Vardia Insurance - January Sales

Vardia Insurance continue and continue to deliver good growth and over my forecast sales also the month of January.
As I said in on of my previous posts: What Could We Expect From Vardia In Sales 2015 my forecast were 89.3M NOK and sales came in today at 92.6M NOK compared to 79.5M NOK last year. Which is completly magnificent!

The first month of sales could also be a good guidance for the next month sales if we just apply it on the assumed working days there will be in February 2015, which is 18 days.
18 days gives us a sales forecast on 119M NOK for February, which sounds a bit high for me but I am confident that Vardia will make over 110M NOK in February, which will be a new record in sales for a month.

Except the sales figures CEO Ivar S. Williksen also said today that Denmark's sales figures are growing as expected and that they also have increased significantly the commercial business in Sweden, and along with our in-house sales forces of agents and brokers they have the goal to be the best selling Nordic insurance in 2015. Impressive!!

On top of the sales figures Vardia has also got a really interesting customer, the Swedish Police Association which has over 20 000 members and are now leaving Moderna Forsakringar for Vardia Insurance Group. more info could be find here: new alliance for Vardia (only swedish).

I am actually surprised that the share price weren't heading north today after this numbers, but I guess as long as DNB Markets are pouring insane amounts of Vardia shares on the market I do think it will be hard for the share price to get higher. Although nothing to complain about since I could be in need of some more Vardia shares at this price.

As said before 2015 will be the year for Vardia Insurance group!

Best regards,

Eighth Wonder Investing



Note: I will increase my share in Vardia in the upcoming days, weeks, months, years.

Full disclosure: Long Vardia Insurance Group (VARDIA)
Disclaimer: All text on this blog is not any form of investment advice, this is only for personal use.

What Could We Expect From Vardia in Sales 2015?

In recent time have I seen several discussions regarding Vardia sales numbers on different blogs and almost fierce comments from some readers in the commentfields. Therefore I want to highlight this post to really focus on the Sales and try to give a fair estimate on where we would end up after 2015.

Before we start I want to highlight the big Q everyone has:

Q: What if the big insurance companies just lower the price and compete Vardia out of the market?

A: Vardia's business model is to provide low risk customers with insurance products. Since low risk customer will do less insurance claims then high risk customers, Vardia could offer the product to a lower price. In other words Vardia says that, why should you share a risk with high risk customers when you are a low risk customer?

This is the main reason why Vardia will be a winner in the end, and this business model is not done by the big insurance companies today. Of course to this you could add several things in Vardias advantage like more efficient IT, lean organisation etc. but it's still the core business model that will make Vardia successful. 

Now over to the numbers,

To make this forecast as correct as possible I will investigate how 2014 sales number were per annual, monthly and daily basis. Then adjust a modest annual sales growth on below market expectations on 15% (For Vardia this is modest). 

How was sales on annual and monthly basis 2014?

-Total sales of 1044.3 million NOK 2014.

-Average per month 87 million NOK.

How was sales on daily basis 2014 and how will it be 2015?

Public holidays 2014 which fell on a weekday (Could have 1 day wrong here on some country) :

Denmark: 11 days

Sweden; 15 days

Norway: 12 days

We take an average here and say 13 days in general.

Weekends (Saturday and Sunday) 2014: 104 days

Holiday (I assume everyone has 5 weeks); 35 days

Number of days per year:  365 days

How many effective working days do we end up with per year now?

365 - 13 - 104 - 35 = 188 days

If we assume 15% sales growth next year we end up at 1200.6 million NOK, divide that per effective working day, we have sales per day at: 6.38 million NOK.

How will sales be per month 2015?
After analyzing local holidays and normal vacation patterns I did this assumptions for effective working days per month for 2015:

January: 14 Days
February: 18 Days

March: 18 Days

April: 17 Days
May: 17 Days
June: 12 Days
July: 9 Days
August: 13 Days
September: 19 Days
October: 19 Days
November: 19 Days
December: 14 Days

If we now apply the assumed average sales per day on effective working days for 2015 we end up with a sales per month like this:

So next year, annual sales forecast on 1200.5 million NOK and GWP forecast on 56-60 NOK per share. 2015 will be a great year for Vardia Insurance!!

Sincerely,
Eighth Wonder Investing

Note: Vardia offer products to everyone, but high risk customers gets a high premium.
Full disclosure: Long Vardia Insurance Group (VARDIA)
Disclaimer: All text on this blog is not a form of investment advice, this is only for personal use and I disclaim myself  for misspelling or wrong calculus.

