Q3 2017 · IDX · Nov 2, 2017

BFIN Is It Growing Faster Than It Can Fund Itself?

Nine-month net income grew 52.1% and new financing disbursed jumped 33.7% YoY, but operating cash flow swung to an even deeper -Rp1.24 trillion than the first half's shortfall - and inside four months the company fully drew a USD100 million syndicated loan, then agreed to enlarge it to USD125 million, then started issuing a third bond tranche for the same growth spurt.

The Funding Treadmill Speeds Up

Six weeks ago, this backlog covered a company whose first-half growth had swung operating cash flow more than Rp1.2 trillion negative in twelve months, funded by a fresh USD100 million syndicated loan that was, at the time, only 15% drawn. Nine months in, that cushion is gone: net income grew 52.1% year-over-year to Rp842,064M, new financing disbursed grew 33.7% to Rp10,250,634M - and operating cash flow swung to -Rp1,241,164M, a wider gap than the first half's -Rp1,124,628M, from +Rp242,483M a year earlier. The mechanical story hasn't changed: cash disbursed for new financing (Rp10,250,634M) is growing faster than cash collected from the existing book (Rp10,939,771M, up only 14.3% YoY), so the faster the company writes new business, the more cash it burns doing it.

What's new this quarter is how many different doors the company had to knock on to cover that gap in such a short window. The USD100 million syndicated facility signed on 12 June 2017 - barely drawn as of the last post - stood fully drawn at USD100,000,000 (Rp1,349,200M) by 30 September 2017. Then, on 6 October 2017 - six days after the quarter closed - the company signed a Syndication and Amendment Agreement to enlarge that same facility to USD125,000,000, before it had even been on the books three full months. And as of the date this quarter's financial statements were issued, the company was mid-process on issuing a third 2017 bond tranche ("Obligasi Berkelanjutan III Tahap III") for Rp835,000M, targeting a mid-November listing - on top of the Rp1 trillion Tahap II tranche it had already issued in the nine months just reported. Three separate financing actions, inside roughly four months, to fund one growth spurt (see Beyond the Usual). Growth this fast needs funding this diversified - but it also raises the question of whether funding is being planned a quarter ahead or arranged just in time. Separately, and disclosed only as a subsequent event, the company also took its first step into sharia-compliant financing this quarter (see Beyond the Usual) - a genuine new business line worth watching alongside the funding story above.

The Prescription

Keep the funding diversification going - a secured syndicated facility priced against the company's own receivables, cross-currency-swapped back to Rupiah risk, plus a domestic bond program with staggered maturities, is exactly the funding mix a company growing bookings this fast should be building, and it's cheaper and more resilient than leaning harder on the off-balance-sheet joint-financing arrangements the company keeps shrinking (down to Rp484,088M net, from Rp1,260,617M at year-end - see Beyond the Usual).

What it should stop doing: raising financing reactively, quarter to quarter, rather than sizing a facility once for the growth it can already see coming. Fully drawing a USD100 million facility and then amending it upward to USD125 million within the same reporting cycle - while simultaneously placing a third bond tranche - is what a company does when it keeps slightly underestimating its own funding needs, not what a company does when it has planned two years of growth-funding in advance. The individual facilities are sound; the cadence of arranging them one crisis-adjacent quarter at a time isn't.

Key Financial Metrics

Nine months ended September 30, 2017 vs. nine months ended September 30, 2016

FX: Rp13,492 = USD 1 (30 September 2017, per the company's own financial statements, the Bank Indonesia mid rate used for translation). Both periods are converted at this same rate for comparability; it is not a historical rate for the 2016 column.

