8.5x FCF, 0.8x BV, Cash Covers Most of the Market Cap
Aumann AG (AAG.DE) is cheap.
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.
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