Posted Jun 25th 2009 3:50PM by Steven Mallas
Filed under: Earnings reports, Campbell Soup (CPB), Kellogg Co (K), ConAgra Foods (CAG), Kraft Foods'A' (KFT)
Food processor
ConAgra (NYSE:
CAG), whose products share space at the supermarket with
Kraft (NYSE:
KFT),
Kellogg (NYSE:
K), and
Campbell Soup (NYSE:
CPB), is down in Thursday's afternoon trading by over 6% as I write this. The company released earnings for the fourth quarter earlier this morning. Sales increased 8% according to the
press release. Adjusted earnings from continuing operations came in at 41 cents per diluted share. This result benefited from an extra week.
The per-share profit compared very favorably to the 18 cents earned in last year's similar quarter. However, in terms of analyst expectations, the performance was relatively unimpressive. Earnings.com indicates that 41 cents is what the market was looking for.
Continue reading ConAgra only meets expectations, but is stock cheap?
Posted May 28th 2009 3:20PM by Steven Mallas
Filed under: Earnings reports, Kellogg Co (K), Kraft Foods'A' (KFT)
Heinz (NYSE: HNZ), whose supermarket colleagues include Kraft (NYSE: KFT) and Kellogg (NYSE: K), reported Q4 numbers earlier today. Can't say they were the stuff of a growth investor's dreams. Earnings per share came in at $0.55 versus $0.61 in Q4 of last year. The top line had trouble because of currency effects. Sales dropped over 5%. However, organic revenues increased over 5%. Unfortunately, volume decreased 2%. As can be seen, things aren't totally awesome at Heinz.
The company came in one penny ahead of expectations according to my earnings preview. Other sources say Heinz essentially met expectations. No matter what, management has its work cut it out for it in terms of offsetting currency woes and getting those volume stats on the rise.
Continue reading Heinz has a lackluster Q4
Posted May 27th 2009 3:00PM by Steven Mallas
Filed under: Earnings reports, Forecasts, Campbell Soup (CPB), Kellogg Co (K), Kraft Foods'A' (KFT)
Heinz (NYSE: HNZ) is set to report Q4 data before the opening bell on Thursday, May 28. How will the company do? And by that I mean, will it beat the earnings expectation?
In general, that's what the market looks for. Sometimes the market cares more about beating the analyst game than it does about profit growth. Might sound strange, but that's what you see from time to time. Of course, even when a company beats, it may not make much of a difference when it comes to price action (I'll get to that in the last paragraph).
I think Heinz will indeed beat on the bottom line. I'm going by recent history here. According to Earnings.com, Heinz is expected to report 54 cents per share tomorrow. The company went beyond the call in the first three quarters of its fiscal year. Why miss on the last quarter of the year? I think the trend is in on this one.
Continue reading Earnings preview: Will Heinz surprise the market?
Posted May 23rd 2009 4:10PM by Steven Mallas
Filed under: Earnings reports, Campbell Soup (CPB), Kellogg Co (K), General Mills (GIS), Kraft Foods'A' (KFT)
Campbell Soup (NYSE: CPB) served up a tasty broth of estimate-beating soup this past Friday. According to Trey Thoelcke's earnings preview, the market was looking for $0.42 per share and $1.8 billion in net sales. Well, according to Jon Ogg's coverage, Campbell delivered $0.48 per share and roughly $1.7 billion in net sales. So, revenues came in somewhat soft, but the bottom line was a success as far as Wall Street was concerned.
One thing Campbell investors want to look at is the gross margin. This metric tells you how the company is doing in terms of cost control. The press release stated that gross margin went up to an adjusted 40.3%. Last year at this time, management reported a gross margin of 38.6%. Pricing helped out, as well as efficiency initiatives. It's cool to see that Campbell can leverage price actions to propel its gross margin. It shows the power of its brand equity.
Continue reading Campbell Soup goes beyond expectations in Q3 -- buy/sell?
Posted May 4th 2009 10:00AM by Jim Cramer
Filed under: PepsiCo (PEP), Market matters, Caterpillar (CAT), Abbott Laboratories (ABT), Kellogg Co (K), Clorox Co (CLX), Colgate-Palmolive (CL), Hershey Co (HSY), General Mills (GIS), Kimberly-Clark (KMB), Lilly (Eli) (LLY), Freep't McMoRan Copper (FCX), Cramer on BloggingStocks
TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer suggests watching certain staples for hints that the flight to riskier plays is losing steam. Will the endless "beta" trade out of slow-moving, "safe" drugs and foods and into companies like
Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE:
FCX) (
Cramer's Take) and
Caterpillar (NYSE:
CAT) (
Cramer's Take) ever end?
