Mobility Global MBGL

Current Stats

Post-Spinoff Performance

Computed from split-adjusted closing prices. Returns are total return — (end price + dividends received − start price) ÷ start price — with no reinvestment assumed.

Detailed Post-Spin Analysis — August 27, 2026

Written against the August 26 close of $20.55. Primary sources: the Q2 2026 Form 10-Q (filed 2026-08-07), the Q2 results release, and S&P Global’s FY2025 and FY2023 Forms 10-K for the Mobility segment’s pre-separation record.

This is the complete standing analysis of Mobility Global, consolidating the post-separation work to date into one document. It supersedes the interim Q2 earnings note. The initial assessment of July 31 / August 5 and all pre-separation analyses remain below, exactly as published.

The one-line version

The question is not the multiple. It is whether CARFAX’s 8% growth is durable, and nothing in the first standalone quarter argues against it.

Q2 delivered revenue +7%, adjusted EBITDA +7%, margin held at 43%, and 82% of revenue on subscription. The guidance is where the thesis moves: full-year adjusted EBITDA margin of ~40.1% against 41.8% delivered in the first half implies a second half at 38.4% — disclosed, not a stumble, and almost entirely the standalone cost load arriving.

Four years of segment history say the business is getting better, not worse. S&P Global reported Mobility as a segment from 2022, and the numbers reconcile to Mobility Global’s own within $3M. Revenue went $1,142M → $1,484M → $1,609M → $1,747M, and segment operating profit grew 77% against revenue up 53%. The longer record supports the story here rather than undercutting it, which is not what a pre-separation growth claim usually survives.

The valuation is unusual in a specific way: GAAP earnings are close to meaningless here. Amortization of acquired intangibles runs $296M a year — 16% of revenue — against capital expenditure of about $25M. Free cash flow is the only honest measure, and at 13.1x free cash flow, a 7.6% yield, the market is paying less for this than for any comparable information-services business.

Rating BUY, unchanged. Target $28, from $27.

What the business actually is

Two segments, one of which is the company:

CARFAX is two-thirds of revenue and the entire investment case. It grew 8% in both the quarter and the half. B2B grew 4% in the quarter, of which roughly $1M of recall revenue simply moved to the second half.

Ignore the reported EPS line entirely. The prior-year comparative is carve-out accounting with no standalone costs and almost no interest, and the current period carries $148M of intangible amortization per half. The valuation section deals with this properly; for now the point is that neither GAAP earnings nor the year-over-year EPS change tells you anything about this business.

Management Team

This is a deeper bench than the “spun-out division” framing suggests, and one correction is worth making explicitly: the public-company experience is not thin. Calderone ran finance at a listed company several times this one’s size. Negro has taken a company through a separation in exactly this seat. And Eager is not a divisional president who inherited CARFAX — he ran CARFAX itself for four years and worked there for two decades before that.

What the team is short of is a shared track record as a listed company, which is a different and smaller problem, and one the board is well constructed to cover.

The board

Eight directors, and the composition looks deliberately assembled to supply what the management team lacks.

Three current or recent chief executives of listed companies, and three former public-company CFOs. For a first-time public-company management team, that is the right shape — and the Chairman’s background is an unusually precise fit: an automotive-industry operator who has also run a listed transport company through a full reporting cycle.

Two directors carry S&P Global connections — Aboaf is the parent’s sitting CFO, and Leroux sat on its board until 2022. That matters less than it would at a separation where the parent kept a stake, because S&P Global distributed 100% and retains none. There is no block of stock to place and no ongoing economic interest to reconcile. The counterpoint is that the parent’s CFO sitting on the board of a company the parent no longer owns is a relationship worth noting even where it is benign.

The financial record — four years by segment

Mobility Global’s own filings show three years. S&P Global reported Mobility as a segment from 2022, which adds a fourth — and, more usefully, a check on whether the two bases describe the same business.

*2022 covers roughly ten months — S&P Global’s merger with IHS Markit closed at the end of February 2022, and the Mobility segment did not exist before it. Segment figures from S&P Global’s FY2023 and FY2025 Forms 10-K; standalone figures from Mobility Global’s own disclosure.

The two bases describe the same business. Revenue differs by $1M in 2023, $4M in 2024 and $3M in 2025 — a rounding difference from intersegment elimination. That is an unusually clean match, and it means the S&P Global segment history can be read as Mobility Global’s own history rather than as an approximation of it.

What four years show

Revenue grew 53% from 2022 to 2025. Segment operating profit grew 77%. Margin went 18.7% → 17.5% → 19.4% → 21.6% — a dip in 2023, then two years of expansion totalling 410 basis points.

It is worth saying plainly, because a longer record more often works against a spun-off business than for it: on four years of segment data, Mobility Global’s economics have been improving. The 2023 dip is consistent with IHS Markit integration costs washing through; everything after it goes the right way.

Adjusted EBITDA margin, by contrast, has been flat at ~40.5% across all three years it is reported. Those two facts together locate exactly where the improvement came from: not from operating leverage on cash costs, but from acquired-intangible amortization becoming a smaller share of a growing revenue base. That distinction matters, and the valuation section returns to it.

Free cash flow margin improved every year — 25.3% → 25.5% → 26.3% — on a business whose capital expenditure is about $25M a year against $1.75B of revenue. This is as asset-light as businesses get.

The one line that goes the wrong way, and it is disclosed

Full-year 2026 guidance is revenue $1,870–1,885M (+6.9–7.7%) and adjusted EBITDA $745–760M at ~40.1% margin.

The first half delivered 41.8%. Full-year guidance of ~40.1% therefore implies a second half at 38.4% — roughly 340 basis points below the half just reported.

