After its Record U.S. IPO, Visa's Shares Post Double-Digit Gains for Second-Straight Day

By William Patalon III
Executive Editor
Money Morning/The Money Map Report

Just one day after its debut from a record-setting initial public stock offering, demand for newly public Visa Inc. (V) was still so strong that the deal underwriters yesterday spent $1.79 billion to purchase another 40.6 million shares, the operator of the world's biggest electronic-payments networks announced.

Visa shares soared 28.4% in their IPO debut Wednesday as investors bet that the company's dominant market position and the growing shift into electronic payments will translate into consistently escalating profits.

The shares jumped another 13.89% yesterday to close at $64.35, up $7.85 each.

One IPO expert says the stock is easily worth $80 a share.

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"I think fair value rests near $80 in the intermediate term. Morningstar thinks $74 is the magic number," says Basenese, editor of The Hot IPO Alert and The Takeover Trader investment newsletters. "Either way, the current price means the stock's undervalued and represents a solid double-digit opportunity, a rarity in this volatile market."

After Visa's 406 million shares were priced Tuesday at $44 each - well above the expected price range of $37 to $42 a share - the proceeds of $17.86 billion were already a U.S. record, leapfrogging the $10.6 billion stock offering for AT&T Wireless in April 2000.

Now that the underwriters have exercised their over-allotment rights, the gross proceeds from the IPO jumped to $19.65 billion – making it one of the top global IPOs in history. Only one deal was larger: The October 2006 IPO of the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, or ICBC, which raised $19.1 billion - or nearly $22 billion when the over-allotment provisions were fulfilled.

Excluding fees and commissions, Visa and its bank owners raised $19.1 billion.

Visa's shares opened at $59.50 on the New York Stock Exchange (NYX), and traded as high as $65, before closing Wednesday at $56.50, up $12.50 a share, or 28.41%. The run-up gives the San Francisco-based company a market value of nearly $50 billion.

A Unique Allure

It's Visa's unique position that makes it such an alluring investment, says Basenese, the newsletter editor. In fact, the Visa deal is one of the better IPOs to come down the pike in some time. For one thing, the company is the market leader, dwarfing its rivals in terms of both transaction volume and total transactions [See accompanying chart], he says.

Chart 1: Visa the Giant

As the largest processor of retail payments the world, Visa Inc. dwarfs its rivals. It accounts for 60% of the debit-card transactions in the U.S. market - a four-to-one advantage over rival MasterCard. As the chart demonstrates, it is also bigger by total transactions and total volume.

Sources: The Hot IPO Trader, Money Morning.

Visa is an electronic payments network that focuses on retail transactions. It actually acts as a facilitator of global commerce, enabling money and information to move among banks, retailers, consumers, businesses and even government entities.

There are three basic points investors need to understand - especially with the chaotic credit markets investors now face, Basenese says:

  • Visa is not a credit-card issuer.
  • It's not a lender.
  • And it's not exposed to consumer-credit risk.

The bottom line: Visa is simply a transaction-processing company that collects a fee based on the number and dollar value of the transactions that it processes, he said. In short, this is a financial-services company whose shares investors can snap up with confidence and a feeling of safety, since there aren't any worries that another credit-crunch-related catastrophe could obliterate its business and send its shares into the ground.

"Visa enjoys one of the widest economic moats that a company can desire," Morningstar analyst Michael Kon wrote in a Wednesday research note.

A Changing World

Investors have been eager to grab shares in Visa's offering as shares of the much-smaller rival MasterCard Inc. (MA) have more than quadrupled in value since the company went public in May 2006. MasterCard shares have largely been untouched by the stock-market turmoil generated by the ongoing credit crisis and closed yesterday at $220.38, up $11.99 a share, or 5.75%. They are down 3% from their 12-month high of $227.18.

The fervor reflects investors' view that Visa is in a lucrative position as consumers and businesses alike rely increasingly on its electronic network to make payments instead of using cash and checks. Visa is expected to milk the phenomenon to become an even bigger cash cow than it already is.

Visa generated $5.2 billion in revenue last year as it handled more than 44 billion transactions totaling more than $3.2 trillion. The volume puts Visa far ahead of its main rival MasterCard, whose own shares are up nearly six-fold from their May 2006 IPO price of $39, according to a Forbes.com report.

Making Visa even more alluring to investors: The firm is very well insulated from the credit issues that have scorched the very banks that issue Visa-brand credit cards. The banks - not Visa - carry the consumer debt on their books. Visa generates revenue and profit from transaction fees, which have been advancing steadily for years. In fact, those fees even increased during the last two U.S. downturns - 1991 and 2001.

Indeed, since the last recession, Visa has been able to get consumers to increasingly use its debit and credit cards for the purchase of such staples as gasoline and groceries, and to cover such household budgetary costs as utility bills. The upshot: Visa estimates that about 42% of its transactions fall into the "nondiscretionary" category, way up from the 27% recorded for 2000.

"We operate in a large global market undergoing a significant shift from cash and check to electronic payments, said Visa Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Joseph W. Saunders. "We believe Visa is well positioned to build upon our past success and take advantage of this migration to electronic payments."

Visa listed JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Banc of America Corp. (BAC), Citigroup Inc. (C), HSBC Securities (HBC), Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. (MER), UBS AG (UBS), and Wachovia Corp (WB) as joint book-running managers of the record U.S. stock offering.

[Editor's Note: Louis Basenese is the editor of The Hot IPO Alert and The Takeover Trader newsletters, and is a contributing writer to Money Morning. Basenese last wrote about how to profit from the takeover market. To learn more about The Oxford Club and its publications, please click here. Check out Money Morning's full investment research report on Visa's IPO].

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About the Author

Before he moved into the investment-research business in 2005, William (Bill) Patalon III spent 22 years as an award-winning financial reporter, columnist, and editor. Today he is the Executive Editor and Senior Research Analyst for Money Morning at Money Map Press.

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