BSL 1.23% $21.85 bluescope steel limited

IS BSL a capital Coffin?

  1. 26 Posts.
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    So I have a bit of a concern with BlueScope steel as a long term business.
    So I'm pretty sure that it is pretty reasonable to say that the stell business is not a long term growth or high return space to operate.
    Hence the value from Bluescope is in its ability to crank out cash and return it to shareholders. it does produce boatloads full of cash, in a good year its operations can produce over 1 Billion in cash. But the company can only really pay out cash that is not needed to sustain the business. Hence the question: how much does the business need to spend to maintain its position. If you deduct only the capital spending on what is not clearly an acquisition (ie spending on the acquisition of subsidiaries), then the business does produce a lot of cash over the cycle. So it seems ok, the business is not in a great industry, but at least is can fling of cash (at like 10-20% of the Enterprise value). But if this is the case, then why has the company been a net taker of capital from shareholders, while not materially increasing the earnings power of the business over the cycle? (If you add up the value of all dividends ever paid to add buybacks and then subtract capital raised you to end up with a 900m deficit.)
    Here's what I think happened- see all those acquisitions, they weren't for growth they were required cause the business needs to keep acquiring new subsidiaries to replace the ones they go broke or make up for the weakening profitability of others.
    If you take this into consideration the business produces around 5-10% of cashflow on its enterprise value- and negative at the bottom.
    For your information yes I lost money on this business so I am biased (I first started buying at 15 then kept averaging to about 9).
    Maybe I'm wrong, but ONLY if Bluescope will perform better in the future than it has over the past two decades. The large dividends equating to around 20-30% of my investment which I thought was likely I now see was probably a large mistake.
    Seriously though if anyone has a theory on why BSL will now be able to change its behaviour and return capital to shareholders I would love to hear your thoughts.
    Keep Safe, good luck on your investments and most importantly have a wonderful day.
 
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