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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jurgis Bekepuris who wrote (41814)	3/17/2011 10:25:30 AM
From: Spekulatius	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78537

re Japanese stocks And you can only buy it in Japan going through currency conversion and highish brokerage fees. Not available in IRAs either at least on Fido . I pay 450Y for a trade in Japen, that is about 5.5$ Currency conversion of a chunk if funds costs 2.5$ with really tight bid/ask. Fidelilty can't touch Interactive brokers with respect to international stocks. FWIW, these trades were all down in a Roth IRA.

To: Jurgis Bekepuris who wrote (41814)	3/18/2011 2:18:51 AM
From: Spekulatius	1 Recommendation Respond to of 78537

re 2501 Sapporo is more a "sum of parts valuation" than an earnings play. Based on earning valuation Sapporo is certainly not cheap but based on a "sum of parts" valuation, it almost certainly would be. I found somewhere in the Sapporo website a page that valued their RE at 2x stated book. Their brewery operation is certainly worth something too, even though their trail Kirin and Asahi in market share and profitability. With Japanese stocks, the stated earning do not tell the whole story, imo. For one thing, I believe that Japanese numbers are more conservative (they in fact do depreciate goodwill and intangibles and take a hit for it in earnings) and they also tend to have higher depreciation (I believe there is more incentive to hide earnings in Japan, because tax rates are higher etc.). if you compare EBITDA valuations, then Japanese companies look in fact cheap. For example Kirin and Asahi appear to trade at 6x EBITDA/EV or roughly 11-12x cash earnings. This is lower than BUD ever traded as far as I remember and both business are fairly comparable. FWIW , the latter two look like decent values for an income investor, because they generate strong FCF and have been increasing their dividends at a nice clip. In any case, the Japanese run typically lower with lower ROA but one of the reasons is that they run asset heavy (own their equipment, land and buildings) while US companies tend to be asset light. Over the last 10 years however the Japanese have been catching up slowly and a restructuring. What takes 1-2 years in the US will take 5-10 years in Japan, so this type of restructuring is a slow motion activity.