Members of the Board of Management increase shareholdings

The remuneration system for the members of the DBAG Board of Management provides that 35 per cent of the net amount of the long-term variable remuneration granted to each member will be invested in shares of Deutsche Beteiligungs AG. In principle, the shares must be held for a minimum of four years. Torsten Grede, Tom Alzin and Jannick Hunecke went beyond this obligation in February when they made their most recent investments in the DBAG share. As a result of these directors’ dealings, a total of 116,993 shares (or 0.62 per cent of DBAG’s issued share capital) are now held by members of the Board of Management. As at 28 February 2022, the shares held by Board of Management members had a market value of 4.1 million euros.

Investor conferences in February and March
As ever, it is the changes in investment strategy that arouse the greatest interest among the analysts and investors with whom DBAG speaks. In February, Torsten Grede, Spokesman of the Board of Management and Roland Rapelius, Managing Director responsible for Investor Relations, presented the DBAG share at the German Investment Companies Conference. This virtual conference was hosted by Warburg Bank and exclusively featured private equity companies presenting their business models.

Among the topics discussed were DBAG’s entry into the Italian market and the question of whether it should now tap into other foreign markets. Financial investors who, like DBAG, have a focus on companies in the SME sector and a great deal of experience with investments in business models linked to manufacturing businesses and related service providers, are finding that the Italian market is comparable to that of Germany: though smaller than that of Germany, given the size ratio of the two economies, the structure is similar. This applies not only to the high proportion of family-owned companies, and to a sector distribution featuring a solid share of industrial companies, but also to a sizeable number of companies from the IT sector. Besides, there are currently no specific plans to open up offices in other foreign markets.

The next investor conference in DBAG’s financial calendar is (29 to 31 March) the Pan-European Mid-Cap Virtual Conference, hosted by US investment bank Jefferies. This event will be attended by investors focusing on pan-European stocks in the small and mid-cap sectors.

Investment ratings confirmed following publication of quarterly figures
Following publication of DBAG’s results for the first quarter 2021/2022, all but one of the analysts covering the share have maintained their “buy” rating. Besides six “buy” recommendations, J.P. Morgan Cazenove’s analyst has given the share a “neutral” rating. Regarding the net loss for the first quarter of the new financial year 2021/2022, among the comments from analysts was that the (quarterly) fluctuations in the IFRS net result (whether positive or negative) should be regarded as “noise” and not as an indication of a major trend. According to analysts, investors should ignore this and continue to focus on the steady earnings from Fund Investment Services and the long-term returns that they can expect from the portfolio.

However, after DBAG withdrew its forecast for the current financial year on 7 March in view of the impact of the war in Ukraine on overall economic development and the consequences for valuations on the capital market, three analysts reduced their price target.