Quote Originally Posted by Beagle View Post
To be clear I am assuming no growth whatsoever in EPS in the years ahead until management can prove otherwise. The thing with the hounds modified Graham formula is I need to be confident the EPS growth is highly likely and that is definitely not the case here. Confidence in future EPS growth needs to be built upon a well proven history of past EPS growth before one can even consider using the Graham formula so in my opinion this sort of valuation approach is totally inappropriate in this case. To be honest I think its a very very poor show on management's part that sales have risen so strongly in recent years and there has been zero eps growth. I was hopeful going forward that they could address this. The other thing you should note is that there's no way in the world that all the brokers will have downgraded yet and no way that will all be showing up on 4traders website yet. Usually takes at least 3-4 working days for most analyst changes to show up on there. Suggest you have another look at their figures next weekend and there is likely to be a different set of future profit estimates.
Look Roger, I hear what you are saying and if you don't believe they will have future growth, than this is your opinion. We are all entitled to one.

However - this does not make it right to make wrong statements related to past performance:

year EPS
2012 4.7 cts
2013 4.5 cts
2014 6.5 cts
2015 7.8 cts
2016 11.1 cts
2017 10.5 cts

The early years are pro-forma (from their IPO prospectus, just in case you are wondering.

OK - there is a slight drop back in 2017 (we all know, why), and we obviously don't know whether 2018 will be better than 2017, but I still would not call this a static EPS. Would you ? Really?