60%+ gross margin and a 36% net margin make the company a 90th-percentile and above operator with a COGS of below 40% and below 40% OpEx. The company is one of the more attractive utilities out there in terms of profitability, which I view as key for a good investment. The US market is now over 40% of the company's assets, and it's strictly in regulated markets in the US. It's growth strategies are related to inorganic growth and tack-on M&A's, not any sort of organic growth beyond the low single-digit percentages.Ī good way to view a utility is a relatively safe income investment, a bond-type investment. Organic growth for a business like this is usually nil. It's not only a rich heritage, they are core assets that make up part of the backbone of the British energy infrastructure. Fundamentals and history for the company go back to well before the 2000s, and before its founding, the operations that are now NGG, generation, and transmission of electricity in England and Wales were under the Central Electricity Generating Board, a public entity that was broken up in 1990 into different companies. The best you can hope for, if you buy the "right" utility at the "right time" is a combination of reversal in valuation and attractive dividends, maybe some dividend growth, to really land you in the green and see some good returns on your investment.Īnd NGG is certainly a "good business". Why would you invest in a 3-4%-yielding utility no-growth play when you can get almost the same from bonds? Utilities don't have massive growth. Utilities are very appealing plays, though the changes in interest rates have made investing in them a bit more complex. That one is still "percolating" though - meaning it's up significantly (over 43%), but it's still not anywhere near I consider it meeting its full potential. That's not a trivial position for me, and it makes NGG one of my larger utility stakes, though not comparable to my significant 4.8% stake in Italian Enel ( OTCPK:ENLAY), which is currently by far my largest utility holding. I'm at about half a percent in terms of portfolio allocation for this company. That's not where we are today - but more on that later when we look at valuation. The last time we had a real opportunity here, which is also when I loaded up on the business, was during last fall of 2022 when the company briefly went below 13x normalized P/E. The company teeters between a slight premium and sometimes trading at a discount. Now, I don't want to give you the impression that NGG is some sort of screaming, must-"BUY" rating here just because it's down a few percent. National Grid - Attractive again after a small drop, but only barely This article serves as an update - and a rating change for the company, which once again is in a position to be attractive here. It shows you once again why valuation is such a crucial consideration during times such as these, and why you want to make sure that you never really buy anything too expensively relative to what else you can get on the market in the same sector. I went "HOLD" in April, and the relevant returns since that time speak for themselves. My last article on the company was published in early April of this year, and I would say objectively that I've been able to pinpoint, for 2023, good points to "BUY" and good points to stop buying and go "HOLD". National Grid ( NYSE: NGG) remains a qualitative utility with interesting exposures and a good and attractive future.
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