Turnaround Cases: Premier Exhibitions Part 1 ($PRXI)

by PlanMaestro

A great investment opportunity occurs when a marvellous business encounters a one-time, but solvable problem. You just need to know the business to recognize this – Warren Buffet

So after reviewing some situations where a turnaround was threatened by tough issues that were not completely on management’s control, we now move to situations where the core business is healthy but the performance has been compromised by solvable issues. This is usually the result of bad luck (it sometimes happens), internal issues brought upon themselves by incompetent leadership or by management’s inability to rise to a solvable new challenge.

What is the point of having a blog and end discussing examples with a strong consensus. Instead I am going to propose a controversial case: Premier Exhibitions (PRXI). You probably never heard that name before but you probably heard the names of its two exhibitions: Titanic and Bodies. Both are hit shows not only in the US but around the world and both continue to attract crowds. Bodies shows cadavers treated with a technical process that makes them viable for exhibition and Titanic shows pieces recovered from the wreckage. Someone appropriately used the adjective macabre to describe the situation however that is not necessarily bad. As Peter Lynch once wrote

Something that makes people shrug, or turn away in disgust is ideal – One Up on Wall Street

If you agree with that statement then Premier may be your kind of stock. This is a company well known for value investors since Mark Sellers, a respected hedge fund manager, is its majority shareholder. There are several articles on Premier’s good economics and the potential value of its Titanic assets so I am just going to make the introductions. Dear reader, here is Premier Exhibitions:

Most of these articles were written before Premier hit an earnings bump. That bump’s cause, consequence, solution and opportunity are going to be the topic of several posts, but as an appetizer let me show you the historic stock price:

Wow, that is what I call a rise and fall. You just have to go through Yahoo’s board to retrace the story and is really something. You can read how early adopters bought the story of the unrecognized Titanic assets, were joined later by growth investors that valued the successful new Bodies exhibition, how pricing got out of hand with momentum investors pumping pie-in-the-sky projections and the sudden collapse. Now it had gone full circle becoming a value stock again: I recommend you to check the Complete Growth Investor podcast on Premier and get their free report. This is indeed the story of an Icarus growth stock.

The collapse has wrongly been attributed to the 20/20’s attempt on character assassination of Bodies –that I still recommend to watch, also here is Premier’s response - and the settled investigation of the bodies’ origin. To the contrary, both were short term attendance boosts because as we know there is no such thing as bad publicity.

The reason for the collapse was simpler: an outsized and undisciplined organization built by an entrepreneurial one man rule seeking growth on too many fronts without the needed processes to manage that growth. This is a story repeated time and again that has been the subject of some best sellers like “Inside the Tornado” and “Build to Last”. I do not offer these books necessarily as testaments of good research but as witnesses of the topicality of the challenge.

All investing is risky and growth stocks have their particular set of challenges. Their stocks multiples can collapse fast when earnings or growth disappoints. And the probability of disappointing is higher than people think: these are some Bain and Co. estimates of success for growth initiatives

Growth

If this is not material for a good series, I do not know what is. It certainly has drama. In the next part we are going to address the story of Premier’s collapse and discuss if it is solvable.

Long PRXI

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