NWQ Managers (Trades, Portfolio) slashed its stake in Marten Transport Ltd. (MRTN, Financial) by more than 50% in the first quarter.
Marten Transport was originally founded in 1946 by 17-year-old Roger Marten who began operations with a $400 loan from his mother in order to purchase his first truck. Marten Transport is a temperature-sensitive truckload carrier. It transports and distributes food and other consumer packaged goods that require a temperature-controlled or insulated environment. Today, the company has locations throughout North America with 15 operation centers and more than 3,670 employees and contractors.
Marten Transport has a market cap of $582.7 million, a P/E ratio of 16.98, an enterprise value of $620.12 million, a P/B ratio of 1.48 and a dividend yield of 0.55.
NWQ Managers (Trades, Portfolio) is led by a senior investment team with an average of 19 years of analytical experience. NWQ’s investment team uses a fundamental, bottom-up approach when making investments that primarily focus on the long term. In May 2002 NWQ was purchased by Nuveen Investments; however, it has kept its name and remains as a sister company to Nuveen.
Marten Transport is also traded in Germany.
It is likely that NWQ reduced its shares of Marten Transport to reduce the variance with this holding. Marten Transport has a mediocre financial strength rating of 6/10 according to GuruFocus with a 0.01 cash-to-debt ratio ranking it below 98% of the 813 companies in the Global Trucking industry.
Marten Transport faces tremendous competition within its industry, and its No. 1 client is Walmart (WMT, Financial). If Marten loses Walmart as its top customer in the future, its market value and revenues could drastically decline. This could also have been a reason why NWQ decided to reduce its stake in Marten Transport.
Below is a Peter Lynch chart for Marten Transport.
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