RE: Simon Thompson22 Oct 2020 10:27
ALM
Early buyout increasingly likely
The point is that there is now a huge incentive for Afterpay to try to buy out ThinkSmart’s minority interest in Clearpay before its call option becomes exercisable in 2023. Clearpay is one of the fastest growing e-commerce payment companies in the European market, so can only become more valuable. For instance, the business now has more than 1m active customers (more than 10 per cent of Afterpay’s total customer base), is recruiting new merchants at quite a pace, and Afterpay is accelerating Clearpay’s expansion into Europe through last summer’s acquisition of Pagantis. This will enable Clearpay to enter Spain, France, Italy and potentially Portugal, regions that have a combined addressable e-commerce market worth more than US$247bn, according to Ecommerce Europe, an association representing 100,000-plus companies selling goods and services online to consumers in Europe.
Trading on an unwarranted 50 per cent discount to my sum-of-the-parts valuation of 94p, the pricing anomaly is worth exploiting. Strong buy.
https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/comment/2020/10/19/technology-winners-with-a-huge-margin-of-safety/