That is not a stumble; it is the standalone cost load arriving on schedule. Incremental public-company costs carry a run-rate of roughly 150 basis points against the FY2025 base, and they phase in through the second half rather than appearing at once.

This also reframes the July restatement. That correction moved the reported margin from a fictional ≈60% to an actual 40.6%. The right forward number is lower again — roughly 39%, fully loaded — not because anything deteriorated, but because a standalone company pays for its own back office.

It does mean the margin question is genuinely open until the November print, which is the first quarter carrying a fuller standalone load. Whether ~39% is a floor or a waypoint is the single most important number this company will report this year, and no amount of history settles it — the four-year record was earned under a parent that absorbed these costs.

Where Mobility Global sits in the value chain

CARFAX’s moat is not technology, a brand, or a network effect in the usual sense. It is a forty-year accumulation of records that cannot be re-created at any price, fed by an ongoing flow from sources — DMVs, police reports, service shops, auctions, insurers — that took decades of individual relationships to assemble.

That produces an unusual power position:

The threat worth naming is disintermediation at the source, not competition at the product. A rival cannot rebuild forty years of history. But the vehicle itself is increasingly the record — connected cars generate service, mileage and incident data directly, and the OEM owns it. If manufacturers were to pool telematics into a shared history standard, the new flow would bypass CARFAX entirely while its archive kept ageing.

That is a slow risk, not a live one. It requires OEM cooperation against their own commercial interests, applies only to vehicles built recently, and the used-car market runs on a fleet with an average age above twelve years. But it is the reason to watch data-supply agreements more closely than competitor launches.

The contrast with a components supplier is instructive. A semiconductor- materials or aerospace-component business is qualified into its customers' processes but cannot raise price, because alternatives exist and the buyers are larger than the seller. Mobility Global is the inverse: its customers are numerous and small relative to it, and its product has no substitute. That is a genuinely better position, and it is why the pricing question here is about volume and mix rather than about defending price.

Where the growth actually comes from

A reasonable reading of this company is that CARFAX has saturated its market and B2B is the growth engine. The disclosure does not support either half of that.

B2B is not the growth engine — CARFAX is

CARFAX is growing twice as fast as B2B and is two-thirds of the revenue. It also gets the investment: the company states it is putting targeted consumer brand advertising behind CARFAX to lift unaided awareness, and the named new products — Sell My Car (full-service cash offers) and digital advertising — are CARFAX products, not B2B ones.

B2B’s role is different and worth stating precisely. It is where the adjacent markets sit — dealer management systems, shop-management software, P&C claims and repair software, F&I marketing — and those are large. But they are described as “beyond our immediate roadmap”, and they put Mobility Global against CDK Global, Reynolds & Reynolds and Cox Automotive, where the competitive section above rates it a participant rather than a leader. A bigger pond, and a worse position in it.

CARFAX is not saturated, on the company’s own numbers

Mobility Global sizes its total addressable market at $75–81B for 2025, against $1.75B of revenue. That headline should be discounted heavily — it is the standard inflated framing, and two-thirds of it is “adjacencies” the company does not currently sell. The useful figure is the first tier:

Even on the conservative tier, $1.75B of revenue against a $13–15B core implies roughly 12% penetration. That is not a saturated market. The saturation intuition is right about one thing — CARFAX’s position in the US used-car vehicle-history transaction specifically is close to fully penetrated — but that is a subset of the core, and the growth is coming from selling more per customer rather than from finding new ones: the 53M-member Car Care base, the subscription mix at 82%, and products layered onto an existing data asset.

International is the underrated part, and the numbers show it

International is 17% of revenue and growing faster than the US. And the expansion is only beginning: CARFAX Europe has proven a consumer-led model in Spain and Italy, and the company states it intends to enter Germany and France on the same playbook — the two largest used-car markets in Europe.

Why this matters more than it looks. CARFAX’s moat in the US took forty years to build because the data had to be accumulated. In a new market the company is not starting from zero on method — it knows which sources matter, what the product should look like, and how the consumer-led model works, because it has now run it twice. Europe also has structurally favorable conditions: high cross-border used-vehicle flow, which makes history opaque and a history report more valuable, and no incumbent with CARFAX’s brand.

The risk is that it is genuinely hard. Vehicle records in Europe are held by national registries, insurers and workshops under different rules in every country, with GDPR overlaying all of it. Spain and Italy took years. Germany and France will not be quick, and nothing in the current guidance depends on them — which is precisely why this is upside rather than base case.

One embedded option worth naming. The company holds approximately 25% of Data Analytics (DA), a Germany-based SaaS platform that embeds its planning data into supplier workflows, with a right of first refusal on the remaining 75%. That is a call option on a European B2B channel, already partly owned, and it does not appear in any valuation on this page.

In depth: competitive dynamics

The two segments face completely different contests, and conflating them overstates the risk to the company.

The asymmetry is the point. CARFAX is close to unassailable and is two-thirds of revenue; B2B is genuinely contested and is one-third. The company’s average competitive position is much better than its weakest one, and the weakest one is the smaller and slower-growing part — B2B grew 4% in the quarter against CARFAX’s 8%.

Why the dominant position holds

It is not the brand, though the brand is real. It is that a vehicle-history report is worth having only if it is complete, and completeness compounds. Every additional data source makes the product more useful, which wins more consumers and dealers, which funds more sources. A competitor starting today would need both the archive and the ongoing feeds, and the archive cannot be bought.

That compounding is contractual rather than fragile — the records arrive daily under paid arrangements, often exclusive. What it does not protect against is a shift in which data determines a vehicle’s value, which is examined separately in Commentary: how the competitive structure could change below.

