Warum Home Depot trotz des Kurses eine gute Anlage ist - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[Ami2000]

Moin , ich eroeffne diesen Thread mit dieser aktuellen und in meinen Augen sehr zutreffenden Analyse der momentanen Situation von
Home Depot. Ich freue mich ueber rege Beteiligung und natuerlich kritische Kommentare. Ich habe Home Depot im Februar als Langfristanlage bei $ 60 gekauft.


Aug. 17 — So far this week, shares of Home Depot Inc., the nation’s leading do-it-yourself retailer, have fallen more than 15 percent, to barely $50, on some second-quarter earnings news that, a year earlier, would have sent the stock through the roof. It would seem, in short, that Home Depot has become Wall Street’s answer to Rodney Dangerfield — the stock that can’t get no respect, no matter what it does. But over the longer term, a huge buying opportunity looks to be developing in the shares.
SINCE THE START of the year, when Home Depot came within a fraction of a point of its all-time high of $70 per share, the stock has been jolted by two sustained sell-offs: from January through March, and from late April through June. Technicians look at trading patterns like that and see what they call a double top — in January and April — and begin fleeing the shares in the belief that everyone else is seeing the same sell-signal they’re seeing. Result? The stock goes down whether the news backdrop is good or not.
That is the condition in which Home Depot now finds itself — it’s a stock that has been captured by the chartists, and the results have been grim for long-term holders of the shares. Each time action develops in the stock — there’s a positive news announcement, for example, or an earnings release, or the market itself rallies — shares in Home Depot now top out at lower highs than they reached previously, then sell off to lower new lows. In July, the stock rallied to just under $60, fell to the low $50s; it rallied back in August to just under $60 again, was engulfed by selling, and is now having trouble holding above $50.
It is this relentless grinding process that has driven the shares down by more than 27 percent since January, making Home Depot the fifth-biggest loser in the Dow, after Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, International Paper, AT&T and Wal-Mart. (Microsoft is a partner in MSNBC.)More came this week when the company released second-quarter financial results that were precisely in line with analysts’ expectations: revenue growth of 21 percent over the year-earlier period, to $12.6 billion, net income growth of 23 percent to $838 million, or 36 cents per share, and revenue growth of 6 percent in stores that have been open and running for at least a year.

Home Depot earnings match targets

These are superb results for a company of the size of Home Depot, which in terms of revenues alone is America’s 14th-largest non-energy company and 17th-largest employer — an amazing achievement indeed for a company that is less than 25 years old. Compare those results to that, of say, the Walt Disney Co., another Dow stock, which has soared 36 percent in value since January on only 8 percent revenue growth and 19 percent growth in net income.
Disney’s stock has lately been rising on news whether it is good or not. For example, Disney reported a 50 percent growth in earnings per share from “continuing operations” in its latest quarter, but when the complete bottom line is viewed, EPS growth was only 17 percent.
By contrast, Home Depot’s results, released on Tuesday, sent the stock into a tailspin, with the shares dropping in two days of frenzied trading from $59 to $51 per share — and all because the numbers that the company released were in line with but didn’t actually “beat” the consensus forecast of the more than two dozen Wall Street analysts who cover the stock.


ANALYTICAL HAIR-SPLITTING

Several used the opportunity to issue downgrades of one sort or another on the shares, but the reasons given betray a desire simply to escape from a stock that has weakening technicals instead of one that is faced with any significant threat to its business fundamentals. One analyst who is widely followed in the stock, David Strasser of Salomon Smith Barney, cut the shares from a “buy” to an “outperform” (an ecclesiastical distinction that doubtless escapes the understanding of people of ordinary intelligence) on the bizarre argument that, although the company’s gross margins will continue to improve, the actual rate of improvement is expected to slow. This is analytical hair-splitting in the extreme.

