A Mexican company that holds 50-year government concessions over 13 airports, including Monterrey, trades at 16.3 times earnings and 9.7 times book value at the September 25 close, earning 47.4% on its equity. In October 2023 the Mexican government cut what it can charge each passenger and added a new 9% tax on airport groups’ gross revenue; the stock fell about a third in a week. Two years later, revenue is higher than the year of the cut, and the return on equity has not dropped below 46% in any year since. It also carries half its passenger traffic on a single airline, and faces a currency it doesn’t control.
The regulator can cut what it charges. It cannot open a second airport next door.A regulated monopoly, tested once by the government that grants it and still earning close to 50 cents on every dollar of equity afterward — priced for those returns to continue, exposed to the same regulator again, to a peso it doesn’t control, and to one airline that carries half its passengers. Genuinely defensive against a demand shock in a way a discretionary retailer isn’t; not defensive against the regulator, the currency, or its own price.
OMAB holds concessions, granted June 29, 1998, to develop, operate and maintain 13 international airports across northern and central Mexico: Monterrey, Acapulco, Mazatlán, Zihuatanejo, Ciudad Juárez, Reynosa, Chihuahua, Culiacán, Durango, San Luis Potosí, Tampico, Torreón and Zacatecas. Each concession runs 50 years from 1998 — to 2048 — and can be extended by up to another 50 years, but only if OMAB accepts whatever new terms the government attaches at renewal, and complies with the existing concession in the meantime. On expiry, the airports revert to the Mexican government free of encumbrances, and OMAB must indemnify the government for anything beyond normal wear.
Beyond the airports themselves, OMAB runs the NH Collection hotel at Terminal 2 of Mexico City’s airport and a Hilton Garden Inn at Monterrey’s, a joint venture with VYNMSA Desarrollo Inmobiliario developing an industrial park at Monterrey’s airport, air cargo logistics, and airport construction services. Management described the next value drivers, beyond the current five-year development program, as two more hotels, expanded cargo operations, a possible industrial-park expansion, and the commercial space in Monterrey’s new terminal — on the Q2 2026 earnings call.
| Revenue line, Q2 2026 | Change, year over year | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Aeronautical (passenger and landing fees) | +4% | Tariff adjustments effective mid-April 2026 |
| Commercial (retail, parking, advertising) | +7% | MX$66.4 per passenger, up 6.3% |
| Diversification (hotels, industrial park, cargo) | +17% | Cargo revenue alone was up 29% |
| Adjusted EBITDA | +6.6% | MX$2.7B, margin expanded to 75.2% |
| Net income | +10.2% | MX$1.5B |
For the full 2025 fiscal year: revenue MX$15.96 billion, net income MX$5.34 billion, EBITDA (as reported, not the adjusted figure above) MX$9.98 billion — a 62.5% margin. Net debt to EBITDA was 1.05×, modest for a capital-intensive concession business.
On October 6, 2023, Mexico’s Federal Agency of Civil Aviation (AFAC) modified the basis for the airport-use fee every passenger pays, and the government layered on a new charge equal to 9% of airport groups’ gross income for the right to operate federal airports. Three listed groups were affected — OMA, Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico (GAP) and Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste (ASUR) — and OMA was hit hardest, because it is the only one of the three with no international airports to fall back on: every peso of its revenue comes from inside Mexico. On the Mexican exchange, OMA fell 37.6% that day and trading was halted. Its US shares moved on the same news: about $95 on September 28, 2023, about $65 by October 5 — roughly 32% in a week.
The Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transportation said the changes had been “long overdue” after two decades without adjustment. Whatever the government’s reasoning, the effect on OMAB was immediate and large, and it is the single clearest illustration of the risk in section 7.
OMAB carries no balance-sheet cushion, and the direction of travel is away from one: total debt rose from about MX$7.9 billion in 2021 to about MX$13.6 billion in 2025, because the company has been borrowing to fund the concession upgrades its Master Development Program commits it to. Read by the balance-sheet tests alone, it reads as a company in trouble.
Those tests were written for a wholesaler that could be wound up and its inventory sold off. A runway cannot be. The question worth asking of a concession is not what it would fetch broken up, but whether the toll it collects is durable and whether it covers the borrowing — net debt of 1.05× EBITDA and interest cover of 6.1× say it does, comfortably.
