In this segment of "Industry Focus" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on Dec. 15, Fool Tech Host Dylan Lewis and Analyst Yasser El-Shimy take a look at how well BICO (BICO +3.86%) has continued to perform despite making acquisitions that have diluted its stock.
Dylan Lewis: As we start to talk about the financials, some of the key business metrics. You mentioned earlier that it's a highly acquisitive company.
Yasser El-Shimy: I'm sorry.
Lewis: I think we need to talk about what that means for the company's finances and really what people should be paying attention to you when they're looking at this business.
El-Shimy: Similar to any company that does a lot of acquisitions, you really got to pay attention to how well these acquisitions are integrated into the mother company. Do they add value? Do they dilute shareholders? I'm just going to go ahead and make it very clear to our listeners and our viewers here that BICO has in fact doubled the share count over the past five years.
That has effectively diluted early shareholders. But early shareholders are still sitting on very stratospheric gains on the last, I think over 2,500% of gains since the IPO. They're not too upset about that, but they have doubled the share count.
Every time they acquire a company, they mostly use equity issuance as a tool to acquire these companies. The other thing to watch out for is the differentiation between what we see as top-line revenue growth as opposed to organic growth or organic revenue growth.
What do we mean by organic growth? It means the old companies that form the backbone of what BICO is. How well are they doing, how well are they growing compared to just the sales numbers being potentially artificially inflated by all the new companies that they've been acquiring? On that front, I think they've been doing well.
Lewis: I think one of the easy ways to think about it if you're not used to looking at highly acquisitive companies is think about the restaurant industry.
You can grow by having your existing stores sell more in the form of comps, or you can grow your revenue by opening new stores. Ideally, you see both of those things moving in the same direction, but you can inflate your top line if you're opening a lot of new stores, even if your existing stores are underperforming.
With a highly acquisitive company, especially one that has diluted shareholders along the way, you want to make sure that both of those numbers are moving up and to the right, because otherwise that dilution maybe isn't worth it for shareholders.
