Cynthia Carroll

4090 days ago

Guest Post: Sam Bottell - Anglo American the writedowns are only just starting - Sell!

I spent two years working along Sam Bottell as he worked with minesite.com and oilbarrel.com and he is a good, honest and clever chap. Now that he is starting his career freelance writing as well as an organiser of the UKInvestor Show I have no hesitation in helping him along via this blog as a guest contributor. As such I bring to your attention a share tip from TradingResearch Point on the Anglo American. It is a compelling read and not the sort of analysis you get in a broker note. Good stuff Sam.

Results from Anglo American (AAL) today are a handful. In a 40 page statement you have to wade through a lot of paperwork to find the salient points. Perhaps when you are reporting a headline loss of $1.49 billion – your first loss in a decade – you really are not that minded to make life easy for commentators., but this will not be the last headline loss, whatever the company says and the shares – at £20.47 – remain materially overvalued.

The results for calendar 2012 are terrible, no wonder Cynthia Carroll stood down as CEO. The net loss for 2011 compared to a net profit of $6.17 billion in 2011. If one strips out exceptional items the underlying profit was $6.16 billion – that was still a fall of 44% on 2011 with the company blaming this largely on lower metals prices.

What pushed the company into the red were a series of writedowns

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