The demand side reinforces it. CARFAX is bought once, under time pressure, as a small fraction of a large purchase — the worst possible conditions for price comparison. And on the dealer side it functions as a marketing tool: dealers display CARFAX reports to sell cars faster, so it sits on the revenue side of their P&L rather than the cost side. Products that make customers money are harder to cancel than products that save them money.

What would actually threaten it

Not a better product — a change in who holds the data. That risk is set out in the value-chain section above: connected vehicles generate service and incident records that the manufacturer owns, and CARFAX’s position depends on feeds it does not control. The competitive threat and the structural threat are different things here, and only the second one matters.

The item the market may still be under-weighting

Buried in the guidance assumptions: cash taxes will run $80–90M above the GAAP provision.

That is not a one-time separation artifact. Mobility Global carries $8,845M of goodwill and $3,640M of intangibles — largely from the legacy IHS Markit merger — throwing off $310M of annual amortization that is substantially not deductible. Book income is suppressed by a charge the tax authorities do not recognize, so cash tax lands on a much larger base.

The practical effect is that EBITDA overstates this company’s cash generation by more than the usual amount, and any valuation anchored on an EBITDA multiple flatters it. My FY27 estimate:

That is $1.40 per share — a 6.8% free-cash-flow yield at $20.55, or 14.7x. The business did not get worse; the tax disclosure got clearer.

⚠️ This is an estimate, and it is the least certain number here

The company guided a $80–90M cash-tax premium for 2026 and did not say whether it persists. I have assumed it is permanent, reasoning that non-deductible amortization of acquired intangibles is a structural feature of a company carrying $12.5B of goodwill and intangibles from the IHS Markit merger — not a separation artifact that unwinds.

That reasoning is inference from public filings, not disclosure. A tax position of this kind is exactly the sort of thing an outside investor cannot verify: the deductibility of the intangible base depends on the structure of a merger that closed years ago and on the terms of the tax matters agreement with S&P Global, neither of which is laid out in the 10-Q.

The error is one-sided, which is the useful part. If the premium is transitional, FY27 free cash flow is roughly $490M rather than $413M — a 5.8% coverage improvement that lifts the target about $3–4 per share. If I am right, the valuation above already reflects it. So the valuation is deliberately built on the conservative branch, and the surprise risk runs in the shareholder’s favor.

Capital allocation

Mobility Global separated with a defined capital-returns framework and has already begun executing it — unusual for a company two months old.

Three tranches, all fixed, nothing due before 2029:

Weighted coupon 5.53%, about $111M of annual cash interest, and no floating-rate exposure at all. There is no refinancing wall to underwrite.

The framework as stated: 20–25% of GAAP net income as dividends, buybacks beginning in 2027, and 75%+ of free cash flow returned over time.

The dividend came in above expectation — $0.06 quarterly, $0.24 annualized, a 1.17% yield at today’s price.

The capital-returns arithmetic is the most interesting decision in front of management

At $20.55 the shares yield 7.6% on free cash flow. Retiring debt saves about 4.1% after tax. Buying stock is worth roughly 350 basis points more than repaying borrowings, and on a business with 82% subscription revenue and no maturity until 2029, the balance-sheet risk of preferring the former is modest.

Sustained repurchases at this valuation would retire roughly a quarter of the company over five years. That is the single largest lever on per-share value available here, larger than any plausible operating improvement — and buybacks are guided to begin in 2027, not now.

The thing to watch is whether they actually start. A management team that defers repurchases while the stock trades at 13x free cash flow, in order to reach a leverage target that the maturity schedule does not require it to reach, would be optimising the balance sheet at the expense of the owners. The 2027 start date is a commitment worth holding them to.

Capital expenditure is negligible — roughly $25M a year on $1.87B of revenue, about 1.3%. Nothing about this business requires reinvestment to sustain it, which is why the free-cash-flow conversion is what it is.

Valuation

At $20.55: market capitalization $6,059M on 294.8M shares, net debt $1,795M, enterprise value $7,854M.

Why free cash flow is the only honest measure here

Mobility Global carries $8,845M of goodwill and $3,640M of intangibles from S&P Global’s acquisition of IHS Markit. The consequences run in two directions at once, and they cancel in a way that makes both GAAP earnings and EBITDA misleading:

• Amortization of acquired intangibles is $148M per half — $296M a year, 16% of revenue — against capital expenditure of roughly $25M. It is a real charge against reported profit and almost entirely unrelated to what the business spends. GAAP earnings are therefore far below cash earnings.
• Cash taxes run $80–90M above the GAAP provision, for the reasons set out in the section above. The tax is real cash, and adjusted EBITDA ignores it entirely.

So EBITDA overstates and GAAP earnings understate, and the gap between them is enormous. Reported operating margin runs ~18%; adjusted EBITDA margin runs ~40%. Neither is the economics. Free cash flow — $461M in 2025, 26.3% of revenue — already absorbs the cash tax and the capital spending, and it is the number this page values.

Discounted cash flow

Unlevered free cash flow, explicit period 2027–2040, perpetuity thereafter. Revenue growth easing 6.5% → 3.5% across the window as CARFAX’s high-single- digit growth blends with a slower B2B; adjusted EBITDA margin stepping down to 39.0% in 2027 for the full standalone load, then recovering; free-cash-flow conversion of 62% of adjusted EBITDA, against 65% achieved in 2025 and lower now because of the cash-tax drag.

On the length of the explicit period. A shorter model puts too much of the answer in the terminal value: on a seven-year period, 71% of enterprise value sits beyond the forecast. Running to 2040 brings that to 50%. As it happens the two produce nearly the same number — $28.49 against $29.20 — which is itself worth knowing: the terminal-value concentration was a conditioning problem rather than a valuation error. For a subscription business with 82% recurring revenue and a stable margin there is no depressed cash flow being wrongly capitalized. The longer model is the better-built one; it is not the more generous one.