Metric 9M2017 (IDR) 9M2017 (USD) 9M2016 (IDR) YoY
Total Income ("Net Revenue" equivalent) Rp2,919,900M ~$216.4M Rp2,359,579M ✅ +23.8%
Profit Before Income Tax ("Operating Income" equivalent) Rp1,055,121M ~$78.2M Rp718,725M ✅ +46.8%
Net Income Rp842,064M ~$62.4M Rp553,697M ✅ +52.1%
Total Cash and Cash Equivalents Rp145,746M ~$10.8M Rp175,002M ⚠️ -16.7%, drawn down to help fund financing activity

Profit before tax remains the closest real operating-income equivalent. No investor presentation or transcript has been located for this quarter (unlike the last five posts in this backlog) - the cost-of-funds and cost-to-income figures the company usually discloses in its own deck aren't available this time, so this post relies entirely on the filed financial statements themselves.

Balance sheet metric Sep 2017 (IDR) Sep 2017 (USD) Dec 2016 (IDR) Change
Total Assets Rp15,326,118M ~$1,135.9M Rp12,476,256M ✅ +22.8%
Net Investments in Finance Lease Rp8,728,645M ~$646.8M Rp7,121,175M ✅ +22.6%
Consumer Financing Receivables (net) Rp5,627,116M ~$417.0M Rp4,462,184M ✅ +26.1%
Total Liabilities Rp10,435,887M ~$773.4M Rp8,221,572M ⚠️ +26.9%
Fund Borrowings (net) Rp6,361,619M ~$471.5M Rp4,690,939M ⚠️ +35.6%, syndicated loan fully drawn plus new bank facilities
Securities Issued (bonds + MTNs, net) Rp3,392,003M ~$251.4M Rp2,965,295M ⚠️ +14.4%, new Rp1 trillion bond tranche drawn this period
Total Equity Rp4,890,231M ~$362.5M Rp4,254,684M ✅ +14.9%

A nine-month interim isn't directly comparable to the full fiscal year in the year-end 2016 post, and, as noted in every post in this backlog, vehicle and equipment financing demand here tracks Indonesia's broader economic cycle rather than any pattern within the calendar year - there's no structural seasonality distorting this quarter's read.

Key Operational Metrics

  • Net investment mix: finance lease is 60.8% of the combined finance lease + consumer financing net book, essentially flat with June's 61.1% - the second straight quarter the multi-year march toward finance lease hasn't advanced further, even as the segment itself keeps growing faster in absolute terms (see Two Segments, One Balance Sheet).
  • Receivables overdue more than 90 days (calculated from the filed statement's own overdue-day disclosure, the same convention used every quarter in this backlog): finance lease 0.74% of gross investment (Rp80,716M of Rp10,840,164M), essentially unchanged from June's 0.75% - the first quarter in over a year this ratio hasn't risen. Consumer financing kept climbing: 1.10% (Rp85,840M of Rp7,794,599M), up from June's 1.05% and December's 0.90% - a third consecutive quarter of deterioration in this segment specifically (see Beyond the Usual).
  • Debt-to-Equity Ratio (DER)»: ~1.99x on a gross basis (fund borrowings plus securities issued, both net of unamortized costs, against equity), a slight improvement from June's ~2.08x - equity grew faster than debt this quarter on retained earnings alone, even as the absolute debt stack kept climbing. No company-disclosed gearing ratio is available this quarter without a presentation to cross-check against.
  • Branch network: 321 outlets (211 branches, 110 kiosks) as of September 2017, up from 316 in June 2017 - modest, incremental expansion rather than a step change.
  • Headcount: 9,662 employees (5,789 permanent, 3,873 non-permanent), up 8.1% from 8,941 in December and a smaller 1.2% from June's 9,545.
  • Geographic mix: 52.4% of the period's revenue came from Java, with Sumatera (18.6%) and Sulawesi (17.0%) next and Kalimantan at 10.8% - essentially unchanged from every prior post in this backlog.
  • Earnings per share: Rp56 basic and diluted, up 55.6% from Rp36 (restated for the May 2017 stock split) - again growing faster than net income (+52.1%) since the treasury-adjusted share count stayed flat at 14,964,383,620 shares.
  • Return on average assets/equity: not disclosed by the company this quarter (no presentation located). A rough annualized estimate using average balance-sheet assets/equity and 9M net income annualized - not the company's own reported figure, and not directly comparable to the ROAA/ROAE the company discloses in its decks - works out to roughly 8.1% ROAA and 24.6% ROAE, broadly in line with H1's disclosed 9.84%/23.62% once annualization differences are accounted for.
  • Not available this quarter: no investor presentation or earnings-call transcript has been located, unlike every one of the last five posts in this backlog - see the note under Key Financial Metrics.

