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

To: bruwin who wrote (4574)	5/20/2021 10:54:55 AM
From: robert b furman	1 Recommendation Recommended By Lance Bredvold Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4719

Hi bruwin THANK YOU - I Owe you! Cohu and Brks assemble their equipment in Indonesia, where the majority of the installed ownerbase is located. They get some nice rebated tax help. Poor Armanino operates and grows their tomatoes in California - thus the high taxes. UUU is the largest producer of uranium based in the US. They also mine Vanadium, and are morphing into a rare earth element mining operation within the US. It is inventorying their product and only sold when it attracts a profitable price. Debt free and no hedging of their product. They are one year into producing several rare earth elements and will be adding to revenue with in this year. It is a speculative turnaround with a solid balance sheet. In October of 2018 Cohu made an acquisition of XCERRA, their only global competitor. Xcerra was about to be purchased by a Cjhinese hedge fund and it was nixed by CIFIUS. That allowed Cohu to buy Xcerra, a larger company with higher margins, more cash and revenue. Cohu took on debt for the first time since I've owned them (1978 - not a typo). This year they suspended the small dividend they paid and began debt reduction. This year they also added about 5 million shares in a secondary, half of which went to debt reduction. Just this month they announced a division selloff for about 95 million, targeted towards debt reduction. They are so conservative and hate debt. It would not surprise me to see them pay it all off before end of year. Then I suspect they'll buy back the dilution from the secondary. I've visited this company for decades. I've been in and out of it three times. I have met with the past CEO's several times. They've been a good cyclical company based on the PC Cycle in the past. Now their business is robust due to 5G and automotive electrification ADAS mostly the new driver with autonomous well down the road. Over the last two years their SG&A has been loaded with severance and relocation of their facilities in Malaaka Indonesia and the Philippines. As well as facility closures from XCERRA. They will run a tight ship and have had excellent recent order growth. It is a very good turnaround story of a small company that bought a bigger company. David and Goliath kind of thing. BRKS is a money making machine that just announced the separation of their two businesses. Semi equipment and life sciences. The CEO Stephen Schwartz is top shelf Dr. leader role type and the CFO Linden Robertson is conservative with a sleeper sell presentation during the webcasts. They both will go to the life sciences company. It features cryo cold chain storage which they invented utiliyzing robotics and no human interaction. The other faster growth part of life sciences is genomics and Sanger sequencing. When the company splits off the two stocks, I'll sell the semi company and double down into the genomics. I DO NOT know this, but their meteoric rise these last two years may well have been the buying of their stock by ARK INNOVATION FUND. The CEO and CFO who runs the fund talks in a futuristic way about Crisper and genomics and it sounds like she is describing BRKS life sciences to a tee. Thank you again for the review. I hope the brief FA is a helpful return of your much appreciated gesture. Bob