Protector Forsikrings Forecast and Announcement January 20th 2015

Brief notes about the announcement from Protector today.

Protector (PROTCT) today announced their own forecast and a significant volume increase for year 2015.
Their CEO Sverre Bjerkeli said this today about 2015:

"The Company experiences strong growth in January and expects Gross Written Premiums (GWP) to increase to 18% (15% measured in local currencies) over full year 2015. Norwegian business areas will contribute with single-digit growth, while Sweden / Denmark will grow approximately 50% in aggregate. Gross and net written premiums are expected to experience identical growth rates. 

This text is really a statement that Protector Forsikring has just started, 18% (!) growth is magnificent and really show how much hidden value there is in this insurance company. A wonderful company like this should be traded at higher price, that's it. Mr. Market wake up!!

Looking forward for the 2014 annual report 12th February.

Other highlights in the announcement were:

• Strong premium growth in Q4, up 19% since last Q4. Gross premiums written amounted 282 million NOK.
• Net GWP Q4 was 250 million NOK, up 24% since last Q4.
• GWP 2014 were 2.375 million NOK, up 28% since last year.

Over and out,
EWI

Vardia Insurance - December Sales

Finally the sales for Vardia Insurance arrived, lets have a look at them.

As expected the total sales were lower in December than in November, 79M NOK versus 105M NOK, due to the Christmas holiday. 79M NOK is an OK number but not more than that would I say, my forecast were slightly higher as could be seen here:December Sales Forecast

Let's do the calculation to see how the sales actually were adjusted to working days.
I assume Vardia's employees only are on duty working days, which is 5 days a week. As far as I could find none of the countries Vardia is operating in had local holidays in November, which is Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Let's start,

November
20 full working days. Which is below average, normal month has 21 working days.

December
If we consider local holidays in December we sum up to 18 full working days. Local holidays for all the countries are as you probably know, Christmas Eve, Christmas day, Boxing day, New Years Eve. In other words, but how people are actually only taking the local holidays off during Christmas?

Not so many people I would say..  So the real question we should ask us are if sales people at Vardia took additional vacation during Christmas? Most likely.. 

For me this question is impossible to answer, but I could assume from my experience from family and friends that a normal person has around 6 days vacation during Christmas which means that December had 15 full working days. As I said above November consisted on 20 full working days and the outcome of November were 105M NOK in sales.
December consisted of 75% of the working days of November (15/20). If we after that multiply that 75% with the sales of November to see the sales numbers of November applied on the same working days as December, we get:

105M NOK x 75% =  78.75M NOK

Assume then a modest growth on 1%:

78.75M x 101% = 79.53M NOK

In other words we missed target with approximately 800K NOK which is almost nothing but its not a magnificent month for Vardia. Although my view on Vardia is still the same, the company should at least be valued as 1.0 x GWP, which should be around 36 NOK per share now. On the other hand as longer the price stays low as more shares I could come over.

Important to highlight is that 1.0 x GWP are a very modest valuation and with the sales growth we seen in the last year for Vardia an even higher valuation wouldnt have surprised me at all. 

Sincerely,

Eighth Wonder Investing

October sales Vardia Insurance Group

Vardia Insurance Group presented strong sales figures for October this week, 11th November. The total new sales in Sweden, Norway and Denmark in October were 106.4 million NOK (66.4 million NOK) which is an increase of 60.2% from October 2013. Norway contributed with 59.4 million NOK, Sweden with 43.3 million NOK and Denmark with 3.6 million NOK.

For me personally it's a bit under my estimation since I expected total sales for fiscal year 2014 to be 1112 million NOK. I really thought sales for October should have been around 113-117 million NOK with Denmark contributing with atleast 9-10 million NOK to the sales. It's no panic yet about the numbers for my forecast, but it would have been nice to be on the right side. To get my sales forecast of 1112 million NOK Vardia has to close business of 252 million NOK in the two upcoming months, which I think  could be hard because of christmas holidays.

Since Denmark was a disappointment I really hope they are steeping up now for the last two months of the year. If they do I am sure Vardia will show profit for at least some month this year and the concern about the cash problem will go away and we could see a more normal valuation for Vardia.

Here are the actual sales for 2014 up to October (rounded),

I also bought some more companies, Mc Donalds (MCD) and Protector Forsikring (PROTCT). Mc Donalds for a price of 95.3 USD per share and Protector for a price of 36.2 NOK per share. More info and analysis will come in the upcoming weeks.


Over and out,

EWI