Month: June 2016

Why companies are saving more and investing less

The global economy is suffering from an unusual problem of too little demand rather than the usual problem of scarcity, ie too little produced and so too little earned. Hence the relative abundance of the global supply of savings over the demand to utilise them, so causing some interest rates in the developed world to become negative and prices to fall (deflation rather than inflation) and growth to slow.

Since much of the savings realised are made by companies in the form of retained earnings and cash (that is earnings augmented by depreciation and amortisation) the question then arises – why are companies saving as much as they are rather than using their cash and borrowing power to demand more plant and equipment that would add helpfully to both current spending and future production?

In the US, where an economic recovery from the recession of 2008-09 has been well under way for a number of years, fixed investment spending (excluding spending on new home and apartments), having recovered strongly, is now in decline and threatens slower GDP growth to come.

It is not coincidental that demand for additional capacity credit by US corporations remains subdued while balance sheets have strengthened. The debts of US non-financial corporations, compared to their market values are proportionately as low as they have been since the 1950s.

 

With the cash retained by non-financial corporations, the financial assets on their balance sheets have come to command a much higher share of their net worth. The share of financial assets of total assets has grown significantly, from the 30% ratios common before 1970 to the well over 55% today, a ratio reached in the early 2000s and sustained since then and now seemingly increasing further.

 

 

The ability of US corporations to save more and build balance sheet strength has been greatly assisted by improved profit margins – now well above rates of profit realised in the fifties. As may be seen these profit margins peaked in 2011 at about a 12 % rate and are now running a little lower, with profit margins running at a still impressive 10% of valued added by non-financial corporations.

The lack of competition from additional capacity has surely helped maintain these profit margins, as well as cash flows and corporate savings. But it does not explain why the typical US corporation has not invested more in real assets nor why they have preferred to return relatively more cash to shareholders in dividends and share buy backs. Even so called growth companies, with ambitious plans to roll out more stores or distribution capacity, seem able and willing to fund their growth and yet also pay back more. They paying back to institutional shareholders (in the form of dividends and buy backs) who themselves are holding record proportions of highly liquid assets in their portfolios.

There is incidentally, no lack of competition between US businesses. Competition is as intense and disruptive as it has ever been. The competition to know your customer better and so be more relevant than the competition in the offerings you can make to them is the essential task facing business managers. And so part of the answer to the reluctance to add to capacity is the fact that capital equipment (hardware supported by software) is so much more productive than before. A dollar of capital equipment utilised today does so much more than it used to – meaning less of it is needed to meet current demands of customers.

It must take higher levels of demand from households and perhaps also governments to stimulate more capital expenditure and less cash retention by the modern business corporation. Capital expenditure typically follows growth in demands by households. Households in the US account for over 70% of all spending. In SA, households’ share of the economy is also all important, at over 60% of spending. It is the growth in household spending that puts pressure on the capacity of firms to satisfy demands and to improve revenues and profit margins doing so. It is the weakness of household spending in the US and even more so in SA that explains much of the reluctance to build physical capacity.

Why are households in the US and SA not spending and borrowing more in ways that would encourage more capex by firms? In SA’s case the answer is perhaps more obvious. Household spending has been strongly discouraged by rising interest rates. Until interest rates reverse direction in SA, it is hard to anticipate a cyclical recovery reinforced by capex.

In the US and SA, what will be essential to faster growth will be the confidence of households in their future income prospects. It is this confidence, much more than changes in interest rates, that is essential to the purpose of economic growth. The role of politics in building or undermining confidence in the future prospects of an economy is all important. Perhaps it is the failure of the politicians (and perhaps also central banks) to build confidence in both households and the firms in their prospects, is the essential reason why spending remains as subdued as it is.

How (not) to value a CEO

Alec Hogg in his Daily Insider column of 6 June had the following harsh words for Sasol’s David Constable:

“In the 2015 annual report, Sasol chairman Dr Mandla Gantsho admitted trying to extend CEO David Constable’s five year contract which expires this month. Shareholders should be grateful he wasn’t more persuasive. Together with another Canadian, Anglo’s Cynthia Carroll, Constable ranks as the worst ever CEO appointed by a major South African company.
“Soon after arriving in July 2011, the Canadian aborted Sasol’s long and costly flirtation with China, switching attention into his native North America. In Monday’s trading statement, the company said it will write down billions more on its Montney Shale Gas field, taking the loss on the Canadian investment to a staggering R11.5bn. Worse, the cost of its 40% complete Louisiana chemicals cracker has escalated to $11bn from the $8.9bn shareholders had been told.
“If more salt were needed for those wounds, it is sure to come in the remuneration section of Sasol’s 2016 annual report. Given the way these things are structured, Constable’s R50m a year package is likely to have ratcheted up still further in his final 12 months.”

