Sunday, March 26, 2006

Shufflemaster - I'm betting against them

Ahh, Shufflemaster. Who hasn't gone to Vegas and cursed this company?
Casinos like them because their card shuffle machines speed up the gambling - no downtime waiting for the cards to be shuffled. I bet (get it?) that casinos save about 7 minutes per hour, enough for a good 3 deals. With a table averaging 3 bettors, that's 9 bets per hour or ~79,000 extra bets per year. Those machines pay for themselves fast.
Oh, and it also hurts players because the randomness of the shuffle increases.

After racing up 2003~2004 as their machines penetrated every casino in Vegas, the stock has been flat for 15+ months.
Then recent earnings showed signs of growth. Almsot immediately stock analysts raised expectations AFTER - funny how most analysts are unable to do it BEFORE the obvious news hits.
So are analysts right? Is this a great company?
I wouldn't put my money down on them
THE GOOD STUFF
1. Market Penetration - Slowing in the US, maybe growing overseas. Like in Macau. Which is important. They need to sell more machines
2. Insider trading - The Chairman bought $2.6M worth of stock in Sept 05. The General Counsel even bought some.
3. Revenue growing - their sales have doubled in 2.5 years.

THE BAD STUFF
1. Earnings not that hot - A small ($0.01) jump in earnings does not justify a 20% stock price jump.
2. Earnings estimates are dropping, not rising - Analysts reduced expectations by 15% for this quarter.
3. Poor quality earnings growth - earnings are growing slower than sales (20% vs 30%)
4. Margins dropping - In the past 4 quarters, operating margins have dropped from 74% to 70%.
5. PEG Ratio >1.4 - They have a ~30 P/E on expectations of 20% growth this year and next.
6. Price to Book - 44. Ok, that's just really expensive (GOOG is 10).
7. Price to Sales - 10 Ok, this is a company that MAY grow 20%. So ~10x Price to Sales is too high. Especially given that they sell machines with a limited market potential.
8. Massive debt - They have $160M in debt.
9. Ugly Balance sheet (in Y/Y terms) -
*Cash flow has dropped almost 40%
* Receivables are up ~150% - could be a good sign of sales surging, except that it is ~20% of annual sales that they are owed. (If you wanted to fudge the books, you would take the customer's purchase order and call it a sale, but the pending order is registered as receivable - meaning the customer hasn't paid. So they cancel at a later date. The fact that sales are accelerating faster than earnings is probably explained here - the orders haven't been completed.)
If recievables were suddenly jumping up, that would be a possibility.
Instead, the Receivables as a share of monthly sales has doubled from 1.3 to 2.6 (meaning that they are owed the equivalent of 2.6 months). That's a $15M difference when sales only increased $12M for the last 2 quarters combined. Typically receivables go up when companies are cooking the books, having trouble collecting, or sales are jumping. But the receivables are higher than sales, so it isn't a case of good news.
The only possibly positive spin is that they changed their terms and are willing to let customers pay much slower. In which case, booking the order now is playing a little fast and loose with the accounting.
* Inventory doubling - Again, it could be a sign of business picking up. But inventories are rising faster than sales.

Something stinks and I don't like it.

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