Dinakar Singh Likes Sprint, Orkla, & Zhongpin

Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital was at the Ira Sohn Conference yesterday, and gave three investment ideas to the hedge fund community yesterday. Singh mentioned Orkla, a Norwegian company. He believes the company, which is one of the best consumer staples company in the region is working to unlock shareholder value. Management had lost its way, started building everything, including solar energy. The company owns consumer staples, aluminum, and an investment company as well. The company is currently replacing 2 board members, and has already sold a non core business for several billion. Singh said he sees $65-$80 in upside in shares. Singh also mentioned ZHONGPIN INC. HOGS, saying he sees the potential for a return to double digit price to earnings ratio here. As the Chinese food industry consolidates and gets cleaned up, Singh believes ZHONGPIN will benefit. The last name Singh mentioned was Sprint S, which he believes has 40-70% upside from here. After Sprint merged with Nextel, the smartphone came out in abundance, and Nextel became a junk asset, instead of a core asset. Things are slowly starting to turn around, as operations, customer service and other metrics have been improving over the past couple of quarters. As Sprint continues to build its margins up by consolidating networks, and other efficiency measures, Singh believes that Sprint may get taken out by a company like CenturyTel CTL, which wants to get into the wireless industry. He also mentioned joint ventures, such as one with Lightsquared is likely to be beneficial to Sprint. The company is also likely to get the iPhone in the coming years, and could get divested assets from the AT&T T T-Mobile combo on the cheap. Singh thinks Sprint might be a double from here in two years.