By Brendan Coffey, Analyst and Editor of Cabot Green Investor
From Cabot Wealth Advisory, 9/10/09 Sign up for free Cabot Wealth Advisory e-newsletter
Few Americans have heard of Telvent (TLVT). It's a Spain-based information technology company that manages Green resources, like watersheds in Spain, the mass transit electric systems for Sao Paolo, Brazil, and automated toll collection on Chinese highways.
The company has been in its four business segments—transportation, energy, agriculture and environmental services—for over 20 years and has the benefit of consistently large and stable business as a result (it had 55% of 2010 expected sales locked up by December 2008).
Last year, it earned $1.41 a share earnings and sales of $1.45 billion. Yet it's also a growth story in the area of smart grids and smart meters.
Telvent just won a $150 million contract (it will share one-third to half of that with a partner) with Finland's largest utility to help install smart meters in 3.1 million customer homes and is working with Progress Energy Carolinas to implement smart grid technology to manage loads at peak demand hours. Presumably, that's a prelude to even more impressive wins.
At 27 a share, it's still priced at a reasonable 17 times trailing earnings in a segment of the energy industry—smart grids and grid efficiency—that is growing double-digits worldwide.
Editor's Note: The latest issue of Cabot Green Investor has two more high potential stocks (of a smart grid technology company and a brand name household product maker). Subscribe today and you'll have access to those two picks immediately, as well as the full analysis of Telvent.
Brendan Coffey
Analyst and Editor of Cabot Green Investor Brendan Coffey is a member of the Cabot investment team and editor of
Cabot Green Investor. A veteran financial journalist, Brendan has spent more than a decade writing about investing for publications including Barron's, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and a number of private-client brokerage newsletters.