Category Archives: valuation

Pharma companies are undervalued.

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The stock market is near peak bubble territory. Check the long term NSE PE Ratio chart to see what happened when the PE ratio touched 25. Of course this does not mean there will be crash soon, nobody can predict that but if you look at history then it would make sense not to invest right now.

nifty-pe-ratio
The share price of most companies is overvalued right now finding good investment opportunities has become difficult but there is hope. Look at the NSE Sectoral Performance for the last 3 months.

nse-sector-performance

Most of the sectors have given good returns except IT and Pharma. The companies in the Pharma sector have been facing tough times. Such adverse conditions are good news for patient value investors because investing in companies who have taken a beating gives enormous returns down the line. The only condition is you have to analyse which stocks to invest in that sector.

Companies like Sun Pharma, Lupin, Divis Lab, Dr Reddy’s which were once the darlings of Pharma sector have taken a significant beating. Most of Pharma companies faced the wrath of US FDA due to tighter regulations.

Despite the short term bad news, Pharma companies are not going anywhere, they have promised to fix all the regulatory issues. We believe it’s a good time to invest in the Pharma sector. Of Course there is always a possibility that the share price of Pharma companies can fall even more, if that happens you will get to buy them cheaper. You can check our charts, valuation models of the individual pharma companies to see which ones are fundamentally good or bad. If you don’t have the tenacity to do the research you can invest in a Pharma mutual fund.

So even though the market is overvalued there are some hidden gems provided you know where to find them.

How to make intelligent Stock decisions in 5 minutes.

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We recently added ACC to our database. When we add any new company to the database we avoid looking at the share price. We add the data and then look at the performance, growth pages and then make a decision whether it is a good company to invest or not.

If you look at the profit margins and ROE charts you will immediately see that all of them are dropping down consistently for many years. Most of members do check these charts but we have seen from our website logs that most members don’t look at the Growth page. So we just want to point out how the Growth page can help you make the decision.

ACC_Cement_Growth_Rate

The above information tells you that ACC does not have a good Revenue growth for all these years. The next two lines tell you (this is very crucial) that all the sales ACC does, it has a tough time converting those sales into profits (Net Income) and ultimately pass on those profits to the shareholders (EPS). So either ACC is operating in a bad sector or the company is not being managed properly.

To see if ACC is operating in a bad sector, let us look at another cement stock, UltraTech Cement

Ultra_Tech_Cement_Growth_Rate

UltraTech Cement’s revenue growth is much better than ACC. It was able to lower its expenses which is why the Net Income growth is better than Revenue growth. The EPS growth rate lower than the Net Income growth rate because UltraTech issued new stock for an acquisition.

By comparing these figures from two companies you should be able to figure out that the cement sector is not a bad sector to invest. Its just that ACC is not being managed well. It makes sense to invest in UltraTech Cement(not at current valuation though) instead of ACC.

Now and only now you can look at the company’s stock price to see if our analysis was right and to see how the market has valued ACC historically.

If you look at ACC’s share price from 31-March 2006 till 16-Jan-2015, its compound growth rate was 8.6%, which is not good. If you look at UltraTech Cement’s stock performance for the similar period, its growth rate was 22% which is fantastic. So our analysis about ACC was correct. The market agrees with our analysis, even rest of the market thinks that ACC is not a good company to invest which is why it has given such poor returns compared to UltraTech which has given fantastic returns.

In the long run the share price performance matches the company’s performance. We hope by now our members would understand why it so crucial to look at a company’s long term growth rates. You simply cannot ignore it.