Tuesday newspaper share tips: Just East, Mediclinic

Should investors in Just Eat follow its chief and finance director’s decision to bail-out of the better part of their stakes in the food-delivery chain?

On Monday, each of them discarded roughly 60% of their holdings, sending the stock tanking.

However, the company has seen sales expand at a compound rate of 60% a year since 2012 and its latest full-year results earlier this month were ahead of expectations, its margins hitting record highs and management looking guiding to another stonking year, the Financial Times’s Lex column pointed out.

“For the paranoid,” the investment column said, there were some worrying signs in its latest financials, with orders from so-called ‘active’ users in the UK having slowed down. A slowing UK could throw a spanner into the firm’s plans to charge restaurants more for its service.

As well, the risk that copy-cats might appear in its neighbourhood was not an idle-one, Lex said, citing research from Aviate.

“Share sales by executives will not settle nervous stomachs”, the tipster concluded.

Will Mediclinic follow in the steps-up of its South African peer Old Mutual and one day rue its decision to pursue a listing in London?

Unlikely, the FT’s Lex column said.

The two companies were very different beasts; with Old Mutual the problem lay in what transpired at the outfit post its flotation, not its decision to list in London.

Mediclinic, which listed on the LSE via a reverse take-over of Al Noor hospitals wasn’t simply running from its political unpredictable homeland and its volatile currency.

Before coming to London it was already a very diverse company, obtaining less two-fifths of sales from South Africa.

Both it and Al Noor also held significant interests in the United Arab Emirates, whose currency is pegged to the US dollar.

The UK is another of its ‘hard-currency’ profit centres.

In Mediclinic’s case, it will be the quality of its expansion overseas that holds the key to the firm’s future.