Tassal Group Strategic Thoughts, page-435

There's two separate discussions here, one on debt and one on dividends. For dividends, I don't have an opinion - if they don't pay dividends, the question is can they reinvest it in themselves at a higher ROIC? Arguably yes. But if they pay dividends, you get greater shareholder interest in the company as people don't value this a growth business anyway.

The other discussion as I see it is around debt levels. The most important consideration for fund managers and investors is, "Can this business survive or is there a risk of default / capital raise?". In 2020 and 2021, the narrative of the shorts was that Tassal would need to do a capital raise. I thought they were wrong, and I still do.

Below is an excerpt of the half yearly accounts. The books are muddled by 'right of use assets' and 'lease liabilities', which essentially net themselves out. They need to include these as they have bills to pay to keep the permits, but the permits have a value themselves. Look through it because that's a cash flow not a balance sheet issue imho. So the real debt to my mind is the $350m in borrowings with 3.5yr timeframe at ~3% or whatever (@bug1 will have the exact deets). Compare that to $43m cash and $150m undrawn facilities - approx $200m of available liquidity.

Management talked about leverage has reduced from 2.55 to 2.37. It's clear to me that at this point the debt to equity has peaked (due to CAPEX for prawn farms etc), and is now coming down. Liquidity is sufficient and improving. Good times.