But is this the right way to measure the value added or lost by shareholders over the tenure of a CEO, by reference to the losses written off or the overruns added in the books of the companies they own a share of?  What matters to shareholders is what happens in their own books; that is in the value of the shares they own. And share prices attempt as best they can to discount the future performance of a company – rather than its past – as written up by the accountants. Shareholders in Sasol will rather be inclined to compare the performance of their shares under Constable’s surveillance with that of others they may have owned. In this regard they may be grateful that Sasol, since 2012, did significantly better than other Resource stocks, but regret that Sasol did significantly worse than the JSE All Share Index.

Shareholders would have been much better off staying away from Resource companies and investing in Industrial and Financial shares, especially after mid-2014. Even the best managed resource and oil companies would not have been able to avoid the damage caused by lower commodity and oil prices – forces over which CEOs cannot be easily held accountable for. In the figure below we show the relationship between the Sasol share price and the price of oil in US dollars. This relationship become much stronger when the US dollar value of a Sasol share is compared to the US dollar price of oil. Quite clearly, the US dollar value of a Sasol share is almost completely always explained by the oil price. This is a force over which the CEO has no influence whatsoever. Incidentally, the relationship between the oil price in rands and the Sasol share price, also measured in rands, is a statistically very weak relationship. It is the dollar price of oil that matters for the Sasol share price – not the rand price – even if much of Sasol’s revenues are derived from selling oil in rands at a dollar equivalent price.

 

In the figure below we show the results of a statistical exercise where we compare the Sasol share price in US dollars with the share price that would have been predicted using the US dollar price of a barrel of oil as the only explanation, over the period when David Constable was CEO. As may be seen, it was only in 2013-2014, ahead of the subsequent collapse in the oil price, when something other than the spot oil price is seen to significantly influence the US dollar value of a Sasol share. Perhaps the Sasol share price then was reflecting unrequited optimism in still higher oil prices. And when this did not materialise, the usual relationship between the price of oil and the price of Sasol was resumed.

 

On these considerations it is hard to establish what difference a well paid or indeed even an underpaid CEO can be expected to make to the value of a Sasol given the predominant influence of the price of oil on the share price. Perhaps the major task of a CEO so captured by forces beyond its control is to avoid poorly executed projects designed to increase or even simply maintain the production of Sasol’s oil, gas and chemical output. The selection of good projects and good project management is the essential task of a company like Sasol. Perhaps Sasol, under Constable, can be fairly criticised on such grounds, as Alec Hogg has done.

Time, as always, will tell how well intentioned, designed and executed the Sasol Louisiana cracker project has been. But in the meanwhile, shareholders in Sasol can perhaps exercise a legitimate grievance about the recent performance of the company. Its share price in US dollars has performed significantly worse than that of the two oil majors, Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, that are as highly dependent on the price of oil as is Sasol. Perhaps such measures of relative stock market performance should feature in any discussion of the appropriate remuneration of a CEO.

 

*The views expressed in this column are those of the author and may not necessarily represent those of Investec Wealth & Investment

Now to turn a reprieve into a recovery

The markets have reacted favourably to the S&P rating decision – is there more favour to be shown?

The markets have reacted favourably to the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) decision to leave SA’s credit rating broadly unchanged that was announced after the SA markets had closed on Friday, 3 June. Clearly the danger of a formal derating of RSA debt was reflected in market yields before the S&P announcement. As we show in figure 1, RSA bond yields and risk spreads have narrowed. The current spread of about 285bp provided by a RSA five year bond over a US Treasury of the same duration now indicates a near investment grade status in the market place. The spread is shown below where it is compared to Credit Default Swaps (CDS) on high yield emerging market (EM) bonds and also on Mexican bonds of the same duration. These spreads represent the cost of insuring the debt against default.

