Judges Scientific: the Berkshire Hathaway of AIM?

Judges Scientific (LON:JDG) is the owner of an expanding empire of scientific instrument companies. By its own admission, the group is ‘obsessed’ with creating shareholder value. You might think this is how all listed companies operate but the truth is value destruction is rampant. Somewhere out there lies a vast graveyard of failed companies that had lots of fun splashing shareholders’ cash. Frequent equity placings, unwieldy debt burdens, ill-considered acquisitions and excessive compensation packages are just some of the ways in which listed companies can transfer wealth away from shareholders. To know that a company bases its strategy and actions specifically on creating shareholder value is actually quite something. This is what Judges Scientific claims to do and, looking at this chart from the group’s H1 19 presentation, it appears to be doing a good job. Unfortunately, the group does not give a scale for this graph. Going through the historic accounts, however, we can see that the group’s share price has grown at a compound rate of around 31% (from 104p to 4,420p) since the end of Judges’ financial year 2005 (the first year of its scientific instrumentation strategy),…