Good morning!

In case you haven't seen it, let me flag up a late update to yesterday's report. As you've probably gathered by now, I'm more a night owl than a morning person. The new sections in yesterday's report cover results from Plexus Holdings (LON:POS) and PPHE Hotel (LON:PPH). The latter in particular looks quite interesting, after refinancing its debt onto long term, low (and fixed) interest rates. Also I commented on the discovery of internal fraud at a subsidiary of T Clarke (LON:CTO).

Here's the link for yesterday's completed report.




Conviviality (LON:CVR)

Share price: 214p (up 4.4% today)
No. shares: 172.1m
Market cap: £368.3m

Trading update - this covers the 26 weeks to 30 Oct 2016, so it's H1 of FY 04/2017.

The background here is that the group embarked on a bold expansion strategy just over a year ago. It acquired a drinks wholesaler, called Matthew Clark. Incidentally, I've started noticing vans with that brand name on them, delivering to local cafe/bars. There are obvious bulk buying efficiencies with Matthew Clark bolted on to the original off licence business of Conviviality.

Two further acquisitions were made afterwards, of Peppermint in Dec 2015, and Bibendum PLB Group in May 2016. Put together, this has more than tripled the turnover of the group, which was £783m in H1, up 211% against prior year, due to the acquisitions.

Various financial details are given, which I'm not really interested in. All that matters is overall performance, and this sounds on track;

The Company is making strong progress with the integration of Matthew Clark and Bibendum PLB Group ahead of plan and the plan to deliver synergies remains on track.

Conviviality continues to perform in line with market expectations for the 52 week period ending 30 April 2017.


It's interesting to note from Stockopedia's graph that earnings estimates have been revised up several times in the last year. So meeting expectations is actually better than it might at first sound - because the bar has already been raised twice, as you can see below;



581873e239affCVR_brokers.PNG



Valuation - I'm quite surprised that the shares have trended sideways (see share chart below) in the last year,…

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