Hestia Capital could be preparing to shake up the board at Pitney Bowes

Enterprise: Pitney Bowes is a worldwide delivery and mailing firm that gives know-how, logistics, and monetary companies to companies, together with greater than 90% of the Fortune 500, retailers and authorities shoppers world wide. It operates by three enterprise segments: (i) International Ecommerce, (ii) Presort Companies and (iii) SendTech Options.

Inventory Market Worth: $666M ($3.83 per share)

Share Possession:  6.90%

Common Price: $3.59

Activist Commentary: Hestia shouldn’t be an activist investor. Somewhat, the agency is a deep worth investor that can use activism as a final resort. Kurtis Wolf, managing member and chief funding officer of Hestia is a former technique advisor and notably labored at Relational Buyers from 2002 by 2004. The agency is skilled in enterprise technique and applies its enterprise acumen to deep worth and distressed corporations to find out which of them have a very good path ahead. In consequence, Hestia typically invests in corporations that is perhaps misunderstood or not favored by the market, like GameStop, Finest Purchase and Pitney Bowes. The agency eschews biotech and commodity-driven corporations. Hestia’s solely prior activist engagement was in 2020, when it shaped a bunch with Allow Capital and ran a profitable proxy struggle at GameStop.

Hestia has engaged with Pitney Bowes about enhancing the corporate’s capital allocation, bettering operational efficiency and making modifications to the board’s composition.

Pitney Bowes’ SendTech options enterprise is the core enterprise that the corporate is mostly recognized for: postage meters. It is a secularly declining, however not disappearing, enterprise that generates important money movement. PBI expanded the SendTech division to incorporate delivery labels, which is a development enterprise. The delivery labels enterprise has traditionally competed with, and sometimes misplaced to, stamps.com, which was constructed into an enormous enterprise in the end acquired by Thoma Bravo for $6.6 billion. The SendTech Options phase accounts for 38% of Pitney Bowes’ income and generated $429 million in earnings earlier than curiosity and taxes in 2021. The postage meter enterprise contains 89% of the division’s income and the delivery label enterprise contains the opposite 11%.

The International Ecommerce phase is comprised of primarily three parts: (i) a digital tech enterprise that sells the know-how behind Pitney Bowes’ postage and delivery companies, giving shoppers the power to cut back transportation and logistics prices, choose the most effective service based mostly on want and value, enhance supply occasions and monitor packages in actual time; (ii) a worldwide cross-border options enterprise that handles the entire delivery and customs procedures of worldwide delivery for purchasers like eBay; and (iii) a home parcel enterprise, which is a distinct segment e-commerce enterprise dealing with returns of things and a competitor towards corporations like FedEx and UPS. International Ecommerce contains 46% of Pitney Bowes’ income however misplaced $99 million of EBIT in 2021.

The Presort Companies phase accounts for less than 16% of income however generated $79 million of EBIT in 2021. This enterprise makes its cash from submit workplaces and simplifies the sorting course of for them. Pitney Bowes will choose up mail from companies in particular zip codes, kind the mail by zip code and get it to submit workplaces.

Backside line, the corporate has too many companies and must simplify. The digital know-how and Presort companies are synergistic with Pitney Bowes’ core enterprise as one offers it with the know-how to function and the opposite shares lots of the identical clients and provides them the power to cross-sell. This implies divesting the cross-border options enterprise and the home parcel enterprise. Neither is displaying satisfactory ranges of development or revenue. The previous has single buyer focus danger as eBay is by far its largest buyer, and the latter is competing with a lot bigger corporations like FedEx and UPS. Simply closing these two companies could be accretive to shareholders, and they need to be capable to get some cash for them from a strategic acquirer. However the greater profit could be administration give attention to its core enterprise and the power to extra appropriately incentivize administration. Administration can give attention to utilizing the money from the secularly declining postage meter enterprise to put money into the rising delivery label enterprise. The SendTech and Presort segments alone might be value $6 to $9 per share with out the distractions and dilution of the opposite companies.

Ideally, Hestia would advocate for this plan from a board stage. The corporate has a nine-person, unstaggered board with a nomination deadline opening on Jan. 2, 2023. Hestia will probably want greater than only one board seat to drive change at Pitney Bowes. The corporate has been round for over a century, and a majority of the administrators have a ten+ yr board tenure. Marc Lautenbach shouldn’t be essentially the flawed CEO for this firm. He simply has misplaced focus together with his consideration being pulled in so many various instructions. A extra streamlined core enterprise with him as CEO might work very effectively. The corporate may gain advantage from a shareholder consultant with a robust enterprise technique acumen, and we might anticipate Hestia to incorporate Kurtis Wolf in its slate of nominees together with some skilled business executives. With the common proxy now in play, we’d anticipate Hestia to appoint as much as 4 administrators to present shareholders a bigger pool from which to pick.

Ken Squire is the founder and president of 13D Monitor, an institutional analysis service on shareholder activism, and he’s the founder and portfolio supervisor of the 13D Activist Fund, a mutual fund that invests in a portfolio of activist 13D investments. Squire can also be the creator of the AESG™ funding class, an activist funding model centered on bettering ESG practices of portfolio corporations.