I think it won't end here, that's for certain, unless your staples stock goes to a 5% yield and the economy's macro data show a further breakdown. If we get some retail sales that are awful and some employment numbers that show a further trashing, then we are going to see a momentary blip up in stocks like
Pepsi (NYSE:
PEP) (
Cramer's Take) and
Clorox (NYSE:
CLX) (
Cramer's Take), but perhaps no more than that.
Continue reading Cramer on BloggingStocks: 'Tells' of the beta trade
Posted Apr 28th 2009 4:20PM by Tom Barlow
Filed under: Rants and raves, Competitive strategy, Kellogg Co (K), General Mills (GIS)
The cereal wars have found a new battlefield, and the nation's hungry stand to benefit from the conflict. Both Kellogg (NYSE: K) and General Mills (NYSE: GIS) have agreed to make contributions to the not-for-profit organization Feeding America (formerly known as Second Harvest), which supplies food to more than 25 million Americans each year. But not all contributions are equal.
Kellogg is donating one entire day's production, around 55 million servings, to the organization. It places the value of this donation at $10 million. This figures out to $.18 cents per serving, about half of the shelf price. Starting June 17th, the company will also send you $5 of coupons for every $5 you donate to Feeding America.
Continue reading Kellogg feeds the hungry, General Mills its ego
Posted Apr 20th 2009 10:30AM by Jim Cramer
Filed under: PepsiCo (PEP), Ford Motor (F), General Motors (GM), Market matters, Walgreen Co (WAG), Citigroup Inc. (C), Target Corp. (TGT), Brinker Intl (EAT), Penney (J.C.) (JCP), Abbott Laboratories (ABT), American Express (AXP), AutoNation Inc (AN), AutoZone Inc (AZO), Centex Corp (CTX), Charles Schwab Corp (SCHW), Kellogg Co (K), Hershey Co (HSY), Sears Holdings (SHLD), CVS Corp (CVS), Gap Inc (GPS), General Mills (GIS), Procter and Gamble (PG), Yum Brands (YUM), Kohl's Corp (KSS), Johnson Controls (JCI), Gilead Sciences (GILD), Nordstrom, Inc (JWN), Unilever ADR (UL), Jones Apparel Group (JNY), Cramer on BloggingStocks, Recession, E*TRADE (ETFC)
TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer is seeing signs of a coming boom, but he's still being cautious here. If you had to define the early cycle, if you had to outline what stocks should be soaring coming out of a recession into a boom and which ones should be faltering, you would have to say the action in this market in the last month is the quintessential behavioral pattern.
What are the components of the early cycle? First, it's the homebuilders. As is typical coming out of a recession, the stocks precede the bottom of housing. That's exactly what's happening with the lowest permits and highest affordability and best mortgage rates and massive inventory. Everywhere, except on Wall Street reporting, the bottom is bursting out. When you read the lead story in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer, and it is all about the thousands of prospective homebuyers heading south to pick up condos and homes for half of what they were worth two years ago -- or even less -- and you know that virtually no one has broken ground in the Sunshine State in a year, you can bet that the bottom's actually behind us. This housing market has wiped out all but the most stable private builders and even the public ones are merging as we know from
Pulte (NYSE:
PHM) (
Cramer's Take) and
Centex (NYSE:
CTX) (
Cramer's Take). So, in the next cycle, you can see some profitability developing year over year even though the new homes don't have much margin because the foreclosed homes next door are going for a song. And don't believe this won't change the dynamic of future foreclosures. In most areas, rent is higher than the interest on mortgages, so you will find that second or third job needed to stay in your home. The incentive structure's radically different than a year ago.
Continue reading Cramer on BloggingStocks: The seductive pull of the early cycle
Posted Apr 16th 2009 12:40PM by Joseph Lazzaro
Filed under: Kellogg Co (K), Stocks to Buy
Regular readers know that my investment bias here is toward large-cap companies with demonstrated business models and a competitive advantage in established markets, preferably with a favorable, global trend as a support. And when you can combine these traits with defensive stock qualities, you're two steps ahead, which is why cereal giant
Kellogg (NYSE:
K) is worth a review.
The market sell-off and tumult of 2008 spared almost no stocks, and Kellogg took a beating as well, with investors driving shares down to the $35-range from $60.
