You all know that I invested heavily into Straits Trading. When I saw the headline "Straits Trading's 3Q earnings fall 29% to 12mil on higher expenses" on TheEdgeSingapore, my heart actually stopped for a second. These days 80% listed companies gave superior result, so any soso result will be considered underperformed. So I quickly open the SGX website to check the result.
I like the company's report format as they always gave quite clear explanation on details of the major changes on their financial performance statement and financial position statement. It gave me more information while analysing the report. I saw that the company recorded a 29.4% decrease of profit attributed to shareholders yoy for 3Q17, and 7.9% decrease of profit attributed to shareholders for 9 months result. It doesn't looks good huh. But take note that we also need to the other comprehensive income statement to get the final conclusion. I noted that the group recorded a gain of the fair value of the equity securities compare to last year loss. The total comprehensive income for 3Q17 that attributed to the owners was 15,421,000 compared with last year 15,668,000, and the total comprehensive income for 9 months 2017 attributed to the owners was 73,591,000 compares with last year 60,693,000. So the group actually is making more profit for us.
The revenue from Tin mining and smelting increased 19.1% in 3Q, but the cost of tin mining and smelting increased 21.2% during the same period. I checked the Tin price over last 5 years, the price was bottomed few years ago. I hope that the company will disclose the reason of the increasing cost of mining and smelting. I don't expect that the tin price will surge to sky high price, so the only way of making more profit is cost control, or expand operation. Good news is the increase of the revenue in 3Q17 is a result of both higher selling volume and higher tin price.
The dividend income in 3Q17 was much lower compared with last year result, and its due to the redemption of units in SRE Asian Asset Income Fund. According the the cash flow statement the company already received the funds from redemption. Hope that the company can find a similar return investment.
The company issued 150 million notes with 3.73% fixed rate. I checked the MAS website, the average prime lending rate in 2017 was 5.28%. So I think the note issue will save more finance cost. The gearing ratio is still at a very safe level after including this fixed rate note.
In 3Q17, the company recorded a huge cash outflow on investment activities. The company spent around 140 million on investing in an associate and a JV. The investment value is close to the note issued recently. I hope that the company can at least generate 3.73% return from this investment (:
Overall, I think the company is still performing quite well. The NAV is now at 3.46 SGD, so the share is trading at PB 0.7. After including the 6 cents dividend paid out few months ago, the group's NAV increased from 3.34 to 3.52 within 9 months, a 5.38% gain. I think it is a satisfied performance. The cash and cash equivalents increased from 265 millions to 350 millions yoy.
With a healthy balance sheet, I hope that the company can perform better. I saw that China recently approved its first REIT and it is going to be listed on SSE. I hope that the group can participate in China's property securitilise and benefit from it.
Thanks for reading. Finally finish all the reports that I have to check today.
Cheers!
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