Value per share, at 62% conversion:

The load-bearing assumption is not the margin and not the horizon — it is free-cash-flow conversion, because the cash-tax drag is new and only one quarter of standalone data exists:

Every four points of conversion is worth about $2.30 a share. That is where the November print matters most.

Base case $29.20.

Cross-checks

Multiple on FY2027E adjusted EBITDA of $790M: 11x → $23.39 · 12x → $26.07 · 13x → $28.75.

Against the peer group. At the information-services median of ~14.5x on guided FY2026 EBITDA, Mobility Global would be worth $30.92. The peer section below sets out why that gap is only partly deserved.

Price target: $28 · range $23–31 · BUY

Method	Value
DCF — 40.5% terminal margin, 62% conversion, 8.5% WACC	$29.20
DCF — conversion at 58%	$26.92
DCF — conversion at 66%	$31.48
DCF — 37.5% terminal margin, 8.5%	$27.18
DCF — 9.0% WACC, 40.5% margin	$25.62 (bear)
FY2027E adjusted EBITDA $790M at 12x	$26.07
FY2027E adjusted EBITDA $790M at 13x	$28.75
Peer median 14.5x on FY2026E EBITDA	$30.92

Base $28 is +36% to the August 26 close of $20.55.

Recommendation: BUY, unchanged.

The harder bear case sits below the table. Organic growth falling below 5%, or a 2027 margin under 38%, would compress the multiple toward 9–10x and take the value to roughly $18–20 — at which point the shares are fairly valued rather than cheap. That is the level at which this thesis fails, and it is below today’s price rather than above it.

Earnings-based valuation

A conventional P/E on this company is close to uninformative, and it is worth showing why rather than asserting it.

The year-over-year decline is an artifact and should be ignored. The prior-year period is carve-out accounting: $7M of interest against a standalone run-rate of about $55M per half, and no standalone public-company costs in the $265M of selling and general expense against $335M this year.

Normalizing the current half to the standalone capital structure — full interest, same tax rate — gives roughly $0.26 of EPS for the half, about $0.52 annualized, which at $20.55 is 39x. On its face that looks expensive for a business growing 7%.

It is not expensive; the measure is broken. That $0.52 is struck after $296M of annual amortization on intangibles the company did not buy and does not replace — against $25M of actual capital spending. Free cash flow per share is roughly $1.56, three times the normalized earnings figure, and it is the number that pays dividends and funds buybacks.

13.1x free cash flow and 39x normalized GAAP earnings describe the same company. Anyone screening this business on a P/E will conclude it is expensive, and will be wrong for a reason that is disclosed in a single line of the income statement.

The amortization does eventually end. At $296M a year against $3,640M of intangibles, the charge runs down over roughly a decade. As it does, GAAP earnings converge upward toward cash earnings with no operational change whatsoever — and the cash-tax premium narrows with it.

What this most resembles

Matching on the characteristics that should drive the outcome — a subscription data business, spun whole from a larger information-services parent, high margin, levered on the way out, no retained stake — the universe offers seven reasonable analogs:

Return comparisons are deliberately left out for now. The obvious cut — how each performed at 90 days, one year and three — turns out to say more about when they spun than about what they were. Broadridge separated in April 2007 and Gartner in July 1999; their first years ran straight into the financial crisis and the dot-com unwind respectively. Reading either as a spinoff outcome mistakes a macro window for a business signal.

What the group does support is narrower and more useful:

The early trajectory carries almost no information. Broadridge and Gartner were both below their day-1 price a year out and both went on to return more than 700%. Western Union was comfortably above its day-1 price at 90 days and has since lost roughly two thirds of its value.

The separation is where the outcomes diverge, and it is not about the spin. Western Union’s money-transfer moat was disintermediated; Consensus Cloud’s core product is cloud fax. Both were reasonable-looking businesses at separation with no growth problem visible in year one. Broadridge, Gartner and FIS sold into structurally expanding markets. Neither entry multiple nor opening leverage predicted which was which.

For Mobility Global that puts the burden of proof somewhere specific: not on the 10.3x multiple, and not on the 2.4x net leverage, but on whether CARFAX’s 8% growth is durable. The multiple is defensible either way; the growth is the whole question.

The closest business analog is one the table cannot show. CDK Global — automotive dealer software and data, spun from ADP in October 2014 — is nearer to Mobility Global’s B2B segment than anything else in the universe. It was taken private by Brookfield in 2022 for $8.3B, which is why it has no live profile here and also why it matters: the last comparable automotive-data asset to actually change hands cleared at roughly the enterprise value Mobility Global carries today. The pre-spin analysis’s $18–28B takeout range was never the right frame; $8B was.

Price and volume: where we are on the post-spin journey

The mechanical selling is done. Whether the artificial trading is done is a different question, and the data says no.

Index and mandate selling compressed into the first two weeks and decayed fast. But three things argue against calling the register settled.

The float is still churning at an extraordinary rate. Cumulative volume since the spin is 119% of shares outstanding in 36 sessions — 85% of it excluding day 1. The last ten sessions alone traded 17% of the company, which annualises to roughly 430% turnover. That is not the profile of a shareholder base that has found its owners.

Volume re-elevated into earnings, then faded. Weekly medians against the baseline:

Volume bottomed at 0.68x the week before the print, jumped 57% through earnings week, and receded again. That is the signature of a cohort that arrives for a catalyst and leaves after it — event-driven money positioning on the direction of a first standalone quarter, not long-term holders building.

And the 2.6x earnings-day spike is not, on its own, evidence of anything. Measured across 118 tickers with enough history, 20.8% of all sessions after volume normalization run at 2x baseline or higher — a 2x day is roughly a weekly event for a typical name. A 2.6x session is therefore not, on its own, evidence of anything. What is notable is the shape around it: a quiet trough, a spike, a fade.

