Good morning. Apologies for slightly erratic service lately, should be OK to do a report every day for the rest of this week hopefully.
I hold shares in Walker Greenbank (LON:WGB), a luxury interior furnishings group that looks a good value situation to me, on a fwd PER of about 8. Slightly irritated with their RNS this morning which just mentions them having won a magazine award, with no financial information mentioned at all. The RNS is not for PR, it's for proper financial news!However, I shall forgive them providing they keep delivering good earnings growth as they have done for the last 3 years.
Troubled regional newspaper group, Johnston Press (JPR) has issued an IMS which says that they expect full year operating profit performance for 2012 to be broadly in line (i.e. slightly below) market expectations.
That's all very well, but they are really not making much inroads into their gargantuan debt pile at all, which has only reduced from £352m at the start of the calendar year, to £336m at 31 Oct. Just servicing the debt seems to be absorbing the lion's share of their cashflow.
When you take into account the declining nature of the business, I remain of the view that the equity of Johnston Press is probably worthless - as I don't believe that the business will generate enough cashflow to ever repay its debt. Therefore these shares do not tempt me at any price - why take the risk?
Whereas Trinity Mirror (TNI) is a much more convincing newspaper story, with debt reducing so fast that it looks set to eradicate its net debt by 2014 (although a big pension deficit will remain there, but largely offset by freehold property assets).
(I hold neither long nor short positions in either JPR or TNI).
Interim results (6m to 30 Sept) from international fastenings group, Trifast (LON:TRI) look pretty respectable, with underlying EBITDA up 50% to £4.6m, and adjusted EPS up 25% to 2.3p.
The full year forecast (per Stockopedia, which I am now using for my fundamentals data, and have to say am finding it an excellent reference site) is for…
