At €12.45 per share, the company is selling for around €161MM. Against that, you have €10.88/sh in cash, €15.10/sh of equity, €7.55/sh total liabilities, and roughly €1.50/sh of normalized free cash flow.

That is 8.5x FCF, 0.8x book, and roughly a 10% return on equity.

For a net-cash German automation business, that is interesting.

Aumann builds special-purpose machinery and automated production lines. Historically it has focused on electric mobility, meaning production systems for EV motors and related components.

More recently, management has been trying to diversify through “Next Automation,” targeting clean tech, aerospace, life sciences, and other industrial niches.

The reason the stock is cheap is that the EV capex cycle rolled over.

In 2025, revenue fell 34.7% to €204MM, order intake dropped to €147.5MM, and backlog ended the year at €122.2MM. Management guided 2026 revenue around €160MM with a 6%–8% EBITDA margin.

Maybe Aumann was just a temporary beneficiary of EV exuberance. Maybe customers keep delaying projects, the core E-mobility segment stays weak, and the business muddles along with cash but little real earnings power.

But there are a few things that make this more interesting than the typical cyclical cheap stock.

First, the balance sheet. Cash equals roughly 87% of the current market cap. Equity is around €195MM against total liabilities of €97.5MM.

Second, earnings are already in the trough and the business should remain cash flow positive. At the low end of 2026 guidance — €160MM of revenue and a 6% EBITDA margin — you get about €9.6MM of EBITDA. Assuming roughly two-thirds of that converts to free cash flow, Aumann could still produce around €6–7MM of FCF in a weak year. That’s not bad for a net-cash company near the bottom of the cycle.

Third, management has been buying stock. Shares outstanding were reduced 9% from 2024 to 2025.

And fourth, not everything is going backwards.

While the main EV business is soft, Next Automation is gaining traction. The segment is still too small to carry the whole company, but if management can keep diversifying away from pure EV exposure, it’d be reasonable to expect the market to apply a higher multiple to the valuation.

The bottom line is the upside case does not demand heroics.

You do not need Aumann to become some great compounder.

Management needs to continue behaving rationally with the cash (buybacks when the stock is cheap, discipline on acquisitions, and no setting money on fire chasing growth). And earnings need to recover at least modestly when industrial and automotive capex normalize.

If that happens, today’s valuation looks too low. A company trading below book, with cash covering most of the market cap, buying back shares, and generating free cash flow does not need a perfect cycle to work out.

But, if EV-related demand stays depressed for years, Next Automation fails to scale, and management spends all their cash on bad deals, then the stock may stay statistically cheap. Cheap cyclicals do that.

You are paying €12.45/sh for a business with €11/sh of cash, €15/sh of book value, and positive free cash flow through the cycle. Expectations are already low. The balance sheet provides plenty of runway. And the buyback shows that management understands the stock is cheap.

That is usually a better place to start than a leveraged company trading at 4x peak cycle earnings and calling it value.

DISCLAIMER: Global Value AI LLC is not a registered investment advisor, broker-dealer, or financial planner. Nothing published here constitutes investment advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All content is for informational and educational purposes only. We may hold positions in securities discussed. Do your own research. You are solely responsible for your own investment decisions and any gains or losses that result from them.

FactSet Research Systems (FDS) is the opposite of a cigar butt. It’s a sticky financial data and workflow platform used by institutions around the world.

The business has 95%+ ASV retention (a run-rate measure of annual subscription revenue already under contract), 91% client retention, 30%+ operating margins, and should generate around $18/sh free cash flow this year.

That’s less than 13x FCF for a business with almost no tangible assets and minimal capital requirements.

FactSet sells data, analytics, and workflow tools to asset managers, banks, wealth managers, hedge funds, private market firms, and other capital-markets participants.

These firms use FactSet inside research, portfolio monitoring, reporting, trading, and client workflows. Large institutions aren’t going to casually rip out deeply embedded infrastructure and replace it with a chatbot. FactSet has 9,101 clients, 241,352 users, and a weighted average client relationship length of 16+ years.

You’re paying around 13x for a business that retains more than 95% of its annual subscription value, serves 95 of the top 100 global asset managers and about 75% of the top 50 global investment banks, and still grew Organic ASV 6.7% year over year last quarter. In the face of AI concerns, the company exceeded expectations and raised guidance for the year. Odd for a business supposedly on the verge of obsolescence.

But that’s why it’s cheap.

Investors are worried AI will make parts of the financial data stack more commodity-like. If AI lowers the cost of search, synthesis, and basic workflow tasks, maybe platforms like FactSet lose pricing power.