Where the low was set matters more than either. The day-1 intraday low of $18.10 broke on session 3, and the flush bottomed at $17.67 on July 6 — that intraday floor has never been revisited. But the closing low is $19.00 on August 10, three days after earnings.

The forced-selling trough and the fundamental trough were two different events, five weeks apart. The spin flush set the intraday floor; the guidance set the closing floor. A framework that assumes the post-spin low arrives with the forced seller would have called the bottom on July 6 and been early by a month.

Trading commentary. The stock has cleared its mechanical de-risking but is not yet held by the people who will hold it. With the float turning over at this rate and an identifiable event-driven cohort trading the print, the next two earnings dates are more likely to set the range than the spin ever was — and that argues for treating quarterly results as the risk events here, not the separation.

For a position, the structure argues for scaling rather than a single entry. The $19.00–19.30 area has now been defended twice, once by the flush and once post-earnings, and is where risk/reward materially improves. Below $18.50 the thesis needs re-underwriting, since that would take out the post-earnings base on what would have to be new information. I would expect the November Q3 print — the first quarter carrying a fuller standalone cost load, and the first clean read on whether ~39% is a floor or a trend — to produce another volume event, and would rather be sized before it than after.

In depth: valuation against peers

Prices at the August 26, 2026 close, on a consistent basis.

Mobility Global is the cheapest name in information services on both measures, and the gap is wide — 10.4x against a median of 16.2x, and 12.5x forward earnings against ~20x.

Three reasons the discount is partly deserved:

1. Two months of listed history and a restated margin. The figure this business was marketed on was wrong by nearly twenty points, corrected weeks after listing. That earns a discount until a few clean quarters exist.
2. Leverage. 2.39x net against a peer group that mostly runs lower, and a register that has not settled.
3. End-market concentration. Every peer above sells into multiple verticals. Mobility Global sells into one — automotive — and two-thirds of it into the used-car transaction specifically.

Two reasons it is not. Growth of 7% sits mid-pack, not at the bottom; and free-cash-flow conversion at 26% of revenue is at the top of this group, on capital expenditure of 1.3% of sales. On the measure that actually pays shareholders, Mobility Global screens better than most of the names trading at 50% higher multiples.

The closest comparisons are TransUnion at 13.9x and Morningstar at 13.7x — single-vertical-ish data businesses with strong but not unassailable positions. Closing even half the gap to them is worth roughly $5 a share.

In depth: is Mobility Global an acquisition target?

Yes, and more plausibly than most names this size — but not before July 2028.

Section 355(e) presumes a taxable distribution if control changes within two years of the spin, which blocks an acquisition until July 1, 2028. The same rule constrains Mobility Global as an acquirer: a large stock-funded deal inside the window could itself cost the separation its tax-free treatment. Cash deals are unaffected, but at 2.39x leverage the capacity for a meaningful one is limited.

Beyond that date the asset is unusually buyable. It is a clean single-asset data business with no retained parent stake, contracted revenue, minimal capital intensity and an owner base that has not settled. The natural buyers:

The precedent that matters is not in the universe table. CDK Global — automotive dealer software and data, spun from ADP in October 2014 — was taken private by Brookfield in 2022 for $8.3B. That is the closest comparable automotive-data asset to actually change hands, and it cleared at roughly the enterprise value Mobility Global carries today.

The pre-separation analysis on this page framed a takeout at $18–28B. That was never the right frame. $8B was — and the fact that today’s enterprise value is $7.9B says the market is currently pricing this asset at about what the last one actually fetched, which is neither a bargain nor a stretch.

Commentary: how the competitive structure could change

The section above describes the competitive field as it stands. This one asks how it could be rearranged — by Mobility Global’s own acquisitions, by consolidation among others, and by electric vehicles moving where the data lives. Some of what follows is reasoning rather than disclosure, and it is separated for that reason. External figures are sourced at the foot of the section.

First, what the moat actually is

CARFAX holds more than 38 billion vehicle-history records from over 177,000 sources — 92,000+ dealers and service shops, 6,300+ police agencies, and 36 OEM certified pre-owned programs. The company calls these “symbiotic data partnerships,” and states they secure access “often on an exclusive basis, to critical purchase, incident and service data.”

That construction compounds, and it does so passively. The records arrive daily under standing commercial arrangements in which the supplier is paid. Nothing is re-won each year. A competitor would have to reconstruct 177,000 relationships against an incumbent that already pays those suppliers and, in places, holds exclusivity. This is a stronger and more durable position than a simple archive, because the archive keeps filling itself.

Where it is vulnerable is narrower than it first appears. Not the relationships — those are contractual and paid. Not the records already held. The exposure is to a change in which categories of data matter. If value migrates to a record type generated by an entity with no commercial relationship to CARFAX and no need for one, the existing 177,000 sources keep delivering faithfully while becoming less sufficient. That is the risk the third question below examines, and it is the only one of the three already visible in the market.

If Mobility Global is the acquirer

Section 355(e) is a weaker constraint than it sounds. At a ~$6.1B market capitalization, a stock-funded target of roughly $4–5B could be absorbed before the seller’s holders neared 50% of the combined company, and cash deals are unconstrained. At 2.39x leverage the balance sheet binds long before the tax rule does, and the restriction lapses in July 2028 regardless.

What they buy matters far more than whether they can.

The channel conflict is forming without any acquisition. Sell My Car — the full-service cash-offer product named in the growth plan — puts CARFAX into buying vehicles from consumers, competing with its own dealer customers and with CarMax and Carvana. Immaterial as revenue today; worth watching as positioning.

