NoHo Partners - Capital allocator in the restaurant industry

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Greetings! :waving_hand:

There has been some discussion here in recent days regarding matters related to invoices.

The NoHo Partners Group receives over 20,000 invoices per month from several thousand different goods and service providers. When talking about such volumes, it is possible that unfortunate processing delays may occur with invoices. We have agreed payment terms and processes in place to ensure invoices can be reviewed, approved, and paid within the agreed payment terms. Occasionally, we have to make complaints to suppliers regarding the content or format of invoices. It is of utmost importance that all suppliers adhere to the Group’s invoicing guidelines, required content information, and send invoices electronically as e-invoices, to ensure efficient and timely processing of invoices.

Occasionally, some disputed invoices may be turned into bills of exchange by the counterparty, even if the dispute is ongoing. The cases raised on the forum do not reflect the Group’s financial situation.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

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Referring to Sanna’s post - Noho certainly still has many small goods and service suppliers, and in my experience, these might have challenges following the invoicing instructions of large corporations, which can be quite specific. I am therefore not at all surprised that from such a mass, goods sometimes end up as a bill of exchange (tratta) simply because, for example, the purchase order/other invoicing information at Noho and the supplier’s understanding of that purchase order/invoicing information have not aligned.

Of course, one would prefer to see a bit more cash, but my gut feeling regarding Noho is that these accumulate more for Noho than for many other companies. As there are a tremendous number of companies under its umbrella.

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NoHo has promised the expansion of new Hook restaurants to new localities. The latest opening was in Kuopio (paywall):

The opening night was at least lively: “The 110-seat restaurant filled to the last spot as KalPa’s away game approached.”

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Friends & Brgrs continues its growth. A restaurant is opening in Ideapark, Lempäälä, at the end of February:

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Restaurant spending quite stable in recent Nordea card data:

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Does anyone have access to that Nordic Card Data, or was its publication stopped? On the public pages, the publication of information ended last autumn. Mainly Norway and Denmark would be of interest.

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According to HS, there’s a buzz in Helsinki’s restaurants. This can be seen as a sign of a shift in consumer behavior.

Christmas parties in restaurants | HS.fi

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I haven’t followed Noho much, but I noticed a low P/E ratio and assumed there was a catch. This seems to be BBS’s accounting-related €20M net income boosting “dog burger”. Inderes shows an adjusted P/E ratio and a normal P/E ratio. I wonder why this hasn’t been adjusted out of the results to give a better picture of Noho. Why is there even an adjusted version if something like this isn’t adjusted? Apologies in advance if this matter has already been discussed, but I didn’t have time to read through the whole thread now.
@Arttu_Heikura or @Sauli_Vilen might be able to shed some light, but anyone else can also tell.

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This is indeed a positive earnings impact resulting from a change in the fair value of BBS, which increases 2025 earnings and lowers the P/E ratio. It has simply been left unadjusted. This will be corrected with the next update.

That write-up is 1.1 euros per share, and if it is adjusted from our EPS estimate of 1.53 euros (2025e), then we get a P/E ratio of approximately 18x.

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What about the P/E ratio when there is no fair value change included, but there is a NoHo share of the BBS result?

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NoHolle’s share of BBS’s profit is already included in that 18x.

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This company doesn’t like to pay its bills (paywall):

But management likes to sell shares:

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To be precise, Hanna-Stiina Niemi is close to the management and, to my understanding, not employed by NoHo; she sells her holdings quite regularly, so her interests seem to lie elsewhere. It remains to be seen whether the company will be forced to change its invoice payment practices due to public pressure. Of course, @Sanna_Sandvall gave a quite credible explanation above for why invoices are paid late.

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Yes, regarding the former, certainly so. Regarding the latter, the explanation is poor, and above all, it’s activity that damages the company’s brand when the issue ends up in major newspaper headlines.

@Jugi25 wrote earlier, among other things, “Reportedly, invoices are paid to small operators with 60-90 day payment terms,” and that is not only unpleasant behavior but also illegal activity unless specifically agreed upon. The blameworthiness is not removed by the fact that this is an everyday practice for many large companies, i.e., small businesses are used as their own bank.

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Hanna-Stiina has sold shares multiple times, likely to finance H5 Ravintolat Oy. Their daughter was a shareholder, and the brother was the main owner. The circle is small. Now finally the papers are catching on to NoHo’s style of exploiting small entrepreneurs. If only we could get the minority shareholders to tell about the treatment.

