BRE Bank has announced that is negotiating the sale of a 100% stake in Skarbiec Asset Management (mutual fund management and transfer agent) to Enterprise Investors (private equity company), with a closing date not earlier than 8 January 2007. The price of the transaction was set at PLN 155m but prior to the sale, Skarbiec will pay a dividend of PLN 62m to BRE Bank.
Therefore, BRE Bank is estimating an pre-tax gain of PLN 100m on its results in 2007. Before closing the transaction, BRE Bank plans to buy back the private banking portfolio management business of Skarbiec Asset Management for PLN 12m.
Our view: Given that the expected one-off capital gain, which BRE Bank will book on the sale of Skarbiec Asset Management, we anticipate a positive market reaction to the announcement. The price of the transaction, based on an adjusted price of PLN 217m, equates to an estimated 2006F P/E of 11x (a rough benchmark forward P/E for international fund managers is 17x) but seems reasonable as it also implies 6.8% of AUM (a rough benchmark for a valuation of retail asset managers would be 5%).
However, we view the transaction as strategically negative and it should be underlined that BRE Bank is the only bank in our coverage that considers mutual fund management (a high-growth segment) as a non-core business.
Instead, the bank has opted for an open architecture retail platform, which offers the products of other fund management companies, enabling the bank to split a reduced fee (we estimate typically no front load fee and half of the management fee charged to the client).
Skarbiec asset management (AUM of PLN 3.20bn as of August 2006, 2005A BV of PLN 94.6m, 1H06 net earnings of PLN 15m) has underperformed the market in recent years. However, recently, the asset management business of BRE Bank appears to have stabilised, with Skarbiec TFI outperforming the market on a quarterly basis in 2Q06, with 12.6% q/q growth in AUM compared to the 6.2% q/q growth of the market.