Vivendi’s chairman Vincent Bollore is making significant changes at the French media conglomerate including raising the company’s stake in Telecom Italia. David Marcus, portfolio manager for the Evermore Global Value Fund, said Bollore’s leadership and asset redeployment is paying off for Vivendi shareholders. ‘They are taking the money that they received from selling a lot of assets and they’re redeploying some and they are giving some back to shareholders,’ said Marcus. ‘The stock looks like it’s not moving much but over the last three years, it’s actually doubled. We think it’s worth at least 50% more. They’ve gone from net debt of almost $6 billion, a couple years ago. They have close to $18 billion of net cash now.’ Shares of Vivendi are up nearly 4% year-to-date, while the Evermore Global Value Fund has jumped 10.5% thus far in 2015. Vivendi is the biggest holding in Marcus’ fund, but he is also bullish on another European name, ING Bank. The Dutch bank has seen its shares rise more than 30% so far this year in the wake of its spin-off of its American arm which is now called Voya. ‘It’s a boring bank with an investment banking arm, but it turns out that boring banks make a lot of money,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s very low interest rate environment. ING has figured out how to actually make money. So if rates move up, which a lot of people do expect to happen, they’ll actually make more money. So they are very well-positioned.’
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