Two Segments, One Balance Sheet

The segment structure hasn't changed - finance lease and consumer financing, plus the residual "others" category for unallocated finance income and corporate items.

Finance lease - segment income of Rp1,674,447M for the nine months, up 37.0% year-over-year, on segment assets of Rp8,768,190M (up 33.0% YoY). This remains the segment carrying the business's growth, at a pace essentially unchanged from H1's 38.2%.

Consumer financing - segment income of Rp1,217,645M, up 9.2% year-over-year on segment assets of Rp5,552,804M (up 29.8% YoY). This growth rate has more than doubled from H1's 3.8%, the second straight quarter this segment's income has grown rather than shrunk, and the strongest reading yet for whether last quarter's stabilization was real.

Comparing the two: finance lease still grows roughly four times faster than consumer financing on the income line and keeps the larger share of both revenue and the balance sheet, but the gap between them is narrowing rather than widening for the first time in this backlog. That's a genuinely different signal from every prior post here, where finance lease was consistently pulling away. It's one quarter of acceleration in a smaller comparison book, though - not yet enough to call a reversal of the multi-year mix shift, especially with the net-investment mix itself barely moving (60.8% versus June's 61.1%, see Key Operational Metrics).

Beyond the Usual

A funding cushion signed one quarter ago was fully drawn, then enlarged, within the same reporting cycle

The USD100 million secured syndicated term loan signed 12 June 2017 with Standard Chartered Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ as mandated lead arrangers - only USD15 million drawn as of the last post - stood fully drawn at USD100,000,000 (Rp1,349,200M) as of 30 September 2017. Then, on 6 October 2017, the company signed a Syndication and Amendment Agreement to increase the same facility's limit to USD125,000,000 - before the original facility had even completed one full quarter fully drawn. A facility this large going from barely-touched to fully-drawn-and-being-enlarged inside roughly three and a half months isn't itself alarming for a company growing bookings 33.7% - but it's a faster drawdown-and-upsize cycle than the "sizable funding cushion" framing of the last post suggested, and worth tracking whether the pattern repeats with the next facility.

A third bond tranche was already in progress before this quarter's numbers were even filed

Beyond the syndicated loan, the company issued a second 2017 bond tranche this period - "Obligasi Berkelanjutan III BFI Finance Indonesia Tahap II Tahun 2017," Rp1,000,000M, the same Rp1 trillion raise flagged in the H1 post. As of the date this quarter's financial statements were issued, the company disclosed it was already mid-process on a third tranche - "Tahap III Tahun 2017," Rp835,000M - with a bond listing targeted for mid-November 2017. Combined with the syndicated-loan upsize above, that's three distinct new-financing actions (fully drawing and enlarging the syndicated facility, plus issuing a third bond tranche) inside a single quarter and the weeks immediately after it. Each facility on its own is a reasonable, diversified way to fund growth; the frequency with which new ones are being arranged is the thing actually worth watching next quarter.

Impairment provisioning grew a fraction of the pace of the loan book, even as one segment's bad debt kept climbing

Provision for impairment losses across both segments totaled Rp232,019M for the nine months, up just 4.5% year-over-year (Rp222,072M in 9M2016) - even as gross finance lease investment grew 23.1% and gross consumer financing receivables grew 8.2%, and even as the consumer financing segment's own overdue-90-day ratio rose for a third straight quarter (0.90% in December, 1.05% in June, 1.10% now - see Key Operational Metrics). This isn't necessarily wrong - collective provisioning models can reasonably lag a slow-moving ratio change - but a provisioning expense growing at roughly a fifth the pace of the receivables it's meant to cover, in the one segment whose credit quality keeps deteriorating, is worth checking again next quarter rather than assuming it's a coincidence of the collective-assessment method.