In fact, it is difficult to see any meaningful problems at all facing Home Depot. In the short run, rising interest rates and a slowing economy (if indeed the economy’s slowdown is actually occurring) could put a crimp in home repair and remodeling sales. But it is equally possible that more and more people, faced with rising mortgage costs, will simply remain where they are and decide to add onto the homes they already own, causing the home improvement business to boom. This was precisely the pattern of the 1970s, when soaring interest rates and runaway inflation perversely made the home improvement business one of the hottest sectors of the economy
With more than 900 Home Depot and affiliated stories now up and running in the U.S. alone, the market is definitely filling up. This is the problem that Barnes & Noble Inc., the book-retailing giant, is now facing, with more than 1,000 stores, in every state in the Union.
But Home Depot has a much greater opportunity than Barnes & Noble does to broaden its franchise. Barnes & Noble has had success selling only books, magazines and CDs. Home Depot sells every capital improvement and renovation for the American home. In the same way that Time Inc. many years ago took its core product — Time Magazine — and began expanding its various editorial departments into whole new magazines (Money, Sports Illustrated, People, etc.) Home Depot is expanding its store operations into one sub-operation after the next.
The company is thus now opening up so-called EXPO Design Centers to help homeowners plan and undertake everything from patio additions to the upgrading of kitchens and baths. It is opening so-called Villager Hardware stores to compete for business at the strip mall and neighborhood level. It has started a special flooring operation. It runs a wholesale supply company for professional builders, a specialty lighting company, a special order center and a supply operation for multifamily housing managers and the lodging industry.
This sort of thing can go on for years — decades, in fact — before the market becomes truly saturated. Meanwhile, the company has enormous resources to see the task through. Home Depot’s balance sheet, as of July 30, shows $944 million of cash and short-term investments, nearly double the amount of a year ago. Debt is down, stockholder equity is up, and the business is awash in more than $3 billion of day-to-day working capital.
On an operating basis, the company’s gross margin is not only impressive, but steadily improving. Five years ago, the gross margin stood at 27.7 percent; today the margin stands at 29.6 percent. That is a better gross margin than Wal-Mart (21 percent) or any of Home Depot’s direct competitors such as Lowe’s Cos. (27 percent) or Wicks Inc. (23 percent). Were a price-cutting war to develop, Home Depot would win. The company’s operations are tight. Its 10 percent operating margin is better than Lowe’s (7 percent), Wal-Mart’s (5 percent) and Wicks’ (3 percent). It’s operating cash flow has grown at an average annual rate of 35 percent vs. 23 percent for Wal-Mart and 26 percent for Lowe’s, (Wicks has no operating cash flow). Home Depot is, simply put, a well-managed company in a growth sector of the economy. And since nothing has changed to alter either fact in years, the more the stock slides on its chartist technicals, the greater becomes the appeal of the shares as a long-term core holding. This stock may have further to fall before the rout is over. But end it will, and when the bottom comes, Home Depot will be a glow-in-the-dark buy.

Quelle CNBC vom 18.08.00


Meiner Meinung nach klingt das sehr positiv, so dass jetzt ein sehr guter Zeitpunkt sein koennte (oder sehr bald) , um in einen super Wert der "Old Economy" zu investieren. Wie sind Eure
Einschaetzungen ??


Gruesse Ami2000

[Behme]

Hallo Ami2000,

bin schon seit Jahren investiert. Meine Meinung: Kaufen, vergessen und sich über die Gewinne freuen.

Ds. Jahr wurde der 1000te Baumarkt eröffnet und das Endziel ist noch lange nicht in Sicht. Zur Langfristanlage eine Topppp Aktie.

Gruß Behme

[Ami2000]

Hallo,

weisst Du wann Home Depot den Sprung nach Europa wagen wird ? Soweit ich weiss ist vor einiger Zeit ein fuehrender Mann von Ikea zu Home Depot gewechselt um die Globalisierung voranzutreiben. Wie ist hier der Stand der Dinge ? Viele Gruesse Ami2000