Continue reading Kellogg is a defensive play with growth potential
Posted Mar 20th 2009 10:10AM by Jim Cramer
Filed under: Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Coca-Cola (KO), PepsiCo (PEP), Intel (INTC), Market matters, Johnson and Johnson (JNJ), Kellogg Co (K), Goldman Sachs Group (GS), General Mills (GIS), Oracle Corp (ORCL), Nucor Corp (NUE), QUALCOMM Inc (QCOM), Texas Instruments (TXN), BHP Billiton Ltd ADR (BHP), Freep't McMoRan Copper (FCX), Cramer on BloggingStocks
TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says this market is short-term overbought -- any other reasons to buy can wait. The playbook says, "Buy weak-dollar plays." But does that mean only weak-dollar commodity plays, as in flee-out-of-dollar-into-oil plays? Or weak-dollar plays like
Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:
JNJ) (
Cramer's Take) and
General Mills (NYSE:
GIS) (
Cramer's Take)? Or weak-dollar plays like gold? Or tech plays because
Intel (NASDAQ:
INTC) (
Cramer's Take) and
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:
HPQ) (
Cramer's Take) are hugely international?
Or do you bother doing anything at all up here because we are plus-seven on the oscillator and every time we have gotten this overbought in this market, we have come crashing down?
Continue reading Cramer on BloggingStocks: Lock in some profits
Posted Mar 16th 2009 5:10PM by Steven Mallas
Filed under: Earnings reports, Forecasts, Wal-Mart (WMT), Campbell Soup (CPB), Kellogg Co (K), General Mills (GIS), Kraft Foods'A' (KFT)
General Mills (NYSE: GIS), a cereal manufacturer whose colleagues at the supermarket include Kellogg (NYSE: K), Kraft (NYSE: KFT), and Campbell Soup (NYSE: CPB), is all set to report earnings on Wednesday, March 18. This will be for the third quarter, and according to the following source, analysts are expecting $0.88 per share. It won't be an impressive performance if General Mills merely meets expectations. In the previous year's Q3, the company did $0.87 per share. Obviously, $0.88 wouldn't be much in terms of growth.
Continue reading Earnings preview: Will General Mills top estimates?
Posted Mar 13th 2009 3:30PM by Mark Fightmaster
Filed under: Kellogg Co (K)
A while back, I took a look at the fact that
Kellogg's (NYSE:
K) would not renew its sponsorship of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps -- thanks to "Bonggate." I saw an article earlier this week, an article that was brought to my attention by my hero Darren Rovell over on
his blog, that K's decision benefited the San Francisco Food Bank.
As long as someone needing food in the San Francisco area is not adverse to a picture of Michael Phelps (sans bong) on their Corn Flakes, they will find their bounty at the San Francisco Food Bank. According to
this article, K donated nearly 2 tons of cereal to the food bank - reportedly from their Portland, Oregon distribution center. Rovell was told that the cereal firm is eligible for a tax deduction in the realm of $15,000 for the donation.
Gayle Keck, of the San Francisco Food Bank stated, "Though Kellogg's and their star spokesman hit a patch of rough water, San Francisco's hungry just got thrown a life preserver." While full of bad puns, the statement is accurate and piqued my interest in K's performance (which is why we are looking at a food firm in JockStocks).
Continue reading JockStocks: Kellogg's makes a Phelps-related donation
Posted Feb 11th 2009 9:50AM by Jim Cramer
Filed under: Wal-Mart (WMT), Intel (INTC), Market matters, Kellogg Co (K), Procter and Gamble (PG), Wells Fargo (WFC), Cramer on BloggingStocks
TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says it's overdone, but Tuesday's fall makes sense. We looked so great Friday. We looked so terrible yesterday. Why is that?
The shorts covered Friday ahead of the bank plan. They knew there was nothing that Tim Geithner could say, not after the buildup, that would keep them from rampaging after, but they had to have the ammo, and they didn't want to have to scramble and double-short.
In other words, they took profits on Friday, and then they came in flying yesterday. They came in with everything, every double-short instrument and every put that could be purchased on the usual suspects, plus they pushed down the S&P and they went after the staples with a vengeance.
Continue reading Cramer on BloggingStocks: Understand the selling
Posted Feb 6th 2009 10:55AM by Zac Bissonnette
Filed under: Kellogg Co (K)
When the picture of Michael Phelps inhaling from a bong first began appearing on the internet, Mark Fightmaster
wrote that "It appears that the sponsors are going to stand by their man, from Speedo to Parenting magazine."
Visa said that it had "spoken with Michael and he has expressed regret for the situation, has committed to being accountable and improving his judgment in the future [...] We intend to support him as he looks to move forward."
But there is a defector from Phelps' camp.
Kellogg Co. (NYSE:
K) has
elected not to renew Phelps's contract that expires at the end of the month.
Continue reading Michael Phelps loses deal with Kellogg
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