A regulated monopoly’s cash flow: nobody can build a competing airport next to Monterrey’s, so a government fee cut reduces the toll without ending it. Its historical beta of 0.36 reflects that — low, ordinarily — but the one-week, one-third decline in October 2023 shows the tail risk isn’t zero: the regulator, not the market, sets the terms this business runs on.
Two different sources in this table, kept straight rather than blended. Price to earnings, price to book, return on equity, net debt to EBITDA and dividend yield are from Financial Modeling Prep, queried directly — not figures travisvaluation.ca carries; the app has no FMP data behind it since the licensing question in September 2026 (see the standards page). The Graham Number is the one figure in this table that IS the app’s own: OMAB’s SEC filings alone, earnings per share and book value per share converted from pesos to dollars at the Bank of Canada’s published rate, the same conversion the live research page now applies. Click through to that page and its own price-to-earnings and price-to-book will read differently again, on purpose: both are built from the same fiscal-2024 filed figures behind the Graham Number above, priced at whatever the stock trades at when you look, while FMP’s TTM pair in this table is built from trailing four-quarter figures instead. Two honest readings of the same company on two different bases, not an error on either side.
| Method | Reading | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Price to earnings (TTM) | 16.3× | Just over Graham’s ceiling of 15 |
| Price to book (TTM) | 9.7× | Far over Graham’s ceiling of 1.5 — see section 3 |
| Return on equity | 47.4% | The figure that has to justify the price-to-book |
| Return on invested capital | 22.5% | Consistently 22–25% since 2021 |
| Net debt / EBITDA | 1.05× | Modest for a concession business |
| Dividend yield (TTM, before Mexican withholding) | 5.3% | Payout ratio 86% |
| Graham Number | $39.68 | Price 160% above it. On fiscal-2024 EPS ($5.76) and book value per share ($12.14), both converted from OMAB’s peso filings at the Bank of Canada’s daily rate so they read against the dollar price honestly. |
| Beta (historical) | 0.36 | Low in ordinary conditions; the October 2023 week says the tail isn’t zero |
The price tests and the return tests point opposite ways, and the Graham Number is not a close call either direction: at $39.68 against a $103.03 price, OMAB trades at roughly 2.6 times it. That number is not evidence OMAB is expensive. It is evidence the Graham Number is the wrong instrument for a concession business, full stop — not slightly off, not in OMAB’s favour with a different input, just not built for what this company is. Book value here is structurally depressed: a concession is an intangible asset amortising toward zero over its 2048 term rather than sitting at replacement cost the way a factory would, so a business earning 47% on that shrinking base will price at a large multiple of it forever, cheap or not. The same mechanism, read backwards, is why the Graham Number understated OMAB’s own predecessor reading in the version of this file that briefly (and wrongly) showed $87.88 before both the ADS-ratio and currency fixes were verified together — neither number said anything true about the price.
This app now carries a lens built for exactly this case: research pages for airports, pipelines and toll roads discount the Graham screen verdict, the current ratio, the debt-vs-net-current-assets test and the Altman Z-Score, and trust net debt to EBITDA (1.05×), interest coverage (6.1×), free cash flow, and return on equity measured across a full traffic cycle instead. Read by that lens rather than Graham’s, the case for OMAB is what section 7 makes: durable monopoly cash flow, not a statistically cheap stock.
| Test | Result | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Adequate size | Pass | About $5.0 billion market capitalization |
| Current ratio ≥ 2 | Fail | 1.32 at the 2025 fiscal year end |
| Long-term debt < net current assets | Fail | MX$11.8 billion long-term debt against MX$1.5 billion of working capital |
| Positive earnings, recent years | Pass | Profitable every year 2021–2025 |
| Twenty years of dividends | Unverified | Not checked in the data available this session |
| Earnings growth over the window | Pass | EPS roughly doubled, 2021 to 2025 |
| P/E ≤ 15 | Fail | 16.3 |
| P/B ≤ 1.5 | Fail | 9.7 |
Three or four of eight, depending on the dividend question — a fail on Graham’s own terms. That is not a surprise once section 3 is read: Graham built this screen to find safety in the balance sheet, and OMAB’s safety, such as it is, sits in the concession instead.
