MFT - Mainfreight. Global Freight & Logistics

[Snow Leopard]

LOL

So, if was currently trading on a P/E of 8.9, would you buy it?

1/4, 1/2, & 3/4 financials are out, read them, use a calculator.
End of year financials are 5 weeks away. []

[optiontrader]

Of course I would at 8.9

[rmbbrave]

Here are the fundamentals for MFT given by Direct Broking.

They don't look good. The P/E is 65 - which is terrible.


Fundamentals : Mainfreight Limited Ordinary Shares

Total Issue 95,887,190

Market Capitalisation $230,129,256 (@ 240)

Full Year Profit 3,441,000.00 (NZD)

Earnings/Share 3.6900 cents

Price/Earnings Ratio 65.0407

NTA/Share 35.4700 (NZD) cents

Dividend/Share 6.5000 (NZD) cents

Dividend Yield 2.7%


Fin Data has a differnet set of figures with a P/E of 29.

Sector: Transport
PE: 28.96
EPS: 0.0694
Dividend: 0.097
Market Cap: $234,923,600
NTA: 0.2871
52 Week High/Low: 2.75 / 1.74

I don't know which of these is most out of date but there are plenty of good compnies with P/E's of 10-15 about.

[winner69]

Last years reported profit was $5.968M - ie 6.2cents a share ... at 245 a PE of 39.

The problem with MFT financials is there are so many restructuring costs, abnormals and all that sort of crap you have to be a Mainfrieght insider to know what is really going on.

At least they seem to now reporting consolidated group earnings ... presumably because they are now in profit after reporting a loss in the 1st quarter of the year.

Reported NPAT this year will prob be in excess of $10M - say 10 cents a share. Strip out a lot of one off sort of stuff if you want and eps prob be about 16 c/s ... giving it a pe of about 15. This is a bit more respectable but assumes that all the one off sort of crap and other excuses will be gone in the future

Some are forecasting eps of 25 cents next year - if this eventuates than todays 245 might be cheap

However too unclear and too hard to assess what is crap in the results and what is likely in the future for me to get too interested ... and MFT is priced today assuming that everything will be alright.

[winner69]

In other words leave any purchase decision to the charts

[Snow Leopard]

This just gets funnier.

So optiontrader, have you done the sums like I suggested?
Or are you just going to buy some MFT tomorrow given that you think they are such a good deal?

Quoted figures are often wrong, rmbbraves post shows that.
P/E ratios of historical profit, even if it is correct, and current share price can tell a very misleading story.

[optiontrader]

I have got my calculator out, and I can't see where you are getting your P/E of 8.9 from... therefore I don't see them as a good deal at the moment, as I said before, in a few years perhaps

[optiontrader]

MFT is not quite ripe enough yet, I agree with winner69, the charts should rule for a bit here

[Snow Leopard]

Optiontrader:
The profit for the third quarter was $6.6M (i.e. the running profit for the year, went from $1.1M to $7.7M) Annualise that and you get a P/E of 8.9. The fourth quarter was probably better yet.

But the real question is where does it go from here and not where was it last year.

[limegreen]

quote:Originally posted by optiontrader

MFT is not quite ripe enough yet, I agree with winner69, the charts should rule for a bit here

... which was the original point of my post(!), I was just too lazy to post a chart. So anyway, MFT is a bit hard to fit a trend to (in part because I can't get it with a log scale). Suffice to say, that it's declined fairly heavily from its highs, and would have broken a trailing stop if I could draw one. It also recently looked like support had turned into resistance at $2.40, but it closed through that yesterday. However, a more conservative buy signal would be to wait until the current short-term downtrend (red line), has broken. It's stilll ages away from the appropriate moving average, but you'd have lost a lot of profit by then.



UPDATE 5:11PM. So much for the optimism of yesterday. Definitely time to hold off, and glad that I did. I'm definitely inclined to wait for real signs of a recovery.