oudgediende schreef op 14 april 2015 10:18:
Citigroup’s Ehud Gelblum, who has a Buy rating on Nokia stock, writes that selling HERE could “unlock substantially more value from the biz than just what the $168M EBITDA we model HERE should generate for Nokia this year.”
Backing that up, he cites a conversation he had with Nokia back at the Mobile World Congress in March:
Nokia stated it is not religious about holding onto the HERE navigation business and that it would seriously entertain offers, if any were made given that HERE has almost no synergies with the other businesses. In the meantime, Nokia confirmed what we already suspected that with scale, op margin on HERE could go well north of the current 8-12% level. We suspect HERE’s gross margin is in the 75%+ range and that op margin could get as high as 30-35% or greater.
What that math means is that a buyer might pay a hefty premium, he thinks, for HERE:
In a takeout scenario we believe HERE would be worth substantially more than the $0.34 we currently assign to it in our $8.47 SOTP PT as we believe a strategic buyer could be willing pay a substantial premium to our implied 1.1x EV/Sales multiple we use in our SOTP. We believe a strategic could easily pay as much as 4x EV/Sales for a ~$4.52B valuation worth $1.13/ADR in our SOTP vs. our $0.34. Note the $2.26B value stated in the article refers to the book value of the business on Nokia’s balance sheet; we would expect a takeout to occur materially higher.