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There’s always something new at NoHo. The third and largest Holy Cow Taphouse opened in October. It has darts, table curling, live music stages, and screens for football.

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Sara Chafak found, or Sara found Noho, to fill Cheri’s empty space with an all-day buffet. The plan is also to have a disco on weekend evenings. Better this way than empty. :smiley:

The lunch food business was largely abandoned after the corona pandemic when the last Pihkat closed during the current year. It seems they didn’t ultimately pay off in the remote work world, even though “purchasing synergies extending to the group level were achievable from them.” Some smaller companies like Toothpicks & Honey / Soupster and Factory, which is also linked to Akuu, seem to be making some money on that side too. From ethnic buffet places, the benefits seem to go to the franchise concept holder / wholesaler (Luckiefun, Golden grop, Itsudemo/Spartao etcetc).

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OP Pohjola’s Analysts’ 8 Growth Company Picks from the Helsinki Stock Exchange – Strong Opportunities for Value Creation

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today at 2:21 PM ∙ Arvopaperi

OP Pohjola’s analysts present domestic company picks in their latest Small and Mid Cap Monitor report. The report covers companies under OP-Pohjola’s analysts’ coverage whose market capitalization is less than one billion euros.

According to the analysts, eight of these have strong value creation potential over the next 2-5 years. In the long term, the strongest companies, according to the analysts, are Bittium, Fodelia, Harvia, Kempower, LapWall, NoHo Partners, Qt Group, and Revenio.

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OP updated its “comprehensive report” today, likely from the investor service open to everyone. Feel free to delete if linking these isn’t allowed. Buy recommendation and €9.6 target price remain.

NoHoPartners_191225.pdf (2.9 MB)

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Is betting on NoHo’s nightclubs starting to look like a losing hand?

>The decline of nightclubs is a familiar phenomenon to Teemu Pilsari, the restaurant operations manager of the Armas nightclub in Lahti. According to him, bad years have followed one after another for a long time, and nightlife has still not picked up.
– This year’s pre-Christmas season has at least shown occasional good signs. The turnout has been commendable.

In Pilsari’s opinion, however, the pre-Christmas season remained a rather thin lifebuoy and it won’t yet turn the direction of the entire industry.

>Pilsari considers tightened alcohol taxation and the resulting price increases to be a significant factor in the loss of customers.
Ten euros for a pint of long drink is simply too much.
– We can’t go much deeper than this. However, I am optimistic that this will start to recover. We are working incredibly hard to get people back.

I’ve been in Helsinki city center a couple of times during this pre-Christmas season, and even at Apollo on a Friday, a large part of the nightclub was closed off right at the time when they should be “printing money” just to cover the massive rents of that complex.

Stadin Night, under which NoHo had combined those nightclubs in the 2023 acquisition, had posted hefty losses of a couple of million for 2024, and according to my own observations, this market hasn’t headed in a better direction this year either in the Helsinki metropolitan area, even though Rekom collapsed entirely.

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>NoHo Partners Plc has signed an agreement whereby the fixtures of Helsinki’s nightlife, Apollo Live Club, nightclub Maxine, and restaurant Kaivohuone, will be transferred to the ownership of the group’s subsidiary Stadin Night Oy in cooperation with investor Raimo Sarajärvi.

At the time of the deal, NoHo’s ownership stake in this new company was 60%, but I suspect it has increased since then due to possible additional capitalization.

As for Apollo, it’s useless to expect any exit specifically because of the renovation carried out in the fall, but making a profit seems to be difficult even though they practically have a monopoly on after-parties for large student events.

What would help here?
Economic growth would help, but even more so, an increase in consumer confidence and students having the confidence that there’s enough work and that they can live now, and not just sometime in the future.

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The trend is heading in a bad direction, and when you combine this with the fact that other costs have risen, the first thing on one’s mind isn’t to go “crazy clubbing” in a half-empty nightclub to drink a ten-euro pint of long drink when the same product can be ordered—to put it bluntly—at a quarter of the price directly to your door from abroad.

As for the pull of the labor market, even finding internship positions still seems to be like finding a needle in a haystack, and I still can’t be positive in any way that the macroeconomy will provide any kind of tailwind for this investment story next year either.

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