How to polish your smile
Iprobably played my last game of competitive singles on Saturday. I entered the tennis club champs singles for a giggle, to warm up for more important doubles and mixed fixtures. Predictably, my competitive nature got the better of me and I stupidly tried to take the game to Gerald, my younger and better-proportioned opponent.
Nearly two hours later, head between my quivering legs, I was praying I would not heave on centre court. Gerald described the three-set epic perfectly: “Just two desperate rats scurrying around a maze.”
My back felt like it had been kicked by a mule with concrete hooves. My enthusiasm for my doubles and mixed fixtures waned.
I’m the first to admit that some of us mature players tend to experiment, not always successfully but certainly recklessly, with muscle relaxants and antiinflammatories. There was even a brief period of bliss when a homegrown medicinal cannabis compound showed promise until one of the hardiest members of the Monday Marauders was left semi-comatose for a few hours.
So with a tough opening doubles fixture looming on Sunday, some panic set in, which inevitably locked up my back even tighter. But I took heart that Dexter, our overweight Jack Russell/mastiff mix, was showing an uncharacteristic spring in his trot.
A shortage of the usual adult dog food meant we had to resort to feeding His Chubbiness a brand of puppy pellets. The more he guzzled, the more exuberant he got at one point he wagged his tail so vigorously that he actually keeled over. On our walk, he stalked seagulls, crooned longingly at a sleek otter and mauled every piece of kelp on Long Beach. He even grew embarrassingly amorous with a few larger breeds.
I considered mixing a few puppy pellets into my muesli and yoghurt. But in the end I went into my match (a comprehensive victory, if you must know) with my normal pain-numbing cocktail and a few cursory stretches.
Lucky that. Dexter’s Benjamin Button phase came to an abrupt end. By Sunday evening he was pooped out and snapping at anyone daring to rouse him from his basket. I, on the other hand, am ready to be unleashed in the quarter-finals.
Life in the small-cap sector
Speaking of the baring of teeth, low-key investment counter Universal Partners (UP) has pulled off another decent exit. Last year the group, which has a secondary listing on the JSE’s AltX, made a mint exiting its electric motors investment, and now it is shuffling its investment in dentistry business Dentex.
Dentex will be merged into rival group Portman Dental Care. UP’s share is £65.5m settled in £30.3m cash and £35.2m in shares and loans in the enlarged business. This is a heck of a deal.
After an initial investment of £15m in Dentex in 2017, UP pushed its investment to just over £32.3m. This means UP is getting back 94% of its invested capital in cash, and gets to retain a meaningful exposure to any further upside in new-look Portman.
The share, which is rarely traded on the JSE, seems oblivious to developments. The market capitalisation is R1.39bn versus the R1.46bn value of the Dentex/Portman deal, and the last traded share price of R19.10 discounts the last stated NAV of about R32 a share by 40%.
Whether a 40% discount is justified after UP whose primary listing is in Mauritius executed two superb value-enhancing transactions is debatable.
But such is life in the smallcap sector.
Looked at another way, punters lucky enough to scramble a few UP shares at R19.10 will be getting the investments in contract accounting and payroll business Workwell (valued at £37m) for free, with smaller investments in niche businesses such as SC Lowy (a distressed debt and high yield specialist) and recruitment business Xcede chucked in gratis.
I suppose the big question is what UP will do with its cash portion of the Dentex/Portman deal. New investments or a special dividend? Surely it’s not worth trying to buy back illiquid shares? On another tack, the $13bn proposed takeover of container group Triton International by Toronto-based Brookfield Infrastructure Partners spilled onto the JSE, with Textainer which was part of the old Trencor Group finding a wave of support. Textainer steamed to a 12-month high of R661.80 last week. A few things are at play here. Will shareholders who exit Triton now look at Textainer as a modestly priced position in container leasing? Does Textainer drift into the cross-hairs of other large investment entities keen on broader maritime logistics? I know many old Trencor shareholders had wished the group had been more aggressive in steering Textainer towards corporate action. They may still get what they had been hoping for.