Every deal here carries an unusually high opportunity cost. At 13x free cash flow, the buyback is the largest per-share lever available, and an acquisition has to clear that hurdle.

If competitors combine

Two data companies merging does not produce a rival — adding two partial archives does not yield 38 billion records or 177,000 sources. A data company merging with a touchpoint owner might.

The combination that would matter most is Cox Automotive acquiring AutoCheck. Cox already owns Manheim — roughly 7 to 8 million vehicles a year across 111 auction locations, serving more than 80,000 dealers — plus Kelley Blue Book, Autotrader, Dealertrack and vAuto. What it lacks is vehicle history. Manheim physically handles and inspects vehicles at a scale nobody else does: condition data generated at source, of a type CARFAX does not hold. Attaching the number-two history product to that would create the first competitor built on a flow CARFAX does not touch.

A CDK–Reynolds & Reynolds combination is the other: joint control of the dealer system of record, where service data originates, and therefore leverage over CARFAX’s inputs. Antitrust would be difficult.

Internationally the risk is cheaper and nearer. Europe is fragmented across national players. A European roll-up would cost a fraction of a US deal and could pre-empt the Germany and France expansion before CARFAX arrives. Of everything here, this is the one that could happen quietly and soon.

What electric vehicles do to the data — and this one is not hypothetical

Two things happen at once. The traditional record thins: no oil changes, no transmission service, no exhaust, far less brake wear under regenerative braking — and independent shops, a major feed, largely do not service EVs. And the data that matters most moves: for a used electric vehicle the dominant question is battery state of health, which lives in the battery management system and telemeters to the manufacturer. It appears in no title record, police report or independent shop invoice.

This has already happened at the largest used-car retailer in America. CarMax provides battery-health information on its own site through a partnership with Recurrent — a battery range score on EVs in inventory, clicking through to a full Recurrent report. Not through CARFAX. Recurrent’s chief executive frames the ambition plainly: “Battery health is the new odometer for electric vehicles.”

Mobility Global’s own filings describe no CARFAX product addressing used-EV battery condition. Electric vehicles appear throughout the document as a B2B forecasting theme — battery supply chains, EV and software-defined-vehicle player forecasts — and not once as a CARFAX data gap. A competitor has taken the EV data layer at the largest retail buyer, and the disclosure does not acknowledge it.

Four things blunt this, and together they are substantial:

1. Scale and timing. Used EVs reached a record 2.8% of the US used market in April 2026, against a fleet whose average age is about 13 years. New EV sales fell 28% year on year in Q1 2026, so the used pipeline is filling more slowly than previously assumed. The market CARFAX serves stays overwhelmingly internal-combustion well into the 2030s.
2. It is cheaply buyable, and CARFAX has the distribution a specialist lacks. This is the same “own the source” logic as the acquisition question above.
3. The OEM relationship already exists. CARFAX takes feeds from 36 OEM certified pre-owned programs. The premise that manufacturers will not share data is weaker than it looks — they already do, where it suits them.
4. Battery degradation is proving mild. Recurrent’s data has EVs retaining roughly 97% of range after three years and showing a 0.3% replacement rate — which limits how much value the missing datapoint actually withholds.

One counterweight we would not lean on: regulation. Only Massachusetts and Maine have strong telematics access laws; the Massachusetts case remained pending as of early 2026 with manufacturers citing it to defer compliance, and the federal REPAIR Act has been before Congress since 2025 without passing. Mandated access may come, but nothing in the current record supports treating it as likely or near.

The version of this risk that concerns us most is none of the above. If the manufacturer holds the data, the manufacturer can become the substitute — a certified-used program with a battery-health guarantee replaces third-party information with a factory warranty. That is already how certified pre-owned works, and electric vehicles push more of the used market toward it, a channel where a history report matters less regardless of who owns the data.

The structural summary. CARFAX’s sourcing compounds and is contractually secure; the archive is not the fragile part. What is exposed is the mix of data that determines a used vehicle’s value. Electric vehicles are less mechanical and more vertically integrated, so the categories CARFAX dominates matter less on those cars — from a 2.8% base, over a horizon measured in decades. A real risk with a slow fuse, which is the hardest kind to price and the easiest to ignore.

External sources for this section. Manheim scale: Cox Automotive. Used-EV share and new-EV sales decline: Electrek, March 2026. Battery degradation data and the CarMax partnership: Recurrent, CarMax, Green Car Reports. Telematics right-to-repair status: Nelson Mullins, Auto Care Association. All Mobility Global figures are from its own filings.

Tail scenarios

Low probability, high magnitude, short of black swan.

Upside tails

1. The buyback starts early and is used properly. At a 7.6% free-cash-flow yield against a 4.1% after-tax cost of debt, sustained repurchases would retire roughly a quarter of the company over five years. Management has guided this to begin in 2027. Pulling it forward, or sizing it at the top of the 75%-of-FCF framework, is worth more to per-share value than any operating improvement available here — and it is entirely within management’s control.

2. The register settles and the multiple re-rates. Cumulative volume since the spin is 119% of shares outstanding in 36 sessions, and the last ten alone traded 17% of the company. This is not yet held by the people who will hold it. Closing half the gap to TransUnion and Morningstar — the closest comparable businesses — is worth about $5 a share, and requires nothing from the company except two or three uneventful quarters.

3. Adjacencies CARFAX has the right to win. The data set supports products it does not yet sell at scale: insurance underwriting and claims (vehicle history is directly predictive of risk), service-lifecycle marketing to the 53M+ car-care user base, residual-value and lease-return analytics for lenders and OEMs, and fleet and commercial-vehicle history, which is structurally similar and largely unaddressed. Each uses an asset already paid for — the marginal cost of a new product on an existing data set is close to zero, which is why incremental margin in this business can exceed the average.

