More on the share issue in today's Times.
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Soros must be mad: I wouldn’t touch Man Utd with a bargepole
Holding shares in the debt-ridden Premier League football club will prove costly, warns the chairman of Sequoia Capital
Michael Moritz Published: 26 August 2012
Manchester United remains in debt and will shrink in size this year (Matthew Peters)
THE poor, befuddled buyers of Manchester United’s shares — including George Soros, whose firm Soros Fund Management has taken a 2% stake — must be wondering what to do. One week ago, they backed the company’s flotation on the New York Stock Exchange at $14 a share. The Premier League club’s stock is now changing hands at $13.26.
Were investors duped by the club’s controlling shareholders, the Glazer family, who used the listing to dump a big part of their holding? Were they sucked in by the bankers who bigged up United as a growth business and global consumer story?
Buying shares — especially in a company making its market debut — is a hazardous affair. Some people buy shares who have no better grasp of a business’s value than a plumber has of heart surgery.
For United fans, a quick look at the billboards of the club’s sponsors shows there are all sorts of businesses in which to invest.
If they choose to refrain from salty food and alcohol, they can forget about Mister Potato, the club’s official savoury snack, or its wine, beer or vodka sponsors. They may also want to set aside Thomas Cook, the severely challenged travel operator, or GM (the part-owned subsidiary of the American government), which just became the club’s latest shirt sponsor, thereby ensuring that it loses even more on its European car operations. However, the float’s backers might have asked themselves why they would make more money on Manchester United than on some of its other sponsors, such as Nike, DHL or Aon.
I suspect most of the buyers could probably not provide a satisfactory answer. It is as if they had ambled into a butcher, surveyed the counter and convinced themselves that a pound of pigs’ trotters was worth more than a pound of sirloin.
Yet this is precisely what they did. Even after the float, the club remains buried under a mountain of debt, and this year will shrink in size. Failing to understand how to place an appropriate value on United will mean the value of its shares will shrivel — unless a benevolent Middle East investor comes along, astride a white camel.
Here’s what these hapless buyers should do. If they are desperate they could sell, tuck the cash under their pillows and console themselves with the thought that even the ravages of inflation on the real spending power of money will be less painful than holding these shares.
The more reflective should immediately sell their United holdings and use the money to buy shares of companies that are far cheaper, whose prospects are far brighter, and which are led by people who have demonstrated superb leadership. They may want to consider Apple, Google and Berkshire Hathaway, each of which effectively sells for half the price or less of Manchester United’s listing price.
The club’s shares sold at $14, which may at first glance look cheap compared with Apple at $663 a share, Google at $678, or Berkshire Hathaway’s Class B shares at $85. Anyone who thinks that is badly wrong.
One quick way of comparing the value of these businesses is to look at their price-to-earnings ratios — the price per share that buyers are prepared to pay for each dollar of earnings. Buyers of Manchester United shares paid 37 times the value of each dollar of earnings. By contrast, a buyer of Google, Apple and Berkshire Hathaway would — at current prices — be paying 20, 15 and 18 times respectively. So, in reality, Manchester United costs twice as much as these companies.
The club looks even more expensive compared with these three when factors beyond this simple ratio are considered.
The growth of Manchester United has — to be generous — been tepid. By contrast, Apple and Google should grow 20% a year for the next four years. Even Berkshire Hathaway, which is almost 300 times larger than United and operates in mature markets (as opposed to Apple and Google’s fast-growing technology markets), has grown about 30% in the past three years.
Also, Apple, Google and Berkshire Hathaway — unlike Manchester United — have so much cash they could buy every club in the Premier League without making a dent in their treasure chests.
There is one other fact: Warren Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, has chosen to buy shares of his company every time he considers it undervalued — unlike United’s controlling shareholders who have taken out money at every opportunity.
Very few businesses are good, long-term buys at the time of listing, as the buyers of Manchester United are likely to discover. Some eventually become solid businesses, but Wall Street’s graveyard is littered with the tombstones of companies that listed in a blaze of publicity.
There are, of course, notable exceptions. An investment of $100 in the 1986 float of Microsoft would today be worth $34,000, even though the stock has swooned for the past decade. Another $100 invested in Cisco Systems’ 1990 float would be worth $22,700, and $100 in the 2005 float of Baidu, the Chinese internet search company, is worth $5,200. It’s unfortunate that the $100 buyers used to purchase United shares will only melt away.
■ Michael Moritz is chairman of Sequoia Capital. He owns shares in Apple, Google and Berkshire Hathaway. Sequoia Capital was the largest shareholder of Cisco Systems at the time of its float.