In figure 2, we show how RSA debt has enjoyed something of a re-rating in recent days when compared, as it should be, to other EM debt yields. The yield gap between EM and RSA debt has widened, indicating an improved status for SA, while the extra yield provided by RSA debt compared to Mexican debt has also declined from about 140bp. A longer view of these relationships is also shown in figure 3, which shows that RSA debt has suffered a de-rating in the market place since early 2015, a de-rating magnified by the Zuma intervention in the Ministry of Finance in December 2015. While RSA yields have declined in a relative sense over recent days, SA’s credit rating in the market has not regained the status it enjoyed prior to the Zuma intervention.

A similar pattern of improved sentiment has been revealed in the foreign exchange markets. The rand has gained value vs the US dollar recently, not only in an absolute sense, but also relative to other EM currencies that might be expected to be influenced by moves in the US dollar vs all currencies. In figure 4, we compare the USD/ZAR rate of exchange to that of an equally weighted basket of nine other EM currencies (Turkey, Russia, Hungary, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Philippines, India and Malaysia). As Figure 4 shows, the rand and the average EM currencies have gained against the US dollar recently. However the ratio of the rand to the EM currencies (April 2012=1) has improved from 1.32 in late May to about 1.28 on 6 June, an improvement of about 3%. A longer term view of these relationships is shown in figure 5, where it may be seen that the rand, compared to other EM currencies, is still slightly weaker than it was before the Zuma actions in December.

In figure 6, we show the RSA 10 year bond yields since early 2015. We also show the difference between RSA yields in rands with US Treasury bond yields in US dollars. This risk spread may be regarded as the average rate at which the rand is expected to depreciate against the US dollar over the next 10 years. The higher yields compensate investors for the expected exchange rate losses. This risk spread has declined in recent days but remains well above the spreads offered prior to the Zuma shock to the bond and other markets.

The SA Treasury has been able to convince the rating agencies of its commitment to fiscal conservatism. The Treasury will need to be allowed to get on with the task without interference from the Presidency. The bond and currency markets, given but only a partial recovery, would still appear to regard such interference as a possibility. What the Treasury also needs, as much as it needs the authority to manage SA’s fiscal affairs, is a cyclical recovery and faster growth. Such a recovery would be greatly assisted by further strength in the rand and lower bond yields. US dollar weakness would further help promote such trends, as they have done recently. If such favourable trends were to materialise, the Reserve Bank would surely have to reverse its own damaging interest rate course. A loosening rather than a tightening interest rate cycle is urgently called for. Lower interest rates and lower interest rates expected will make a cyclical recovery all the more likely. SA has enjoyed something of an unexpected reprieve from the rating agencies. A strong follow up in the form of lower interest rates across the yield curve can turn a reprieve into a recovery.

Musings on May

May was a poor month for the rand. It lost about 10% of its US dollar value by month end. But perhaps of more importance, it also lost about 6% of its value against an average of nine other emerging market currencies (Turkey, Russia, Hungary, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Philippines, Malaysia, India).

 

Clearly there were specifically South African as well as global forces driving the rand weaker. Uncertainty about the direction of fiscal policy in SA and the role of President Jacob Zuma in introducing such uncertainty has not dissipated and, moreover, seems to have re-entered the markets in an attenuated form during May. Global forces, well represented by other emerging market currencies, are a consistent influence on the exchange value of the rand. But SA specific risks can also influence the rand – that can be identified when the rand behaves to a degree independently as it did again in May. The Zuma effect on the rand is easily identified by its behaviour of after 9 December 2015 when the President replaced the Minister of Finance, Nhlanhla Nene. As may be seen, the rand not only weakened but weakened relatively to other emerging market (EM) currencies, as identified by the ratio of the USD/ZAR to the average US dollar value of the other EM currencies. As may be seen in figure 2 below, this ratio, with higher numbers indicating rand weakness, increased in December 2015 and has remained elevated at these higher ratios since then. The rand did enjoy some absolute strength from late January 2016 and some relative strength in April 2016, which was reversed in May. Figure 3, which shows the developments in the currency market in 2016, makes this very clear.

When we run a regression model explaining the value of the rand using the EM average exchange rate and the EM default risk premium as explanations, we get the results shown below – using daily data from January 2013. As may be seen in figure 4, the Zuma intervention added about two rands to the cost of a US dollar. It may be seen that while the rand has strengthened since, this extra rand weakness has remained of the order of between one and two rands per dollar. The predicted value for the USD/ZAR on 31 May was R14.20 compared to its market value of about R15.70.