4. It gets bought after July 2028. See above. Precedent at $8.3B, and a buyer set that is broad rather than narrow.

Downside tails

1. The second-half margin is a trend, not a floor. Guidance implies 38.4% in the second half against 41.8% delivered in the first. If standalone costs settle materially below 39% rather than at it, the DCF at 37.5% terminal margin gives $27.18 — and a genuine deterioration below that compounds, because it would signal the standalone cost base was underestimated rather than simply phased.

2. Cash conversion disappoints. The cash-tax premium of $80–90M above the GAAP provision is new, disclosed, and structural for as long as the intangible amortization runs. If conversion settles at 58% rather than 62%, that is $2.30 a share. One quarter of standalone data is not enough to know.

3. OEM telematics bypasses the archive. The slow, real risk set out in the value-chain section: connected vehicles generate service and incident data that the manufacturer owns. CARFAX’s position depends on receiving feeds it does not control. Nothing here changes inside three years, and it does not touch the existing twelve-year-average fleet — but it is the one development that would attack the moat at its source rather than at its product.

4. The used-car cycle turns. Two-thirds of revenue is tied to used-vehicle transactions. Volumes are cyclical and this business has never reported through a downturn as a standalone company. Subscription revenue at 82% cushions it, but it does not immunize it — dealers cut subscriptions when they sell fewer cars.

5. An acquisition inside the 355(e) window. Management has an unlevered-ish balance sheet by data-business standards and a stated growth ambition. Paper-funded M&A before July 2028 risks the tax-free status of the separation, and cash-funded M&A at 2.39x leverage would consume the capacity that makes the buyback case work. Either would be a worse use of capital than the shares.

What would change this view

Investment Scorecard

Scored on the five weighted dimensions set out in our methodology.

Grade: A (4.35), unchanged

The July 31 regrade took this from A+ (4.60) to A (4.35) on the margin correction. Four years of segment history and a first standalone quarter do not change that conclusion, which is worth stating plainly, because a longer record usually revises a spinco’s story downward rather than confirming it.

The adjustments net out exactly. Financial Profile 4.0 held — the four-year record is better than the three-year one, but the cash-tax premium and the second-half margin step are new negatives. Competitive Position 5.0 held. Management & Governance 4.0 held, on a fuller reading than the pre-spin grade had: the executive and board biographies are materially stronger than a “spun-out division” reading assumes, which offsets the restated margin rather than being outweighed by it.

The longer record here confirms the story rather than revising it, and the grade reflects that.

What would take it to A+: two quarters at or above 39% margin with buybacks underway. What would take it down: evidence that the standalone cost base was underestimated rather than merely phased.

Initial Assessment — August 5, 2026

Consolidates the July 31, 2026 monthly report and the August 5, 2026 assessment — both written against the July 31 close. This is a point-in-time record and is not updated as the price moves — see Current Stats above for the latest figures.

What happened

Mobility Global separated from S&P Global on July 1, 2026 in the cleanest structure this site tracks: a 1-for-1 distribution, 100% distributed with S&P Global retaining nothing, 294,821,318 shares, NYSE-listed. No retained stake means no overhang on either side, and the price action showed it — a shallow, fast dip to $19.26 on day 5, then a grind back to $20.38 by month-end. That is -3.8% against the $21.19 Day-1 close and +5.8% off the low.

For a separation this large, that is an unremarkable debut — which is itself the point. The forced-selling trough the framework predicts arrived early and was mild. Parent SPGI is -0.7% over the same window; neither side was punished.

The number that changed the thesis

The substantive event of this month was not the price. It was the discovery that the margin figure this profile had carried since October 2025 was wrong — “≈60% EBITDA margins” against an actual 40.6%. The full restatement is in the correction notice at the top of this page.

What matters for the forward view is that the error ran in one direction and touched everything downstream. The valuation ladder, the peer comparison against Verisk, the acquisition price range and the bull case were all built on a margin the company does not earn. The grade fell A+ (4.60) → A (4.35) as a result — a data correction, not a business deterioration.

The business is unchanged. CARFAX is still a near-monopoly with 40 years of irreplaceable data, 53M+ car-care users, 40,000+ dealer customers and 100% of the top-40 OEMs. Revenue grew 8.5% in FY2025. What changed is the price we think it deserves, and the honest answer is a good business at a reasonable multiple rather than a great business at an extraordinary discount.

What the market is actually paying

At $20.38 the market cap is $6.01B; with ≈$1.8B of net debt that is an enterprise value of ≈$7.81B, or 11.0x adjusted EBITDA, 13.0x free cash flow and a 7.7% FCF yield.

Two things follow. First, the stock trades below the 18x “conservative” floor the pre-spin ladder assumed, on an EBITDA base a quarter smaller than that ladder used — the mispricing the A+ implied simply is not there, but neither is the stock expensive. Second, the capital-return story is more interesting than the valuation. Management has committed to returning 75%+ of free cash flow, of which roughly six-sevenths is repurchases; the headline dividend will yield only 0.6-0.9% because it is set against a GAAP net income that $310M of intangible amortization suppresses. Total shareholder yield is 6.2-6.3%.

Discounting total distributions rather than dividends alone implies $24-42 per share. The current quote sits below every cell in that grid.

The one thing to underwrite

The balance sheet starts offside its own target. ≈$2B of notes — raised to fund a ≈$1.9B payment to S&P Global on the way out the door — is 2.81x gross leverage against a stated <2.5x ceiling. It self-cures at the guided growth rate (2.57x in 2026, 2.35x in 2027) without repaying a dollar, and having committed 75%+ of FCF to shareholders, management has structurally chosen to grow into the target rather than pay down principal.

