Mobile Mini Inc. Reports Operating Results (10-K)

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Mar 01, 2011
Mobile Mini Inc. (MINI, Financial) filed Annual Report for the period ended 2010-12-31.

Mobile Mini Inc. has a market cap of $828.5 million; its shares were traded at around $22.74 with a P/E ratio of 42.1 and P/S ratio of 2.2. Mobile Mini Inc. had an annual average earning growth of 13.3% over the past 10 years. GuruFocus rated Mobile Mini Inc. the business predictability rank of 5-star.Mutual Fund and Other Gurus that owns MINI: Columbia Wanger of Columbia Wanger Asset Management, James Barrow of Barrow, Hanley, Mewhinney & Strauss.

Highlight of Business Operations:

Our fleet is primarily comprised of remanufactured and differentiated steel portable storage containers that were built according to standards developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), other steel containers, steel offices that we manufacture, and mobile offices. We remanufacture and customize our products by adding our proprietary locking and easy-opening premium door system to our purchased ISO containers and steel security offices. Because they are composed primarily of steel, these assets are characterized by low risk of obsolescence, extreme durability, relatively low maintenance, long useful lives and a history of high-value retention. We also have wood mobile office units in our lease fleet to complement our core steel portable storage containers and steel security offices. We perform maintenance on our steel containers and offices on a regular basis. Repair and maintenance expense for our fleet has averaged 2.7% of lease revenues over the past three fiscal years and is expensed as incurred. We believe our historical experience with leasing rates and sales prices for these assets demonstrates their high-value retention. We are able to lease our portable storage containers at similar rates without regard to the age of the container. In addition, we have sold containers and steel security offices from our lease fleet at an average of 145% of original cost from 1997 through 2010.

Geographic and Customer Diversification. At December 31, 2010, we operated from 121 locations of which 98 were located in the U.S., three in Canada, 19 in the U.K., and one in The Netherlands. We served approximately 84,500 customers from a wide range of industries in 2010. Our customers include large and small retailers, construction companies, medical centers, schools, utilities, manufacturers and distributors, the U.S. and U.K. militaries, government agencies, hotels, restaurants, entertainment complexes and households. Our diverse customer base demonstrates the broad applications for our products and our opportunity to create future demand through targeted marketing. In 2010, our largest and our second-largest customers accounted for 2.1% and 1.2% of our leasing revenues, respectively, and our twenty largest customers accounted for approximately 7.5% of our leasing revenues. During 2010, approximately 61.4% of our customers rented a single unit. We believe this diversity also helps us to better weather economic downturns in individual markets and the industries in which our customers operate.

Our steel portable storage containers, steel security offices, and wood mobile offices have estimated useful lives of 30 years, 30 years, and 20 years, respectively, from the date we build or acquire and remanufacture them, with residual values of our per-unit investment ranging from 50% for our mobile offices to 55% for our core steel products. Van trailers, which comprised 0.2% of the net book value of our lease fleet at December 31, 2010, are depreciated over seven years to a 20% residual value. For the past three fiscal years, our cost to repair and maintain our lease fleet units averaged approximately 2.7% of our lease revenues. Repainting the outside of storage units is the most common maintenance item.

Approximately 10.0% of our 2010 revenue was derived from sales of our units. Because the containers in our lease fleet do not significantly depreciate in value, we have no systematic program in place to sell lease fleet containers as they reach a certain age. Instead, most of our container sales involve either highly customized containers that would be difficult to lease on a recurring basis, or containers that we have not remanufactured. In addition, due primarily to availability of inventory at various locations at certain times of the year, we sell a certain portion of containers and offices from the lease fleet. Our gross margins typically increase for containers that have been in our lease fleet for greater lengths of time prior to sale, because although these units have been depreciated based upon a 30 year useful life and 55% residual value (1.5% per year), in most cases a units fair market value may not decline by nearly that amount due to the nature of the assets and our maintenance policy.

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