Err Temasek can do savvy deals too

TRE’s and TOC’s readers, and other S’porean netizens may not realise it, but Temasek doesn’t always lose money on its overseas investments.

In 2008, just before the financial crisis, Temasek sold its majority stake in BII for a price that put a value of the Indonesia bank of 4.6 times book value. The  sucker buyer was MayBank of M’sia. It paid Temasek US$1.13bn. NYT article. MayBank later justified its cock-up by pointing out that around the same time, HSBC paid around the same price (book value wise) for another Indon bank. Critics pointed out that in the context of MayBank’s financials, the amount was a big a sum while HSBC’s purchase was “peanuts” relative to HSBC’s financials.

Analysts now say that MayBank’s plans to sell a stake in BII for the same price as it paid Temasek is unrealistic.

Well the price that DBS is paying Temasek for its majority stake in Bank Danamon works out to be 2.6 times book value, and is considered reasonable but pricey. The premium over book has dropped substantially. But it is a gd deal.

And going back in history, Temasek got a great deal when it sold its PosBank stake to DBS. Foreign broker analysts (though not local broker analysts and our constructive, nation-building media) were grumbling that Temasek was getting DBS shares at a big discount to DBS’s fair value. FTR, no foreign analyst is arguing that Temasek is getting DBS shares at a big discount to its fair value in the Bank Danamon deal.

Moral of these examples: Temasek can do savvy deals with M’sians and DBS. Nothing to do with fact that DBS is controlled by Temasek. It’s that DBS likes to do “strategic” deals and, there are studies (dispued) which show that because strategic deals involve paying over the odds, shareholder value is destroyed in the process.

And consider this too.  RRJ and Temasek have been big backers of the trend to use natural gas. Last year they put US$250m into Nasdaq-listed Clean Energy Fuels, a US-based group that provides natural gas fuel for transportation at gas stations in the US at a saving of US$2 a gallon.

That transaction, which closed in January or February this year, has already more than doubled in value.  

And this looks pretty savvy too. Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings and private equity firm RRJ Capital bought nearly half of the shares in the $1.34 billion offering by PetroChina Co’s unit Kunlun Energy Co Ltd, two sources with direct knowledge of the deal said on Tuesday. $=US$

Kunlun Energy and Clean Energy Fuels have a similar mandate and RRJ hopes to bring the two together, according to one report. BTW RRJ is founded by a Malaysian Chinese.

Bang yr balls in frustration Ho Ching detractors, and all haters of the S’pore government and its agencies. Temasek can do savvy deals if M’sians are involved. Either as suckers buyers or as co-investors.

Jokes aside, remember the lines from “If”

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

Well in investing, as in other aspects of life, the line between success and failure is very, very narrow.

Examples:

 KKR and TPG, giant US private equity investors invested billions of their investors’ funds in TXU. One of the things they were betting on was that natutal gas prices would be priced-off oil prices for the foreeable future. Err now even Buffett has lost money buying TXU bonds. The problem is that recent  technological developments mean that natural gas can be extracted from shale, decoupling its price from that of oil. Natural gas is no longer a scarce commodity.

Now all three have extremely gd track records as savvy investors. BTW Temasek’s Merrill Lynch deals would be like this deal. The conventional wisdom was that the deals were risky but that the prices paid reflected the risk and that in all probability the deals would work out for the investors.

Now the conventional wisdom was that the investors got things wrong* . But as FT’s Lex reports:

They paid too much. That was the consensus when 3G Capital took Burger King private in 2010 for a total enterprise value of $4bn, or nine times trailing earning before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. How did things go? Well, Justice Holdings has just paid $1.4bn and will get 26 per cent of Burger King’s common shares in return. This now puts the enterprise value of Burger King at $8bn – an ev/ebitda multiple of 16 times (14 times if you follow Burger King’s practice of excluding restructuring and other costs). By comparison, the multiples for global powerhouses McDonald’s and Yum Brands are 11 and 14 times. Arcos Dorados, the largest Latin American McDonald’s franchisee, trades at 12 times.

3G’s partners put $1.2bn of cash into the original deal and borrowed the remainder of the price. They also paid themselves a near $400m dividend last year, thank you very much. If they had sold the whole company at the price Justice has paid, 3G would have more than doubled its money in a year and a half. Over the same period, McDonald’s and Yum shares have returned 38 per cent and 64 per cent, respectively. Consensus now: would you like fries with that, gentlemen.

*Bit like Temasek’s Shin deal. Brokers were telling their clients with shares in Shin to tender the shares. They would never see such a price again. But our nation-building, constructive media failed to report these views here.