Aspo - Valuation leaves Telko very cheap

The crisis affects Telko and Leipurin in various ways

Aspo withdrew guidance as the war in Ukraine and situation in Russia limit visibility. The uncertainty directly concerns Telko and Leipurin, while ESL ships only limited amounts of cargo from Russia and hence the situation affects the dry bulk business mostly indirectly. Russia and other CIS countries, including Ukraine, amounted to EUR 155m in FY ’21 Aspo revenue. Telko and Leipurin both distribute basic raw materials and have managed to navigate challenging market conditions before, but the full-scale war and dismal prospects for the Russian economy mean the hit is bound to be larger this time. Both companies are asset-light i.e. inventories and trade receivables constitute their assets. There is also no dependency on any large customer accounts. The Russian sanctions shouldn’t concern Leipurin that much as the company sources for the most part local raw materials; Telko is more vulnerable in this sense as it connects small local customers with Western principals.

We revise our FY ’22 EBIT estimate down by EUR 7.9m

We leave our FY ’22 estimates for ESL unchanged at this point, however we revise our revenue estimates for Telko and Leipurin down by a combined EUR 50m. In our view Leipurin will be especially affected by the Russian end-market challenges as the local consumers struggle with hyperinflation. The situation is a lot more unclear for Telko as e.g. elevated oil prices lift raw materials prices, which by itself should support margins. Our new FY ’22 EBIT estimate for Telko is EUR 10.1m (prev. EUR 16.8m) and EUR 1.1m for Leipurin (prev. EUR 2.3m). We note Telko also operates in 13 other countries besides Russia and Ukraine.

In our view Telko is now undervalued despite the risks

There are no very useful peer multiples as the strong global dry bulk earnings translate to multiples which we view too low to be applied to ESL. In our view ESL is worth close to EUR 350m, or some 11-12x EBIT. This would imply the current valuation puts very little value on Telko; there are risks, but the EUR 155m CIS revenue represents 41% of the FY ’21 combined Telko and Leipurin revenue. We thus view the recent sell-off somewhat overdone. Our new TP is EUR 8 (14); we retain our BUY rating.