It’s a story with a familiar ring to it. A successful Irish quoted company with a market-leading position – controlled by a patriarch from a Border county – watches its share price dwindle as investors flock to buy into the next big thing. Keen to get in on the action, the company decides to hive off part of the business and repackage it as something likely to appeal to investors transfixed by the new and novel. The impact on the share price is almost instantaneous, as is the collapse when the bubble bursts.
Neil McCann, the Louth-born chairman of Fyffes whose worldoffruit.com internet play imploded in 2001, died in 2011 but were he alive he might have some advice for Eugene Murtagh, the Cavan-born octogenarian who chairs building materials group Kingspan: if you are going to float off part of your business to cash in on the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, you better do it quick.
Fyffes shares were at a 12-month low when it was announced in December 1999 that it was going to establish a commercial fruit-trading website called worldoffruit.com to capitalise on the dotcom revolution and its promise of frictionless global ecommerce.
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The shares were up 64 per cent by the time the site was launched the following January as investors bought into the future of fruit trading as Fyffes saw it. By 2001 it was all over, both for investors and worldoffruit.com as the reality dawned that the new technology could not deliver on the hype. The internet was not big and fast enough and the computers were not good enough.
Kingspan’s shares – which have fallen by a third over the last four years – jumped 13.5 per cent when it announced two weeks ago that it plans to spin off its advanced building systems unit Advnsys, which is focusing on the global boom in data centre construction. It could to be worth €6 billion according to analysts. Kingspan plans to float an initial 25 per cent.
The rationale for the demerger, according to Gene Murtagh – chief executive officer and son of Eugene – is the valuation put by the market on engineering and construction firms that focus on data centres. It in turn reflects the massive investment being made by data centre operators and tech companies to meet the expected demand for AI-related services. According to the European Data Centre Association, €100 billion will be invested in the sector between 2023-2030. McKinsey, the management consultancy firm, puts the figure at €6 trillion globally.
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Firms focused on the sector are valued at 20 times earnings, according to Murtagh, while Kingspan proper is valued at 12 times earnings. When you consider that Advnsys, which is expected to account for a fifth of Kingspan’s revenues this year of $9.3 billion, could have a stock market value of almost half of its parents, it looks like a no-brainer
The rationale may be clear but so are the risks. As the adage goes: if something looks too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.
The possibility of an AI bubble bursting is a topic that provokes strong views and no clear answers. As the writer and investor Ruchir Sharma pointed out in the Financial Times this week, US tech companies and stock market investors are “all in” on AI, which is the main driver of growth in the US economy, accounting for a 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year.
AI evangelists tout it as a panacea for all the US economy’s ills, from declining productivity to the debt burden. We are definitely in too-big-to-fail territory, which should set off alarm bells in its own right.
You have to question all this blind optimism when you read, as reported in the Guardian also this week, that consultants Deloitte have had to give the Australian government a partial refund on a A$440,000 (€248,000) report because it contained errors as a consequence of using generative AI. These included references to reports by researchers at the University of Sydney and the University of Lund in Sweden that did not actually exist, according to the Australian Finance Review. It also contained a made-up reference to a court decision.
Everybody who has used an AI tool has their own experience of “hallucinations” and mistakes or just plain wrong information. For the moment we seem to be giving the whole idea of it beneficially permeating every aspect of human endeavor the benefit of the doubt, primarily because of the promises being made by boosters such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
But three years on from the launch of ChatGPT, AI has to start to match the hype or sentiment will change and with it the sky-high valuation being sought by Kingspan.
It might be a bit apocalyptic to predict the AI bubble bursting but a reset of expectations – and valuations – does seem on the cards. Hopefully the Murtaghs have factored this into their plan lest Advnsys turn out to be less no-brainer and more worldofcladding.com.
