Key insights
- Moury Construct, a Belgian construction micro-cap, reported record FY2025 results with revenue up 33.9% and net income up 41.2%. The company has a large net cash position and a strong backlog. However, the stock suffers from poor liquidity and is exposed to cyclical risks, limiting its impact on the broader US market.
This company was not on my watchlist. A construction company, in Belgium and a micro-cap which is not exactly what gets people excited on.
But my screener showed a ~20% ROE. In construction ... So I looked.
Moury Construct builds and renovates hospitals, schools, industrial buildings and housing, mostly in Belgium. It looks like a boring business. Except the numbers don't look like a boring business.
They just reported their FY2025 results:
- revenue up 33.9% to €249.6M (all-time record), * net income +41.2% to €34.5M, * and the operating margin barely moved, 15.2% vs 15.5% the year before.
Growing 34% while holding margins in construction is genuinely hard to do.
The thing that caught my attention first wasn't even the growth. It was the €152M net cash sitting on the balance sheet, more than half the market cap (288M€ today). They earn financial income on it (€2.9M in H1 2025 alone, which was ~21% of operating profit that semester). They buy back shares slowly and their last acquisition was 2023 for €9M. What they do with that cash pile long term is the real open question.
But let's go back to the business:
Backlog at end of February stands at €371.5M, book-to-bill of 1.49x. That's roughly 18 months of revenue already secured.
Current multiples are sexy:
- EV/EBITDA around 2.9x, 2. P/E around 7.8x. 3. 5year average ROE ~ 20%
For a business with 15%+ operating margins and this level of forward visibility, I find it hard to argue it's not cheap.
Obviously, there is some serious problems: It trades under a double-fixing system (prices set twice a day only), there's almost no institutional interest, and the stock barely moves between semi-annual publications. Therefore the liquidity is genuinely bad. And yes, it's construction, cyclical, exposed to raw material costs and labor, and the current margin quality reflects a favorable part of the cycle.
On personal opinion, and this is not investment advice in any way, I think the stock has room to re-rate. Running a simple analysis with a normalized operating margin around 11% (vs 15% today, assuming some cycle mean-reversion), a conservative 10x EV/EBIT multiple, and a 20% discount on the net cash pile, I land somewhere around €925/share as a fair value estimate. That's roughly 35% above current prices. Not a moonshot, but for a business this solid with this level of forward visibility, I'll take it. The main risk to that estimate is a hard cyclical downturn compressing margins faster than expected, and the illiquidity means you might be waiting a while for the market to agree with you.