What does that have to do with a pulp mill in poor old Thurso, Quebec? With a healthy investment, the mill can be converted to produce what's called “dissolving pulp,” which is what they use to make rayon among other things. And that's what Mr. Wasilenkoff intends to do.
Fortress is paying all of $3-million for the mill. It has to invest $153-million to convert the plant – $91-million for the actual conversion and another $62-million to build co-generation, which produces electricity. Once up and running, the refurbished plant will, analysts figure, be a cash cow.
Why? Well, since there's a shortage of production capacity out there, dissolving pulp is changing hands for $1,500 a tonne – that compares nicely to the $800 a tonne the mill's pulp product fetches now.
What's more, Mr. Wasilenkoff arranged for attractive and cheap government financing for much of the acquisition. Fortress is putting up equity of only $15-million in total. The risk to shareholders is limited.
The analysts whose reports I looked at show, on average, a doubling of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization over the next two or three years. The new price targets are twice as high as the stock price today, which may seem ambitious and may even be ambitious but isn't ridiculous.
Meanwhile, Fortress's other divisions – wallpaper and security paper – also show promise. The wallpaper mill is one of the lowest-cost mills in the world, and Fortress has about half of the global market share of coated and uncoated non-woven wallpaper.
And the banknote business is also stable with room to grow, although Fortress needs to make investments to modernize the works. Fortress's EBITDA grew 125 per cent from 2006 to 2009.
The truth is that this deal fits in perfectly with what Mr. Wasilenkoff has been doing all along: being a contrarian, buying cheap, seeing opportunities others overlook, allocating capital intelligently and being patient – the sorts of things only CEOs who own a lot of stock (23 per cent in this case) do.
Asked what is most challenging about his job, Mr. Wasilenkoff says “the stock price. We think it's lower than it should be and that's frustrating.”
While small companies bear risks that bigger ones don't, like concentrated customer sales, I think he's right. The stock does look cheap, especially given that he's demonstrated an ability to make money for not only central banks but investors as well.
