Small Cap Value Report (8 Aug) - QRT

Afternoon/Evening!

Apologies for the late report,

This is just a placeholder to say that Paul will be along later with a few updates.

Kind regards

Graham

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Thanks Graham.

Profuse apologies for being so late today. I've been running round various Doctors & Hospitals in London today, dealing with medical problems (not me personally, but someone close to my heart). Anyway, that's all under control now, so I can now sit down with a bottle of Fleurie, de-stress a bit, and write a small caps report for you.

Quarto Inc (LON:QRT)

Share price: 159p (up 14.0% today)
No. shares: 19.7m
Market cap: £31.3m

Half-year report - for the 6 months to 30 Jun 2017.

Receipt of preliminary approach - i.e. a possible takeover bid.

Quarto is mainly a publisher of illustrated books ("coffee table books" as the company describes them). For interesting background, I interviewed the CEO & CFO here, about a year ago. I'm just listening back to that now, to refresh my memory.

Note that the company has a very heavy H2 weighting to its profitability - due to a concentration of sales around Thanksgiving & Christmas.

That said, these interim results are very poor. A few key points;

H1 revenues $50.2m (H1 2016: $57.9m)

Adjusted operating profit- a loss of $7.2m in H1 2017, vs. $0.1m loss in H1 2016. That's a huge deterioration.

Outlook comments are upbeat though - healthy order book;

While we expect the soft retail environment to continue, we have an excellent publishing programme for the Autumn and the Holiday period - one of our strongest in the last few years.

Order book visibility is healthy and our sales teams have the right plans in place to capture all possible opportunities.

We have confidence throughout the Group in delivering a strong finish to the year."

Takeover approach - this sounds slightly odd to me;

The Board of The Quarto Group, Inc. (LSE: QRT) announces that it has received an approach to acquire the entire issued and to be issued share capital of the Company at a price the Board considers to be attractive and reflective of the inherent value of the business as a global publishing platform - and hence worthy of due consideration.

Discussions with the bidder are at an early stage and there can be no certainty that an offer will be made or as to the terms of any such offer.   The Company has decided not to disclose the identity of the bidder at this stage, due to the early stage nature of their interest.

That seems odd to me. I can't explain why, it just seems a little peculiar.

My opinion - an interesting company, but it fails my balance sheets testing, so it's not something I would invest in.

Good luck to shareholders re the possible takeover bid. Something feels slightly fishy to me, so I wouldn't place any particular reliance on that. Without the takeover bid approach, this share might have fallen quite a lot today.

The company issued a profit warning not long ago, but the interim results today seem a lot worse thanI imagined at the time.

Overall - it has a lot of debt, and is performing badly. So not something I would want to invest in.

EDIT - Battlebus points out on Twitter, that Christopher Mills is a major shareholder at Quarto. Mills has a history of pushing for change at small caps. I was a shareholder at Essenden, and he nicked it off shareholders at an under-valuation. So I certainly wouldn't get excited about his involvement - he doesn't over-pay. He's more likely to fleece existing shareholders, and grab the upside for himself, with a lowball bid, in my experience.

That said, I did a search for his stocks a while ago, and Mills is a fantastic small caps stock picker. So someone who is well worth following. But don't be surprised if you get bought out at a modest premium. I wonder whether management may be bullied into doing some of the Mills buyout deals? Looks that way to me.

Anyway, for Institutions, a buyout is a nice clean exit. Quarto looks to be performing poorly, so an exit from a Mills takeover, may be the best option perhaps?