and calculate the total liabilities per share. Total liabilities stand at 228,661 mil RMB, giving us total liabilities per share of 0.098 SGD. Thus, after paying off all liabilities using only their cash/cash equivalents, there is still a cash per share of 0.142 SGD.

Graham recommended using current assets to minus off all liabilities (my calculation is even more conservative since I only used cash/cash equivalents to minus off all liabilities, which is part of current assets). Doing that we have a value of 0.192 SGD per share. Using a margin of safety of 30%, we get around 0.134 SGD per share.

Anyone game to play Graham on this company? :)

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edited: Mike informed me that I had miscalculated some figures because I used the wrong shares outstanding (I used the 07 figures instead of 08). Re-did my calculations :)