Peer Multiples

Peer Multiples

Figures converted from Indonesian rupiah at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates. Ratios, margins, and multiples are unitless and unchanged.

Indonesia's listed private-sector contractors give PBSA the peer benchmark its own price history could not, and on that benchmark the low headline multiple is the securities cushion's arithmetic, not a discount. PBSA's 7.3x reported P/E, the lowest of the six IDX private-sector contractors, is an artefact of the unrealized investment gains: removing the $7.0M of FY2025 investment income cuts net profit to $12.2M and lifts the normalized whole-company P/E to 11.5x — a 3-4 turn premium to the two comparable net-cash peers (TOTL 8.2x, NRCA 7.3x) — while backing out the $15.2M cash-and-securities stack leaves the market paying ~$115M (~10x normalized earnings, 8.4x operating income) for the construction stub, so on a clean basis PBSA sits at the sector's top book multiple (2.5x, level with TOTL's 2.53x), not at a discount (Sum-of-the-Parts).

At $0.043 the market pays about 10x normalized construction earnings for the stub, and each turn of that construction multiple is worth about $0.0038 per share, so a 6x-to-14x range spans roughly $0.028 to $0.058 (Sum-of-the-Parts). The re-rating case is therefore a debate about the stub multiple, not about a hidden peer discount: on the book-value-and-returns frame the IDX uses to price these contractors, PBSA sits level with the sector's best-quality peer rather than below it. The strongest fact on the other side sits in the same operation: the construction stub earns above 40% on the equity actually tied up in it and grew operating income 59.8% year on year in Q1 FY2026 (Palm Oil Capex), so about 10x may be a fair price for that quality and growth rather than a rich one.

The peer set — general contractors, one market

PBSA has no sell-side coverage, so earlier chapters anchored its valuation to its own two-year multiple history (Sum-of-the-Parts). A live look at the IDX private-sector contractor set supplies the missing outside benchmark. None of the six below was ingested in the corpus, so the figures here are market data as of 24 July 2026 rather than filing citations, and none is a business-model twin: TOTL builds offices, hospitals, malls and hotels; NRCA (a Surya Semesta subsidiary) and JKON build commercial and civil-infrastructure projects; DGIK and IDPR do general construction and foundation work. None depends on a single customer, and none carries a securities book that supplies a third of its reported profit. A seventh name earlier writers flagged, Mitra Pemuda (MTRA), is too small and thinly traded to carry a reliable market multiple. What the set answers is narrower but useful: how the Indonesian market prices contractor equity, and where PBSA sits inside that range.

Sources: PBSA figures from FY2025 Annual Report, Financial Highlights [1] at a price of $0.043; normalized P/E derived by stripping the fair-value marks (see Earnings Quality). Peer figures: market data as of 24 July 2026, per public market aggregators. P/E (normalized) equals reported P/E for all peers, which carry no comparable marks.

Book value is priced off returns

The market's logic across this group is consistent: it pays up for contractors that earn high returns on a net-cash balance sheet, and it discounts those that earn low returns or run on borrowed money. Only two names trade above book value — PBSA at 2.5x and TOTL at 2.53x — and they are the same two names that earn above 30% on equity while holding net cash. The other four earn between 4% and 13% on equity, and every one of them trades below book, from NRCA at 0.91x down to JKON at 0.34x. The two net-debt names, DGIK and IDPR, sit at the bottom of the returns range and carry the highest and least reliable earnings multiples.

Source: PBSA ROE derived from FY2025 reported profit and year-end equity [2]; peer ROE and P/B from market data as of 24 July 2026.

The relationship is close to a straight line, and it places PBSA and TOTL together at the top-right corner — the high-return, high-multiple corner — while the rest cluster below book at single-digit or low-teens returns.

Source: PBSA P/B at $0.043 against FY2025 equity of $55.75M [3]; peer P/B from market data as of 24 July 2026.

There is a caveat on PBSA's own place on that line. Its 34% headline return on equity is itself lifted by the fair-value marks: the $6.69M gain that ran through FY2025 profit [4] is part of the numerator. Stripping it leaves normalized profit of about $12.17M on $55.75M of equity closer to 22%. The construction operation earns well above 40% on the roughly $27.4M of equity actually tied up in it (Sum-of-the-Parts); the group return is diluted by the large idle cash-and-securities stack the rest of the balance sheet carries. TOTL's 33% return, by contrast, is construction all the way through.

The Total Bangun Persada mirror

TOTL is the closest thing PBSA has to a live comparable, and the resemblance is unusually tight: 2.53x book against PBSA's 2.50x, a 32.8% return on equity against 34.4%, a net-cash balance sheet against net cash, and a 7.0% dividend yield against 7.7%. The market has handed the two contractors almost exactly the same book multiple. What differs is what sits underneath it. TOTL's revenue is spread across offices, hospitals, shopping centres and hotels for many private clients; PBSA's entire order book is construction work for one palm-oil group (Palm Oil Capex). And TOTL's earnings are construction earnings, where roughly a third of PBSA's reported profit is the unrealized fund marks [5]. PBSA is paying the same price as its highest-quality peer while carrying two risks that peer does not.

What the low P/E hides

The 7.3x reported P/E is the number that makes PBSA screen cheap, and among peers it looks ordinary — NRCA is on 7.3x, JKON on 7.9x, TOTL on 8.2x. But PBSA's reported earnings include the marks, and the peers' do not. On normalized construction earnings of about $12.17M the multiple is 11.5x, not 7.3x. On that basis PBSA is the second-most-expensive name in the group on earnings, behind only the two names — DGIK at 12.5x and IDPR at 20.1x — whose low multiples-of-nothing reflect depressed earnings and net debt rather than quality. Against the two profitable net-cash peers it most resembles operationally, TOTL (8.2x) and NRCA (7.3x), the marks-adjusted PBSA trades at a premium of three to four turns.

Discount or premium

On the evidence here, PBSA is not hiding a peer discount. The IDX prices these contractors principally off book value and returns, and on that axis PBSA is priced in the premium tier, level with the sector's best-quality name, without a haircut for its single-customer concentration or for the share of profit that comes from marks rather than construction. The strongest fact on the other side is that PBSA's construction operation earns a higher return on the capital actually deployed in it — above 40% on operating equity, with operating income up 59.8% year on year in Q1 FY2026 (Sum-of-the-Parts) — than TOTL earns on its whole book, so if the cash-and-securities stack is valued separately, a 2.5x multiple on the operating equity alone is arguably fair for that return rather than rich. What would settle the read is a sustained order book won outside the Sinar Mas and Golden Agri group, which would close the concentration gap that separates PBSA from an otherwise-identical TOTL — or the reverse, a de-rating of TOTL toward the sub-book levels of the rest of the group, which would leave PBSA's premium exposed.