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Great insights, highly informative! Thanks for sharing

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Thank you Tiago for sharing your analysis. I really enjoy reading your weekly updates!

This is an interesting pick and I'm now curious to research WU more. Curious to hear what's your take on the 2 billions of Goodwill on the Balance Sheet? That's half the current market cap, and 25% of their assets. WU seems to have made several acquisitions over the years, and it's hard in retrospect to find out how these played out.

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Apr 5, 2023·edited Apr 5, 2023Author

Hi Casper,

Ultimately I'm not accounting for it in my valuation because this isn't an asset play. I'm assigning a book value of 0 even in the bullish case, so it doesn't make sense to me to take goodwill as a negative.

Additionally their goodwill has been on a downtrend for over a decade now, and so its clear they are not going out and blowing a bunch of cash on new acquisitions well above book value.

This is purely a company whose "earnings power" is what drives my valuation, and as long as the company doesn't waste that earnings power I'm happy to own it with a zero'd out balance sheet.

Hope that explains my thinking on it!

Cheers

Tiago

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Apr 5, 2023Liked by Tiago Dias

Thank you Tiago for the quick reply. Sorry, I am quite new and still learning a lot. I now realise that's the NCAV $0 in your analysis. It makes total sense to ignore goodwill if you assign a $0 book value.

I like how easy to understand WU's business is. I also believe that WU brings a lot of social value by facilitating a service in need to many around the world. It's an element I like when buying into a business.

And even though there's lot of noise about how they are being disrupted, it seems the disruption is not really happening.

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