Insight

The Market Reaction is Overdone

AGT, AVI August 2023 Asset Value Investors

Tom Treanor, AVI’s Head of Research, considers the opportunities in the Private Equity/Venture Capital (PE/VC) sector, where valuations are cheap and discounts to Net Asset Value (NAV) are extraordinarily wide. Higher rates and tighter credit markets may have seen a slowdown in the sector, but Tom explains why that hasn’t had a direct impact on AVI’s portfolio.

Valuations are the key driver for AVI. As contrarian investors, they look for undervalued, out-of-favour holdings, trading at wide discounts to NAV, and that’s why the PE/VC sector has once again caught their eye.

AVI has had exposure to the PE/VC sector for over 15 years, but their holdings have waxed and waned in line with opportunities. In the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, lots of companies in the PE sector got themselves in trouble, trading on extraordinarily cheap valuations and a very wide discount to NAV. As contrarians, that’s when AVI was most active.

Their exposure came down over the following five years, but it’s since ramped back up as discounts have widened and the opportunities have broadened. Tom explains: “The diversified fund-of-funds listed on the London market are good proxies for the broader PE market. Going into mid to late 2021, those funds were trading at between 15% to 20% discount to NAV value and, if you look at them today, they’re trading anywhere between 15% to 40% discount to NAV.”

Some might say that that’s the market telling us valuations are stale and they’ll come down to meet share prices, which would mean it isn’t a real discount. But AVI happily argues the other side of the coin, explaining that private valuations do lag public markets, but that they lag on the way up, too. Tom notes: “Private NAVs didn’t creep up the same way public markets did, but there was an essence of in-built equity valuation buffer there. The real damage in public markets was in the unprofitable tech sector, which PE isn’t particularly exposed to. Companies with high free cash flow in defensive sectors have held up much better than public markets, and those tend to be overrepresented in PE portfolios.”

From a broader economic environment perspective, the higher rates and tighter credit markets that have been seen over the past couple of years have undoubtedly changed the PE/VC market. New deals need financing, and if that slows, there’s a decline in PE activity. That means there are fewer deals getting done today than at the start of 2022, and certainly a lot fewer than there were in 2021.

But as AVI only invests in quoted investment companies, their portfolio companies were all fully formed by late 2021, which means the financing market drying up hasn’t had much of a direct impact. However, the dramatic slowdown in the pace of new investments and exits has led AVI to alter their analytic framework.

Tom comments: “The slowdown means we now scrutinise the balance sheets of our investee companies. We want to make sure they can withstand periods where exits dry up, that they have enough cash on the balance sheet to cope with that kind of environment and that they have prudent banking facilities in place. In an environment like this, the metrics we use to analyse companies change, so as the backdrop worsens, we focus on the balance sheet much more than we did before.”

Tom also noted that a lot of PE managers realised that rates weren’t going to stay pegged to the floor forever so prudently implemented measures that enabled them to adapt to a higher-rate environment. The impact on existing portfolio companies has been somewhat mitigated by the foresight of PE managers.

Elevated inflation also brings challenges to the sector, but these challenges are not necessarily unique to PE. As the UK hasn’t experienced elevated levels of inflation for about 40 years,  it’s the first time most managers of both public and private companies are having to grapple with it. Tom notes: “When it comes to inflation, the key consideration is whether a company has pricing power, or in other words, can they pass the inflationary cost pressures onto their consumers? The more differentiated the product, the easier it will be to pass through cost increases. And conversely, the more commoditised the product, the harder it is, simply because competition is greater.”

The margin profile of a company is another consideration. Those companies with high operating margins will only see a modest effect on their bottom line, whereas companies with high fixed costs and low margins are going to suffer more.

Overall, Tom favours PE over public companies in an inflationary environment. That’s because PE-backed companies typically supply a service which is deemed essential to the customer, which means they over-index in software as a service (SAAS), tech and healthcare. Sectors like retail – which disproportionately suffer in an inflationary environment – are generally underweight in PE portfolios.

PE/VC is responsible for some of the best returns across AVI’s portfolio, and the new opportunities the team has identified make the sector a firm fixture. Tom adds a concluding thought:

“Although there are genuine concerns out there and there are reasons to be fearful, we think the market reaction has been overdone. The sell-off in public markets and fears around PE/VC has meant listed companies across the board have become very cheap and some of the discounts to NAV are at extraordinarily wide levels, so we’ve been ramping up our exposure.”

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AVI Global Trust plc is a public company listed and traded on the London Stock Exchange.

Past performance should not be seen as an indication of future performance. The price of investments and the income from them may fall as well as rise and investors may not get back the full amount invested. The trust uses gearing techniques (leverage) which will exaggerate market movements both down and up which could mean sudden and large falls in market value. Please refer to the Key Features Document for further details effecting affecting your investment.

Applications to invest in AV Global Trust referred to on this Site, must only be made on the basis of the current Key Features Document, or other applicable terms and conditions. Past performance should not be seen as an indication of future performance. Market and exchange rate movements may cause the value of a fund to rise or fall and an investor may not get back the amount invested.

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