Terence Paré:
We have owned Mohawk (MHK, Financial) for a long time. But I feel better about the company today than I have in a very long time. There are a couple reasons for that. One, the company is practically a unique franchise. It is the only flooring company that has exposure across almost the entire globe and is in most of the important flooring markets in the world. Number two, its portfolio of brands covers just about every kind of flooring that there is. It will add sheet vinyl and luxury vinyl tile when it closes on the IVC acquisition, which it announced at the end of last year. So it will make every kind of floor covering, be in most important markets, and generally be the leader in just about every market that it is in. It is the largest ceramic tile manufacturer in the world, and ceramic tile is the largest floor covering in the world.
Somebody mentioned dividends earlier. Mohawk has never paid one. The reason the company has not paid one is that the management of the company, which I think is the best in the business, has found good things to do with the cash that it produces. Looking forward, right now Mohawk has room to grow around the world and it has room to grow in the US, not so much because the US is going to be a fast-growing market, but because the US still really has not normalized in its remodeling spending and in construction. So there is growth in the US. Mohawk has growth potential in Russia. It has growth potential in Mexico, and in different areas of Latin America. So it has a fairly long runway in front of it.
And there is M&A potential still. Even though it is the largest floorcovering company in the world, it is only $8 billion in sales. So there are things to buy. The company will be closing shortly on an acquisition in Bulgaria, a company called KAI Group. The terrific thing about that is that there are lots of little ceramic tile companies in Eastern Europe that would benefit from the modern management and modern manufacturing that Mohawk can bring to them. And there are a lot of floors that need to be remodeled and a lot of domiciles that need to be built. Something like two-thirds of the housing in Russia, for instance, needs to be remodeled because under the Soviet administration, nobody owned their houses. So nobody took care of them, and they did not have the money anyway. As a result, those homes are in a very serious state of disrepair. And Russia is not the only country like that.
A natural question would be — now Mohawk is in Russia, who knows what is going to happen there? What about all the currency issues that they face? Those are certainly real concerns. The company does not try to hedge the dollar against the ruble, but it does manufacture in-country a significant amount of what it sells in Russia. So although there is a lot of economic turmoil, Mohawk has a cost advantage over some other European flooring manufacturers who are competing against it in Russia.
In addition to having the advantage of a partial hedge, Mohawk has natural expansion potential because the company has a variety of methods of distribution. Mohawk has a chain of stores in Russia that it got when it acquired Marazzi last year. Part of it is franchised, but part of it Marazzi owns. It is run mainly by Russians. They have been there for ten years. The accounting can be believed. The company has been careful about that. So the business can grow both by expanding its market share through distributors, but also by expanding its retail network. There are many reasons to feel good about the future growth of the company, and it is inherently a cash generative business.
From Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb Investor Day 2015 Transcript Part II - Sequoia Fund.