All 13 airports revert to the Mexican government in 2048, twenty-two years from the date of value. The extension option exists but is not automatic: OMAB must accept whatever terms the government attaches, and comply with the current concession throughout. Nothing about this makes the next twenty-two years unsafe on its own, but it is the reason this cannot be a permanent, never-sell holding the way a Canadian bank might be.
Section 2. The regulator can review passenger fees again without a new law, and the 9% revenue charge is now part of the cost structure permanently, not a one-time event.
OMAB earns pesos and is quoted in US dollars; a Canadian buyer adds a third layer, the CAD/USD rate, on top. Management named currency fluctuations as a live 2026 headwind on the Q2 call. None of this is unique to OMAB, but it compounds with the regulatory risk rather than standing apart from it: a peso that weakens during a tariff dispute would hit the ADS price from both directions at once.
Viva Aerobus carried about 50% of total passenger traffic through OMAB’s airports in the second quarter of 2026, and Viva’s own traffic growth slowed in the same quarter. OMAB does not control Viva’s fleet decisions, route economics or financial health, and a shock to one budget carrier is a shock to half of OMAB’s passengers.
Total passenger traffic grew just 0.4% in the second quarter of 2026 (domestic +0.6%, international −1.2%, mainly lower Monterrey traffic to Los Angeles, Dallas–Fort Worth and San Antonio). CEO Ricardo Dueñas Espriú’s own guidance on the call: traffic “flat to low single digits” for the year. Cargo is where the nearshoring story is actually showing up — up 29% in the quarter — but at 16.3 times earnings and 9.7 times book, the price already assumes growth continues somewhere.
Monterrey sits at the centre of the manufacturing corridor pulling production out of Asia and closer to the US border. AB Volvo committed US$1 billion to a new truck plant in Nuevo León, production starting in 2026 — one investment among many moving into the region. The clearest sign it is reaching OMAB’s results already is cargo, up 29% in the second quarter, and diversification revenue broadly, up 17%, both ahead of passenger traffic. Management is adding capacity for it directly: a new Monterrey terminal, expanded cargo operations, and a possible industrial-park expansion beyond the current development program.
2026 capital spending is guided at MX$3.5 to MX$4 billion, including carryover from the prior development program running into 2027. The company also said it expects to end the year at about 93% of the maximum tariff it is permitted to charge — near the regulatory ceiling already, which limits how much of the nearshoring volume shows up as higher prices rather than higher traffic.
The freight is arriving before the passengers are. That is either the early stage of a longer story, or the whole story.Set September 26, 2026.
1. Traffic. Total passenger traffic for full-year 2026 below management’s own guided “flat to low single digits” — that is, a decline — breaks the growth half of the case.
2. Cargo. Cargo revenue growth falling back to single digits in the third or fourth quarter of 2026 would say the nearshoring signal in section 7 was a one-quarter spike, not a trend.
3. Regulation. Any further reduction to the maximum tariff, or a new charge beyond the 9% imposed in 2023, before the current Master Development Program’s term ends.
4. Return on equity. A drop below 40% in any fiscal year would say the extraordinary returns behind the 9.7× book multiple are normalizing.
| Considered | Rejected because |
|---|---|
| Harley-Davidson (HOG) | The original candidate for this issue — below book, a genuine insider cluster buy, but a discretionary consumer durable late in the cycle. Curtis’s call: retail is first to fall in a downturn, and a motorcycle doesn’t have the everyday-necessity moat a shoe or a grocery run does. Considered in full in last week’s research; not carried into this issue. |
| Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico (GAP) | Same regulatory exposure, same October 2023 event, more moderate. Own the toughest one instead, or a diversified bank — not the middle of the three. |
| Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste (ASUR) | Genuinely more diversified — it derives meaningful revenue outside Mexico — which is precisely why OMAB, entirely domestic, was the sharper illustration of the regulatory risk this file leads with. |
| Several regional US banks from the original screen (BHF, RDN, HOMB, WAFD and others) | Statistically cheaper on price, several near or below book. Set aside on Curtis’s explicit preference for the infrastructure story and the diversification it brings against six issues that have leaned financial or retail. |
At the date of value the author owns shares of OMAB. No cost basis is disclosed here by his request.
A government can cut what you charge. It cannot open a second airport next door.