(BFM Bourse) – The optical giant is one of the last representatives of the CAC 40 to have not yet given any indication of its 2021 performance. Pending its annual publication, Midcap Partners has put on the spot his “No BlaBla” team and concludes that the current consensus is likely to be exceeded…
Within Midcap Partners, a French investment bank specializing in small and mid-caps, the paternity of the “No BlaBla” project goes to Lionel André, at the time an “equity salesman” and today responsible for the development of the firm. His conviction: the mass of publicly available information (“open data”, from customs as well as from Google Trends, Eurostat, Insee, Banque de France, RTE, Météo France, OECD, etc.) has become so important that it necessarily contains the indices making it possible to model and predict the turnover of different companies. As long as you know how to find them…
Surrounded by a team of “data scientists”, he therefore set up this project aimed at exploiting the sources in a systematic way, identifying the most relevant data, sorting them and checking the correlation of the indicators with the actual income. For example, the team had determined an 89% correlation between Iliad’s revenue growth and the popularity of the “Free” search in Google Trends: in the absence of physical stores, subscriptions are done online. Obviously often more complex than in this example where the link was almost direct, this work ranging from recovery (“scrapping” and “text mining”) to data analysis, including their organization and processing, all at great reinforcement of R programming (the language intended for statistics and data science), led to No BlaBla. Section through which Midcap Partners sends its clients, without unnecessary bullshit, numerical projections on the revenues of the listed companies that interest them.
In a recent note, the Midcap design office launched its review of the world leader in ophthalmic lenses, frames and sunglasses, EssilorLuxottica, which will publish its turnover and results on March 11. “To build our index, we looked at global flows of optical lenses to represent Essilor’s market. Regarding Luxottica, we observed Italian exports of frames and sunglasses,” explains Sami Benjelloun.
This index suggests high growth of +29.3% in the fourth quarter (+22% in October, +24.7% in November and +47% in December), which also seems to be confirmed by the strong increase in customs flows from eyewear. However, at present the 15 analysts following EssilorLuxottica anticipate, on average, a turnover of 5.017 billion euros for the last three months of 2021 (bringing the annual total to 19.285 billion), i.e. a growth of 22 % “only” at the end of the year. Thus, according to research by Midcap Partners (which claims a 99% correlation with its indicator in the case of the optician), the group’s growth could well exceed current consensus expectations by almost 8 points.
Guillaume Bayre – ©2022 BFM Bourse
Are you following this action?
Receive all the information about ESSILORLUXOTTICA in real time: