Can you name a retailer than has gone out of business without having any debt on their balance sheet? The common characteristic of the recent retailing bankruptcy announcements is highly leveraged balance sheets. In more cases than not, private equity firms took over the companies, loaded them up with debt, and the interest payments became too much to handle as sales and profits declined due to excessive competition and the "race to the bottom" in terms of discounting full price merchandise. Recent examples include Sports Authority (2006 private equity deal), Limited Stores (2010 private equity deal), Payless Shoes (2012 private equity deal), and J Crew (2011 private equity deal), which has been fighting to avoid bankruptcy recently.
It may seem overly simplistic to simply equate lots of debt with bankruptcy and vice versa, but in today's investment world where folks opt to trade exchange traded funds and computerized algorithms treat all retail stocks as if they are identical, it seems clear that strong balance sheets are being undervalued by investors.
Put another way, if a retailing company has no debt and generates positive free cash flow, it should not trade at a similar valuation to a competitor with lots of debt. The challenge for companies with strong balance sheets is not survival, but rather growth (or in many cases merely maintaining their existing market share).
To illustrate how Wall Street appears to be getting it wrong with regard to balance sheet analysis (or lack of interest), consider two retail stocks that recently reported first quarter results below analyst expectations and saw their stocks crater; Express (EXPR) and Francesca's (FRAN).
Express:
$6.68 per share, 78.5 million shares = $525 million equity value
No debt, $191 million cash onhand = $334 million enterprise value
2016 financials: $2.19B revenue, EBITDA $187M, free cash flow $88M
Valuation: 2x EV/EBITDA, 6x FCF
Francesca's:
$10.46 per share, 36.8 million shares = $385 million equity value
No debt, $48 million cash onhand = $337 million enterprise value
2016 financials: $487M revenue, EBITDA $87M, free cash flow $50M
Valuation: 4x EV/EBITDA, 8x FCF
These two companies are in no danger of going bankrupt. Will they have to fight hard to compete for shoppers' dollars given how crowded the apparel and accessories space is in the U.S. right now? Absolutely. But both of them are going to be around for a long, long time.
Let's contrast Express and Francesca's with a couple of other retailers with debt and see if Wall Street is segmenting the sector in a rational way. Consider Barnes and Noble (BKS) and JC Penney (JCP):
Barnes and Noble:
$6.68 per share, 72 million shares = $485 million equity value
$180 million net debt = $665 million enterprise value
2016 financials: $3.95B revenue, EBITDA $150M, free cash flow $11M
Valuation: 4.5x EV/EBITDA, 44x FCF
JC Penney:$4.75 per share, 313 million shares = $1.5 billion equity value
$3.7 billion net debt = $5.2 billion enterprise value
2016 financials: $12.5B revenue, EBITDA $938M, free cash flow ($93M)
Valuation: 5.5x EV/EBITDA, No FCF
If you look at the stock charts, you will see that the public equity markets are saying that these four companies are essentially the same. However, it is not a hard argument to make that both a traditional department store and a retailer of all things "Amazonable" (physical books, toys, etc), with quite a bit of debt, are in a worse competitive position than a chain of women's boutiques and an apparel brand focused on a 20-30 year old customer that now gets 25% of its sales from e-commerce (up from zero 10 years ago), both of which are debt-free. And yet the latter two are cheaper on a valuation basis and the stocks of all four look like they are headed for the graveyard in the same vehicle.
I know it does not fit with the media-driven narrative in retail right now, but balance sheets matter. It is short-sighted to simply categorize all bricks and mortar retailers as dead and call it a day. Can you name companies that go out of business with no debt? Other than a select few examples when a company does something illegal and gets shut down by the government or a regulator, or can't come up with enough cash to pay a large jury award, I cannot think of any. At some point, investors will take notice (I think, anyway... there are no sure things in the investing world!).
Full Disclosure: Long shares of EXPR and FRAN at the time of writing, but positions may change at any time.