I received an interesting item from Sharepad/Sharescope by Jeremy Grime this morning. It was headlined “Culture in Payments” but the interesting part was the coverage of the valuations of Fintech companies. It listed some of the recent takeover transactions of such companies where the valuations ranged from multiples of 1.1 to 7.8 times revenue (Source: W.H.Ireland), but many of them were on more than 7 times. Profits are not even mentioned! One example was UK listed company Earthport, taken over at 7.3 times revenue by Visa when it had been consistently loss making.
The article also mentions three small such UK listed companies – Alpha FX (AFX), Argentex (AGFX) and Equals Group (EQLS) and explains how they seem to be evolving from being primarily suppliers of foreign exchange to evolving into banks. I have an interest in one of those companies and another in the sector, but some of the valuations seem to be way too high to me. There are clearly a lot of share speculators betting on their future, but not all are likely to be successful. Maybe they are just looking further ahead than me (source of the word “speculator” is Latin “speculatus”, the past participle of the verb speculari, which means “to spy out” or “to examine” but it tends to now mean acting without looking).
Chancellor Sajid Javid has put the cat among the pigeons over the weekend by suggesting on Friday in an FT interview that UK businesses need to prepare for divergence from EU rules. He said “There will not be alignment, we will not be a rule taker, we will not be in the single market and we will not be in the customs union”. This may create potential difficulties for large importers/exporters from/to the EU, such as auto manufacturers, aerospace companies, pharmaceutical companies and food/drink suppliers. It is also somewhat inconsistent with the “political declaration” which was part of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement.
Perhaps this is just a negotiating position. I hope so because some harmonisation on goods might surely be preferable to ease trade flows, even if we depart to some extent from EU financial regulations and other rules. However, just to give you one example where harmonisation might be objected to, the EU is mandating Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA) for all new cars from 2022. Many UK drivers consider this unreasonable as speed limits are often inappropriate and there are a number of technical objections to it. Exporting compliant vehicles to the EU should not be difficult for car manufacturers but for German manufacturers if the UK drops that rule then problems may arise. The devil is in the detail on harmonisation. The answer is surely to agree harmonisation on technical standards where there is an obvious benefit to both parties, but not where the regulations attempt to dictate policies in the UK, or how our citizens behave.
Lastly I covered the latest Fundsmith Equity Fund Annual Report in a previous blog post (see https://roliscon.blog/2020/01/18/another-good-year-for-fundsmith/ ). It’s now available from this web page: https://www.fundsmith.co.uk/docs/default-source/analysis—annual-letters/annual-letter-to-shareholders-2019.pdf? and is well worth reading.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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