Yesterday the shares in NMC Health (NMC) were suspended and a formal investigation by the FCA was announced. The suspension announcement said that the company has requested the suspension of its shares and that the company is focused on providing additional clarity to the market as to its financial position.
The events at NMC are hardly the kind of thing one expects from a FTSE-100 company with reported revenue of $2.5 billion and profits of $320 million. The company operates hospitals and other healthcare facilities in the Middle East – hardly a sector that should be particularly volatile. The company has of course been the subject of an attack by Muddy Waters and the share price was already down by 80% from their peak in 2018, before they were suspended.
There now seems to be considerable doubts about the accounts (the finance director is on long-term sick leave which is never a good sign), there are doubts about who holds the shares, and questions about related party transactions and debt. The founder and CEO have departed from the board leaving the COO as interim CEO.
I recall NMC being tipped in numerous publications before all this bad news came out and it certainly looked a good proposition at a glance. Both revenue and profits were rising at 30% per year driven by rising wealth in the Arab states. So why did I avoid it?
The key point I would make is that “financial numbers are not important when picking shares” which is the subtitle of my book “Business Perspective Investing”. The numbers alone cannot be trusted even if they have been audited by a big firm such as Ernst & Young.
The company is registered in London and listed in the UK but the company had a peculiar governance structure with two joint Chairman and an Executive Vice-Chairman. They had a large number of directors otherwise and at the last AGM actually approved a resolution to increase the maximum number to 14. That is way too large for any company and results in board meetings being dysfunctional. The Muddy Waters financial analysis clearly raised some concerns and it is well worth reading. It also raised issues about the level of remuneration of the board and share sales. These might be considered warning signs and there is the key issue that it might be very difficult for UK based investors to monitor the operations of the company.
These are the kind of issues that I suggested investors need to look at in my book.
What do investors do if they find they have been suckered into a company with dubious accounts and when other negative facts have come to light? The simple answer is to study the evidence carefully and if in doubt sell the shares. It is never too late to sell is a phrase to remember. You only have to look at the share price graph of NMC to see that investors with a trailing stop-loss of 20% would have exited long ago and hence avoided the worse outcome.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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