It’s not completely crazy. FactSet competes with Bloomberg, LSEG, S&P Global Market Intelligence, MSCI, Morningstar, and BlackRock Aladdin. It’s a competitive field.

But professional investors are not buying FactSet for one chatbot answer. They are paying for clean and normalized datasets, workflow integration, reporting, analytics, and reliability across large organizations. If a retail investor wants to ask AI for a quick comp sheet, fine. A global asset manager running money across teams, mandates, and reporting systems has a different problem.

That’s why retention matters so much here. If the product were turning into a commodity in real time, you’d expect to see it show up in the numbers first. So far, the numbers still look solid: 95%+ ASV retention, 91% client retention, users up 10%, clients up 5%, and strongest growth coming from Wealth and Market Infrastructure.

The business generates a lot of cash and capex is less than 5% of revenue. It’s not a capital-intensive business and requires almost no physical assets to grow.

The balance sheet is strong with debt of $1.4B, cash around $250MM, and an untapped $1B revolver. Free cash flow will approach $700MM this year with majority of it going to dividends, repurchases and bolt-on acquisitions like LiquidityBook and Irwin.

The bear case is obvious. If AI pressure turns out to be real, Organic ASV growth could slow, retention could weaken, and margins could compress. In that scenario, the market may keep the stock around 12x–13x earnings and you’re probably looking at something like a $180–$200 stock price.

But if retention holds and Wealth and enterprise data keep growing, then today’s price is too low for a business of this quality.

That’s what makes the setup interesting.

FactSet doesn’t have to be bulletproof. Maybe AI takes a bigger bite than I expect.

But at this price, a lot of bad news already seems to be priced in the stock.

DISCLAIMER: Global Value AI LLC is not a registered investment advisor, broker-dealer, or financial planner. Nothing published here constitutes investment advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All content is for informational and educational purposes only. We may hold positions in securities discussed. Do your own research. You are solely responsible for your own investment decisions and any gains or losses that result from them.

Yaron Gazit — Chairman of the Board — owns 40.5% of the company. After accounting for other insider ownership, only ~21% of the float is free. That’s around $24M. Not something many hedge funds are going to look at.

The business earned ₪59M attributable to common shareholders on ₪77.8M of equity in FY2025. Pay 4.6x book for a business earning 76% ROE, and you're getting a 16.5% earnings yield.

Here’s the problem.

The contract with JTI — which represents roughly 45% of Globrands’ net revenue — expires in February 2027. Globrands disclosed that JTI is simultaneously negotiating with several other parties interested in distributing JTI products in Israel.

The contractual history with JTI is worth understanding in detail, because it explains both the current situation and the range of outcomes.

In December 2018, after Globrands’ IPO exposed its profitability, JTI demanded a renegotiation that would reduce Globrands’ profit on JTI products by 33% cumulatively by 2024 — imposed at 4% annually in 2019–2020 and 9% annually from 2021 through the contract’s end.

In that same month, Globrands disclosed it had reached agreement with JTI to extend the relationship by six years from February 2021 to February 2027. In February 2020, the companies formally signed the extension. In that same filing, JTI explicitly told Globrands that removing an older clause did not indicate any plan by JTI to self-distribute in Israel or appoint another distributor.

On February 2, 2026, Globrands disclosed that it is in negotiations with JTI over contract renewal. The filing states that to the best of Globrands’ knowledge, JTI is conducting similar negotiations with several other parties interested in distributing JTI products in Israel.

It warns that even if a new agreement is signed, Globrands’ annual profit rate on JTI products is expected to decline versus 2024 and 2025 levels. There is no certainty the agreement will be renewed at all.

The filing also confirms that the JTI margin cap — the ceiling on Globrands’ share of net revenues from JTI products — remains unchanged for 2025 and 2026, meaning the financial deterioration from any renegotiation begins only from February 2027.

Globrands has provided JTI with a ₪45M bank guarantee, up from the original ₪30M threshold, reflecting growth in order volumes.

That’s the reason the stock is at 6x earnings, down 50% from its high.

This is a binary outcome. If JTI renews, even at renegotiated terms — the stock is cheap. If JTI walks, there’s a ₪357M revolving credit facility used for working capital that would need to be renegotiated, but they have basically no long-term debt (₪4M).

We should know in the next 6–12 months.

Odds are JTI signs a new contract with Globrands but on worse terms. At 6x earnings, worse terms are priced in.

DISCLAIMER: Global Value AI LLC is not a registered investment advisor, broker-dealer, or financial planner. Nothing published here constitutes investment advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All content is for informational and educational purposes only. We may hold positions in securities discussed. Do your own research. You are solely responsible for your own investment decisions and any gains or losses that result from them.