Medibank sell off was an overreaction: Morningstar
Morningstar equity analyst Nathan Zaia talks about the recent change in Medibank's share price.
Nathan Zaia: Yeah, we did think so. It's obviously going to be an impact to policyholder numbers. There could be a large penalty. But the share price fall implied about 1.8 billion wiped off the value of the company. And the reduction we made in our fair value was a lot small. That was only a 6% cut. So, yeah, markets either thinking there's really, really big penalties to come, or the policyholder losses are going to be quite large, and Medibank won't be able to make them up. So, yeah, we think there's a bit of an overreaction there.
There obviously is a negative impact on the health insurer from this. I think there will be a two-fold impact first on policyholder numbers. A lot of attention is diverted away to your existing policyholders at the moment, taking inbound calls, making communications, keeping them as happy as you can. I think it's less likely that you attract new members when they see the headlines about Medibank, and you also get some members that decide to leave because of this. We think they will be quite a small percentage. We think, overall, if this has happened, do you really want to take your data and open another fund with someone else and move across again and provide all your private information to a new business? And I think a lot of people are seeing in the media this is becoming more and more common. So, this isn't an isolated incident, I guess.
And the second one is on costs. So, I mentioned the cost to communicate. They're going to provide mental health support to customers, help with identity monitoring services, issuing documents. So, that's the initial one-off cost. And I also think when this happens, the business will step back and say, okay, what do we need to spend on cyber security to make sure this doesn't happen again, or at least lower the probability of this happening again. So, there's that ongoing cost that I think gets baked into the business moving forward.