In January of 2020, Eugene Robin and I appeared on GuruFocus’s Value Investing Live platform to discuss our position in Viasat (ticker: VSAT). The title of that presentation was Adventures in Contrarian Value Investing. GuruFocus recently invited to me come back on and give people an update on Viasat. It has been quite the busy and bumpy last year for the company—hence the title of this year’s presentation. As such, in the presentation, I discussed the Inmarsat acquisition in depth and provided some initial reactions regarding the impact on Viasat of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The takeaway is that we believe Viasat remains very much undervalued and misunderstood by the investment community.
Additionally, GuruFocus asked me to profile another company in our portfolio. Given the recent pressure on the stock price, I decided to provide a 10,000-foot flyover of Millicom (ticker: TIGO). In November of 2021, Millicom closed on a no-brainer acquisition when it acquired the 45% of its Guatemalan JV that it did not own. The multiple was low and they bought a business they knew as well as anyone. However, some TIGO shareholders are not thrilled with the company being 4x+ levered and thus the company is going to have to raise some equity, most likely in the form of a rights offering. Unfortunately, this has created a meaningful overhang on the stock that has pushed the valuation down to almost distressed levels. Our research suggests that TIGO has substantial upside from here, once the smoke around the equity offering starts to clear. For more on Millicom, you can catch my Compounders podcast interview with Mauricio Ramos, the CEO of Millicom, here.
If you are at all interested in our updated thoughts on VSAT and TIGO, please enjoy the presentation here:
Also, if you’re interested, feel free to review the slides I used in the presentation.
[pdf-embedder url=”https://covestreetcapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/GuruFocus-Presentation-VSAT-TIGO-reduced.pdf” title=”GuruFocus Presentation (VSAT+ TIGO)-reduced”]
-Ben Claremon