Off-balance-sheet joint-financing and channeling commitments fell by more than a third again this quarter

The company's disclosed "significant agreements and commitments" - joint financing and channeling arrangements with banks including Bank Mandiri, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, Maybank, and Bank Tabungan Pensiunan Nasional, kept off the balance sheet under these cooperation agreements - fell to a net Rp484,088M as of 30 September 2017, down 33.2% from June's Rp724,426M and 61.6% from year-end 2016's Rp1,260,617M. This continues the trend flagged last quarter in the opposite direction from the usual "hidden leverage" concern in this playbook: the company keeps bringing financing onto its own books rather than parceling it out through bank cooperation arrangements, funding that growth instead through the on-balance-sheet debt stack described above.

The working-capital loan from PT United Tractors Tbk, redrawn to a new high of Rp317,942M as of June 2017 after its ceiling was tripled to Rp800,000M in March, now stands at Rp392,042M - a fourth consecutive quarter of growth in this backlog, and now just under half of the facility's Rp800,000M capacity. The facility remains secured by the company's own finance lease and consumer financing receivables, funds heavy-equipment financing for the company's customers, and is structured as 12 quarterly installments - the repay-then-redraw pattern flagged across the last three posts has simply continued into a fourth, with no sign yet of the balance leveling off.

The company is entering sharia-compliant financing for the first time in this backlog

On 25 October 2017 - after this quarter's balance-sheet date but disclosed as a subsequent event - the company held an Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders that approved amending its Articles of Association to add financing activities based on sharia principles, adding a new article establishing a Sharia Supervisory Board, and appointing two members to chair and staff it. This is the first mention of a sharia-compliant product line anywhere in this backlog, a genuine business-model expansion rather than a financing or credit-quality item, and worth watching in future posts for how large a share of new bookings it eventually represents.

Target Valuation Range

Market cap ~Rp8,380,055M (~$621.1M) at ~7.7x trailing P/E and ~1.7x P/B - still fairly valued and tilting cheap on a trailing-earnings basis; the share price barely moved this quarter while earnings kept compounding, cooling the multiple slightly from June's read, but the funding-stacking pattern above is the offsetting risk a pure multiples read doesn't capture.

Shares closed at Rp560 on 29 September 2017, up modestly from June's Rp520 close - both figures already on the post-May 2017 stock split basis with no further adjustment needed, since the split completed before this quarter began. Using 14,964,383,620 shares outstanding net of treasury stock (unchanged since June) and the Rp560 closing price:

Market cap buildup Q3 2017
Share price (period-end) Rp560
Shares outstanding 14,964,383,620
Market capitalization Rp8,380,055M (~$621.1M)
Book value (total equity) Rp4,890,231M
Peer-multiple sanity check Q2 2017 Q3 2017 Change
P/E ~7.9x ~7.7x (trailing-twelve-month) roughly flat to down
P/B ~1.7x ~1.7x flat

Both multiples are essentially flat to slightly lower than June's ~7.9x P/E and ~1.7x P/B - the share price rose only about 7.7% over the quarter while trailing earnings grew faster, meaning the stock didn't keep re-rating the way it did in the first half of 2017. A full multi-year DCF still isn't included here: six data points across roughly two years is more history than this backlog had at the last post, but a real multi-year lending-growth and cost-of-funds model still needs several more full fiscal years to anchor a terminal growth assumption with confidence, particularly with cost-of-funds data currently unavailable absent this quarter's presentation. The peer-multiple read above remains the honest valuation lens for now: a business growing net income above 50% a year, trading under 8x trailing earnings, still reads as reasonably priced - the real question for that price is whether the funding-stacking pattern in Beyond the Usual turns into a genuine liquidity or covenant concern before the next few quarters play out, not whether the growth itself is real.


PT BFI Finance Indonesia Tbk's unaudited financial statements as of and for the nine-month period ended 30 September 2017 (with comparative figures for 30 September 2016 and audited balances as of 31 December 2016, as reclassified).