Upside Greater Staying on Independent Acquisition Trail...Scary part, I think analysts are still down playing the organic growth profile especially in the US market when they just entered in force at the end of last year. Granted I get it, these investment houses like to have the ability to really ratchet higher their estimates when they get the shoulder tap by management that they will use their firm to underwrite a financing round, but I digress. Here’s my Case;
My Projections – Core Business
2018 Revenue Estimate of 29M (38M CAD) with 6.5M (8.5M CAD) in EBITDA
Net debt of 5M and cash on hand 5M+ (<1x Net Debt/EBITDA)
Takeout Scenario
These two acquisitions could be the beginning of an arms race , especially when a major foreign player is just jumping into the space. With these two deals being done at 5.2x and 5.3x Sales respectively makes HTL look like quite the bargain at 2.5-3.0x my 2018 Sales estimate.
Using a target price range of 4.0x – 5.0x Sales I get to target price of 1.25 – 1.57/share or a midpoint of 1.41/share or 70% upside on a takeout from Fridays closing price.
Independent Acquisition Scenario
This is where management is everything, its all about capital allocation. By being a smaller player, they are able to go down scale on deal size and find acquisition targets that are absolute steals resulting in highly accretive deals.
Take their last two acquisitions; Gynemed (Bought for 9.6M @ 1.5x Sales) and Embryotech (Bought for 7.25M @ 1.5x Sales). The ability for management to go out and find accretive deals at a third of the price is what creates the big upside optionality of these smaller tuck in deals. Just look at the share price over the last couple years….
Let’s assume they find another acquisition target for aprox. 10M at around a 1.5x- 2.0x Sales multiple. They could add another 6M in revenue and 1.2M in EBITDA without issuing a single share and keeping a net debt/EBITDA number of aprox 2x.
They could have the financial flexibility to do another pair of these 10M size deals like they did with the Gynemed and Embryotech.
Annualized Consolidated Business
So you could have a stand alone business with aprox. 40M (52M CAD) in Revenue with 8.5M (11M CAD) in EBITDA all with a dilluted share count of aprox. 150M and a net debt/EBITDA figure <3x.
Now you put a 5.2x Sales multiple on that business and you are looking at 1.80/share….
(I understand a 5.0x Sales multiple is unrealistic to expect as a standalone company)
Sometimes you just have to let effective small cap companies stay under the radar and believe in the longer-term growth story. When they have a runway in a highly fragmented space and have demonstrated the ability to acquire the right businesses at the right prices and generate compound returns at a rate greater than the market.
LONG