Asia Enterprise Holdings

(06-02-2014, 01:15 PM)BlueKelah Wrote:

(06-02-2014, 11:30 AM)Ben Wrote: This is an area that I am paying more attention on. Numbers don’t lie, but numbers alone is not good enough to predict the future. Take for example Asia Enterprise, a company I invested since 2007. This company has an unbroken track record of profitability since inception. It has a solid BS with high cash and little debts, plus a track record of paying at least 40% of profit as dividends. However, I am not able to see the coming collapse of steel price that beset the company for the next few years. Till now, it is still trading at lower price that my buy price, fortunately, it remains profitable every year and continue to pay dividends every year.

Yes, indeed finance person is different from accounting person. Thanks.

Dun worry, no one saw the coming boom of USA / china property prices either. Steel prices will revert to mean, in fact steel billet has been up >20% few weeks now but AEH and Hupsteel dont seem to have responded.

This is the beauty of competition, steel suppliers can't raise their price at the first sign of the steelmill's cost is going up. They normally have to clear their old stock first. Likewise when the price is heading down.

I used to be vested in AEH too; but divested several years ago because I could not see any progress in their business expansion post IPO. I wonder if the Lee family is regretting taking AEH public.

(06-02-2014, 02:02 PM)egghead Wrote: I used to be vested in AEH too; but divested several years ago because I could not see any progress in their business expansion post IPO. I wonder if the Lee family is regretting taking AEH public.

Ditto for me.
I was invested in AEH 2yrs ago.
Bought at $0.18-$0.2 and exited when it hit around $0.245 after collecting dividends for a few yrs.
My take on AEH after being an active SH:
If you can get it at prices around 50-60% of BV, it provides a reasonable margin of safety. Quantitatively it'll be reasonable at that price, but qualitatively, it has poor margins (and margins seem to be decreasing recently) and after so many years, there is hardly any growth.
I cannot name you any new projects or growth areas AEH is looking into, not now and not in the previous years.
It looks like management either has their hands full already, or are content to just maintain status quo.
So then, any entry has to incorporate a large MOS.

moving up today on no news, could it be start of share buy back?

4th August 2Q results -

0.031c loss for 1H
Cash eq. increased to 64.97 (92.69% Mcap) no debt, almost trading at cash value.
NAV 0.3033 / share

Share price still stuck around 20c with not much volume

when will shipping steel sector pick up?

-v accumulating more soon-

(07-08-2015, 12:39 PM)BlueKelah Wrote: 4th August 2Q results -

0.031c loss for 1H
Cash eq. increased to 64.97 (92.69% Mcap) no debt, almost trading at cash value.
NAV 0.3033 / share

Share price still stuck around 20c with not much volume

when will shipping steel sector pick up?

-v accumulating more soon-

As I mentioned in my post last yr, this is unfortunately a dead end business.
To make it worse, it is commodity related and steel stockists are likely to be screwed even more. Steel demand across the board has tanked, and is not likely to recover much in 2015 and even 2016.
Buy only with a very large MOS

AEH is one of the few true Graham net-nets on the SGX at the moment.

-Consistent dividends each year
-Trading almost around net cash: Cash 67.9m vs Market cap of 68.38m
-NCAV = $102m meaning AEH trades at 2/3 NCAV

Value-edge did a good write up recently on AEH here: http://value-edge.com/2015/10/12/asia-en...older-day/

There are other things to consider besides consistent dividends and trading around net cash. If that is your criteria, I recommend you another Graham net-net: CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY

I believe it is even trading below net cash so essentially you are buying the company for free plus some spare change.

(19-11-2015, 01:35 PM)beau Wrote: AEH is one of the few true Graham net-nets on the SGX at the moment.

-Consistent dividends each year
-Trading almost around net cash: Cash 67.9m vs Market cap of 68.38m
-NCAV = $102m meaning AEH trades at 2/3 NCAV

Value-edge did a good write up recently on AEH here: http://value-edge.com/2015/10/12/asia-en...older-day/

Thanks for the share. I would say that few other criteria could be added when finding Grahamite stocks to invest in. On the point about Creative Technologies I would think that it would just boil down to personal preference about the company's burn rate. Some may deem it irrelevant given a diversified portfolio of Grahamite stocks, while some may find it uncomfortable.

20160202.
For the year ended 31/12/2015, revenue was down 50% to S$32,300,000, compared to FY2014 of S$65,072,000.
As a result, gross profit declined 57% to S$3,669,000, compared to FY2014 of S$8,590,000.
Gross profit margin was 11.36%, compared to FY2014 of 13.20%.
Net loss after tax was S$10,482,000, due mostly to S$9,810,000 inventory write down, compared to net profit after tax of S$1,984,000 in FY2014.

Net Cash Flows From Operating Activities was S$S9,550,000, compared to S$21,521,000 in FY2014.
Net Cash Flows Used in Investing Activities was (S$1,638,000), compared to (S$1,164,000) in FY2014.

NAV per share as at 31 December 2015 was $S 27.11 cent (73.7% in cash or S$ 20 cents per share in cash compared to last transacted price of S$ 19.5 cent).

The company declared dividend of S$ 0.5 cent per share for FY2015.