Month: August 2017

Is the SA economy glass half full?

The SA economy has begun to offer a few glimmers of cyclical light. Of most importance is that industrial metal prices have continued to recover from their depressed levels of mid-2016, as we show below in figures 1 and 2. The London Metal Exchange Index, in US dollars, is up 20% on its levels of January 2017 – a helpful trend for SA exports and manufacturing and mining activity. Less helpful to the SA economy is that the oil price has also sustained a muted recovery, influenced no doubt by the same pick up in global growth.

Further encouragement for the economy has come from a stronger rand: it has more or less maintained its US dollar value when compared to its emerging market (EM) peers. The US dollar exchange value of the rand has moreover remained consistently ahead of its values of a year ago, as is shown in figure 3.

The stronger rand has helped to reverse the headline rate of inflation, which is now well down on its peak levels of mid-2016 and could easily fall further, as we show in figure 4, where currently favourable trends are extrapolated. Over the past quarter, the consumer price index has risen at less than a 3% annual rate.

The prospect of significantly lower short-term interest rates, which would be essential to any cyclical recovery, has therefore now greatly improved, given prospects of lower inflation. The demand for and supply of cash, a very useful coinciding business cycle indicator, has been growing ever more slowly in recent months and, when adjusted for inflation, has turned significantly negative. Somewhat encouraging therefore is that the cash cycle appears to have reached a cyclical trough (see figure 4). A reversal of the cash cycle is an essential requirement for any cyclical recovery.

Two other activity indicators, retail sales volumes and new vehicle sales, provide somewhat mixed signals about the state of the economy. Retail volumes, as can be seen in figure 5, have continued to increase, albeit at a slow rate, while new vehicles sold in SA have declined sharply since early 2016. However the latest vehicle sales trends as well as retail volumes suggest that the worst of these sales cycles may be behind the economy. The sales trend however remains very subdued and will need all the help it can get from lower interest rates over the next 12 months.

We combine two recent data releases, new vehicle sales and the cash in circulation in July 2017, to establish our Hard Number Index (HNI) of the immediate state of the SA economy. As we show in figure 7, the HNI of economic activity turned decidedly down in mid- 2016 but now appears to have levelled off. The HNI can be compared to the coinciding business cycle measured by the Reserve Bank as we do in Figure 7. Extrapolating this Reserve Bank business cycle indicator also indicates that the worst of the current business cycle may be behind us.

The economic news therefore is not all negative. However essential for an economic recovery is further rand stability and the lower inflation and interest rates that would accompany a stable rand. A combination of better global growth and so higher metal prices would help. So, presumably, would any confirmation of the end of the Zuma regime – a view seemingly already incorporated into the current strength of the rand as well as by the reduction in SA risk premiums. Both the strength of the rand, relative to other EM exchange rates, and the spread between RSA Yankee (US dollar) bond yields and US Treasuries indicate that the market expects the Zuma influence over economic policy to be over soon. For the sake of the rand, the economy and its prospects, one must hope the market is well informed. 25 August 2017

 

The avoidable risks Eskom assumes on behalf of all South Africans.

A shorter version published in Business Day is available here

The avoidable risks Eskom assumes on behalf of all South Africans.

The owners of Eskom (all South Africans) should be aware of the grave risks Eskom’s managers and directors have taken on their behalf. The risks that is to the value of the many billions of rands that have been deployed on their behalf building plant and equipment (PPE) to generate and distribute electricity.

The danger is that all this PPE may be worth much less than it cost. There is also the matter of servicing and repaying the over R300bn in debt that has been incurred funding these developments, much of it that is tax payer guaranteed. These debts are large enough to threaten the credit of the Republic itself, as has become apparent.

The essential, unsatisfactory nature of a state-owned business is only part of the problem, namely that the primary purpose of the business easily becomes that of serving the interests of its employees, from top to bottom. The interests of its customers and owners become secondary and are poorly served. However the main problem is when the operations are of such an order of scale that any mistaken investment programmes or operational failures become significant for the economy at large, as has become the case with Eskom.

The further danger is that the burden of these mistakes and servicing the debt incurred are passed on to the consumers of electricity in SA in the form of further increases in prices. But Eskom’s monopoly applies only to the electricity delivered over its grid. Thus increases in electricity prices may prove self-defeating for Eskom as well as highly damaging to the competitiveness of the SA economy. Higher prices lead to lower levels of demand – perhaps the point where sales revenues decline rather than increase as key customers become more energy-conserving and turn to alternative supplies off the grid.

Potential customers can shut down operations or not start new projects when the economic case for their operations make much less sense, given higher real electricity prices. Investing in solar panels, small wind turbines or increasingly efficient gas turbines installed onsite, can make good sense as drawing on the grid becomes ever more expensive. And who knows what opportunities innovation and invention may bring for the generation of electricity on a small scale in the near future?

A further threat to Eskom and us, its owners, is that its largest customers, energy intensive miners and refiners of metals, who account for about 50% of demand for Eskom’s output, have publicly indicated a profound loss of confidence in it as a reliable competitive supplier of energy. They refer to operations being shut down or transferred outside of SA and a much weaker case for expanding capacity to upgrade (beneficiate) the metals and minerals brought to the surface.