That is the right call while the shares trade at a 7.7% FCF yield against a ≈4.1% after-tax cost of debt — buying stock earns more than retiring debt. It is worth naming plainly all the same: this is a SpinCo that was levered up to write its parent a cheque, and the leverage math only works if the growth shows up.

What to watch

First standalone results land August 7, 2026 — before market open, with a call at 8:00am ET. That print replaces the estimates this analysis rests on with actuals: real standalone margins, the actual interest expense on the new notes, the stand-up cost run-rate, and possibly the first dividend declaration. Everything above should be re-read against it.

Beyond that: whether the buyback actually begins in 2027 as guided, and whether the acquisition interest the pre-spin analysis assumed materialises now that a public price exists. At ≈$7.81B, a takeout is a far smaller cheque than the $18-28B the earlier work imagined.

From the July 31 report

First report after the July 1 separation. The margin correction lands here, and with it the regrade. Prices as of the July 31, 2026 close.

Trading since the spin

The anticipated forced-selling window did materialise, but it was shallow and brief — a 9% drawdown over five sessions, then a grind back. The clean, zero-retained-stake structure meant no overhang on either side.

The correction

FY2025 revenue $1,750M, adjusted EBITDA $711M (40.6% margin), free cash flow $461M (26.3% margin, 65% conversion), GAAP net income $220M. The ≈60% margin this profile had carried since October 2025 is not supported by the Investor Day financials; the ≈$1.6B revenue figure was FY2024’s $1,613M. Revenue growth was 8.6% in 2024 and 8.5% in 2025 — the one figure the earlier analysis had right. The full restatement, including the net-income bridge, is in the correction notice at the top of this page.

Valuation on the corrected figures

Market cap $6.01B on 294,821,318 shares; net debt ≈$1.8B; enterprise value ≈$7.81B. That is 11.0x EV/adjusted EBITDA, 12.0x EV/GAAP EBITDA, 13.0x P/FCF and a 7.7% FCF yield. Pro-forma standalone earnings are lower than the $220M carve-out figure suggests: that number carried only $13M of net interest, whereas ≈$2B of notes at an investment-grade 5.0-6.0% coupon implies $100-120M annually. On FY2025 EBIT of $339M at the guided 25-27% tax rate, pro-forma net income is roughly $162-177M ($0.55-0.60 EPS) — before $75-100M of one-time stand-up costs over 12-18 months.

Capital returns

Management’s framework is 20-25% of GAAP net income as dividends, buybacks beginning in 2027, and 75%+ of free cash flow returned annually. The dividend will be small — a 0.6-0.9% yield — because a payout set against net income distributes only about a tenth of the cash this business generates while $310M of amortization suppresses reported earnings. Total distributions run ≈$1.26-1.29 per share, a 6.2-6.3% total shareholder yield, roughly six-sevenths of it repurchases. A dividend discount model values only the dividend and returns $2.44-5.50 per share — 12-27% of the price — which is a verdict on the instrument, not the security. Discounting total distributions implies $24-42 per share, with the current quote below every cell in that grid.

Sustained repurchases at 13.0x FCF earn 7.7% against ≈4.1% after-tax for retiring debt, and would retire roughly 24% of the share count over five years (295M → ≈223M). Heavier deleveraging produces lower per-share value while the stock trades below intrinsic value.

Grade change: A+ (4.60) → A (4.35)

Grade Change: A+ (4.60) → A (4.35). The trigger is the data correction. At 40.6% the business still clears the methodology’s “30%+ margins” test for a 5, but it fails the “double-digit growth” test and starts levered near its own target — squarely the 4 band. Nothing about the competitive position, management or acquisition appeal changed.

Recommendation: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ BUY. The regrade lowers the label, not the conclusion. It is a reasonably priced compounder rather than the extraordinary mispricing the A+ implied.

Next catalyst

⚠️ First standalone quarterly results, August 7, 2026 (before market open; 8:00am ET call with CEO Bill Eager and CFO Matt Calderone). First hard data on standalone margins, actual interest expense on the new notes, stand-up cost run-rate, and any initial dividend declaration.

⚠️ Correction (July 31, 2026) — read before the analysis below

Every section of this page written before July 31, 2026 describes Mobility Global as having “≈60% EBITDA margins” on “$1.6B of revenue.” Both figures are wrong, and the valuation work built on them is therefore wrong. The company’s Investor Day financials (June 1, 2026 deck, slides 11 / 94 / 108–111) show FY2025 revenue of $1,750M and adjusted EBITDA of $711M — a 40.6% margin, not ≈60%. The ≈$1.6B revenue figure was FY2024’s $1,613M. The gap between a 40.6% EBITDA margin and a 12.6% net margin is $310M of D&A, largely amortization of intangibles from the legacy IHS Markit merger.

($M)	FY2023	FY2024	FY2025
Total revenue	1,485	1,613	1,750
GAAP EBITDA	546	608	649 (37.1% margin)
Adjusted EBITDA	598	658	711 — 40.6% margin
Free cash flow	375	412	461 (26.3% margin)
GAAP net income	—	—	220

Consequences: the grade was downgraded A+ (4.60) → A (4.35) on the data correction — not on any business deterioration — and the implied-valuation ladder in Financials & Valuation below (18x/22x/28x on a $960M EBITDA estimate → $17B/$21B/$27B EV) is void. Actual enterprise value at the July 31 close is ≈$7.81B, or 11.0x EV/adjusted EBITDA. The recommendation remains BUY.

Corrections on this site are additive: the prose below is left exactly as published, because it is the record of what each report said at the time. Read it with this correction in hand. The restated analysis is in Analysis — July 31, 2026 at the foot of this page and in the July 31, 2026 report.