By Benen Ling
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"Specific Stocks"
"StoneMor (STON)"
"It's primarily a cemetery company, with an 80/20 split of cemeteries and funeral homes. It's the only stock with a major cemetery focus. Revenues have generally declined over last five years, as you would expect, while the company has tried to mask this with a series of acquisitions. It has only acquired an average of five cemeteries per year over the last 3 years, but it used to be much more active in rolling-up cemeteries and as such as a debt load reflecting that.
The debt load has gotten so onerous that earlier this year StoneMor breached debt covenants. Lenders have waived the breach for now, and are currently negotiating refinancing, but that may merely be delaying the inevitable. Free cash flow is weak, with most of the firm's cash flow going to interest payments. To make matter worse, the acquisitions that StoneMor spent so much on in the first place are underperforming. It hasn't made a profit in eight years and is pretty much a classic case of an over-acquisitive firm that's now overexposed to debt and drowning in interest payments. Some have taken the fact that Axar Capital (the largest equity owner) has injected a $35 million loan into the company as proof that StoneMor is capable of pulling off a turnaround. I would caution against that line of thought. Axar Capital is injecting cash into StoneMor because it is their largest equity holding, per their Form 13-F. I firmly believe that Axar is throwing good money after bad here.
Despite the serious decline in the stock, StoneMor could be going to zero. In late 2018, a Bloomberg story broke about StoneMor burying prepaid customers' graves before they died because doing so would allow the company to tap customers' pre-need trust accounts. Basically, they buried empty graves because it would allow the company to legally siphon off what its customers had paid in advance.
StoneMor is a classic short. It has weak free cash flow that's choked by debt, has had its reputation trashed by its own actions and is on the wrong side of the secular trend towards cremation in the funeral industry. Their bonds reflect this, with the 2021 bond yielding 14.3%. When looking for short sale candidates, experienced stock-pickers look for the most exposed, overleveraged candidates, and StoneMor certainly fits those characteristics."
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