Posted Oct 12, 2022, 7:15 PM
Quick setting is a cement know-how that the stock market is no less quick to adopt. Vicat, the last French concrete independent, is the latest victim of the tendency of investors to immediately sink with both feet any file already crossing the bad boxes of the moment (energy, carbon, economic cycle) at the slightest additional hitch.
Returning the stock market to its level of mid-2003, by making it drop below the threshold of one billion euros in capitalization for the first time in nineteen years (-9.3% on Wednesday), probably reflects more the fears managers on the future in Europe of energy-intensive industrialists than the perspectives envisaged by the groups themselves. In this case, slightly more than half of the profit alert issued by the family business corresponded to operating difficulties on sites outside the Old Continent, particularly in the United States.
Instead of the slight growth expected by analysts, Vicat’s Ebitda could return this year to the level of 2020, i.e. a decline of 10% maximum over one year. A reversion to the average of its five-year stock market valuation multiples would suppose a fall of the double.
However, the concrete is only partially disarmed in the portfolios, other players (Heidelberg Materials, CRH, Holcim) being still very far from having sunk the low points of the 2008-09 crisis.
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