There is in reality no good reason for all South Africans to have to carry these risks to the supply of and demand for electricity in SA. Such risks could be readily absorbed by willing new owners of the PPE – at the right price. Owners perfectly capable of raising their own sources of debt and equity capital to the purpose. The capital market has a proven taste for the predictable income streams that electricity utilities can deliver.

The Eskom assets could be divided up sensibly and auctioned off to a number of independent, capable operators. Hopefully the prices realised for the assets would be sufficient to pay off the Eskom debts. But even if not, it would be better to realise as much as possible, as soon as possible, for these assets, than to incur more debt to keep Eskom on its present path.

One advantage of perhaps lower-than-replacement-cost prices paid for the Eskom assets would be that it might enable its new owners to offer more competitively priced electricity – while still providing an adequate return on the capital they have invested. Prices for energy that could then encourage miners and manufacturers who would then be more internationally competitive thanks to lower energy costs. Competitive electricity prices, by international standards, could prove to be a stimulus for a revival of SA manufacturing and mining and the accompanying employment.

The SA economy stands to benefit from a much more competitive market for energy; from many more generators and distributors of electricity who would compete for customers on price and reliable supplies; from contracts that would facilitate the raising of capital on favourable terms for new owners and managers; and from the alternative technologies, relying on wind, solar or gas, that would have every opportunity to compete for custom on the same competitive terms. This would be a system much more like those that apply in the US or UK, a system designed

Go offshore – for the right reasons

*Published in Business Day on 4 August 2017 (Published version available here)

Offshore diversification by SA firms is not necessarily the best way for investors to diversify their risks.

South African business leaders are demonstrating a heightened taste for expansion offshore. They are borrowing more locally and abroad to fund this growth. The reasons for doing so seem obvious enough. The stagnant SA economy now offers them minimal growth opportunities, yet they are likely to be well rewarded for growing earnings. Clearly such growth would be helpful to managers – is it as likely to be helpful to their shareholders?

It all depends on how much of their capital or debt incurred on their behalf is employed to pursue earnings growth. Unless the extra cash generated by expansion abroad or domestically can be confidently expected to provide a cash return in excess of the opportunity cost of the extra cash invested (cash in for expected cash out, all properly discounted to the present with proper allowance for the maintenance and replacement of the assets acquired) the investment should not be made. One wonders how many of the offshore acquisitions by SA companies offshore can confidently offer cost-of-capital-beating returns for their SA shareholders?

Why then the near flood of such acquisition activity?  Every director acting as the custodian of the capital of shareholders should know that growing earnings or earnings per share may not be helpful to shareholders, if too much capital has been expended to realise growth in earnings.  If managers are incentivised to grow earnings regardless of the extra capital employed to do so, they should not be surprised when managers seek growth wherever it can be found, regardless of how much it costs and whether or not it destroys wealth for shareholders. The golden rule of finance is always relevant: positive net present value (NPV) strategies are worthy of consideration but negative NPV strategies should be declined, especially if they are being made for “strategic reasons” (when an investment is made for “strategic reasons” it often means that there are no “financial reasons” for pursuing it).

A further benefit to managers from expansion offshore will come in the form of a more diversified flow of earnings when these include earnings generated independently of their SA operations. Full exposure to SA risk may threaten the survival of a business and so their own employment prospects. Shareholders however may have no need for managers to diversify their risks. They diversify their portfolios by holding small stakes in a large number of companies. The more specialised and efficient the companies they are able to invest in, the better. Conglomeration in principle comes at a price – that of the cost of a head office or holding company discount. Executives who diversify earnings on behalf of their shareholders are not doing them a favour. Shareholders can do it themselves at a fraction of the cost, e.g., no expensive investment bankers are required, and they can exit when they wish by simply selling assets in their portfolio.

South African shareholders, especially private shareholders, have enjoyed much greater freedom in recent years to invest directly in companies listed offshore. The case for their SA managers investing offshore on their behalf as part of a diversification strategy is therefore a weak one.

SA institutional portfolios subject to a 25% limit to their offshore holdings may have a stronger case for JSE-listed companies investing offshore on their behalf. Indeed, the case for what are essentially offshore companies having a listing on the JSE, primary or secondary listings, is predicated on this constraint on their asset allocations. These companies, with minimal exposure to the SA economy, can raise capital on the JSE on superior terms to those available to them elsewhere. Or, to put it alternatively, they can benefit from a higher share price (in US dollars, on the JSE) by catering to the SA institutional investor. For the private SA investor able to invest abroad, essentially without limit, it makes little sense to pay any premium for access to offshore earnings, dividends or the capital appreciation provided by a JSE listing. The private investor can diversify directly, without exchange control constraints, by investing in the most promising of companies listed offshore.

All this is not to suggest that SA companies and their managers cannot succeed offshore. Some exceptional managers have created a lot of wealth for their SA shareholders by doing so. Rather it is to argue that such attempts should be made on their own strict investment merits; that is, they offer a return (cash in/cash out) that exceeds the risk-adjusted returns their shareholders could hope to achieve independently. Chasing earnings growth regardless of properly measured returns on the capital at risk, or because it offers diversification, is not nearly a good enough reason to go offshore. Without such good reason and given the lack of growth opportunities in SA onshore, it would be better to return excess cash (excess capital) to their SA shareholders by paying dividends or buying back shares or debt. Let shareholders decide for themselves how they wish to diversify their risks.

*David Holland is from Fractal Value Advisors