Our latest review of the UK capital goods sector suggests a more positive outlook for our stocks, echoing the more hopeful picture we identified at the start of the year (Best Ideas 2016, 4 January). While growth remains very low, key indicators suggest a slight improvement for our universe by the end of 2016. More significantly, weak sterling is set to provide a materially bigger boost to sales in H2 than in H1 if FX rates are maintained. This does not appear to be reflected in consensus forecasts, which have also seen their first quarterly upgrade in Q3 to date after four years of quarterly downgrades. Share prices have risen sharply through 2016, taking our weighted sector P/E to c.20x. However the sector does not look expensive relative to the market, trading on its normal premium to the FTSE All-Share. To identify the best prospects we have assessed end market commentary from overseas capital goods groups, track records of growth and introduced quant screens relating to profitability and cash generation. Given the more positive tone to our findings, we have a number of Buy recommendations, but only one Sell. In this note we summarise the main inputs into our sector view, along with overviews of our coverage and some interesting non-coverage stocks.
