March 29, 2024

General Mills Reports First Rise in Sales Since 2011

Shares in the company, which makes Cheerios cereal, Progresso soups and Häagen-Dazs ice cream, rose 3 percent.

So far this year the shares are up 19 percent, with much of that coming after the deal by Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital for H. J. Heinz, which has generally raised valuations for many food companies, Jack Russo, an analyst at Edward Jones, said.

Mr. Russo said General Mills had been performing better in some of its challenged businesses, including cereal and yogurt.

“It looks like they’re reinvesting back into the business, which is always smart,” Mr. Russo said.

Excluding the benefit from the recent acquisitions of Yoki Alimentos in Brazil and Yoplait Canada, General Mills said sales by volume rose 1 percent. That is its first gain for that measure since the third quarter of fiscal 2011. Since then, the company had raised prices on many of its products to offset commodity cost inflation, which hurt sales.

“We think the consumer environment is improving,” the chief executive, Ken Powell, said in an interview on Wednesday. “As the price comparison moderates, the consumer is coming back.”

In the third quarter, ended on Feb. 24, net income rose to $398.4 million, or 60 cents a share, from $391.5 million, or 58 cents a share, a year earlier.

Excluding items like the costs of valuing commodity hedges and integrating recent acquisitions, earnings were 64 cents a share. Analysts on average had expected 57 cents, according to Thomson Reuters

Sales rose 7.5 percent to $4.43 billion. Excluding the acquisitions, sales grew 2 percent, with a percentage point coming from higher sales volume.

General Mills lifted its full-year outlook by only a penny a share because of higher costs in the current fourth quarter related to a comparatively higher tax rate and commodity costs. The company said fourth-quarter earnings would be lower than a year ago.

General Mills shares rose $1.19, to $47.61, on the New York Stock Exchange.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/business/general-mills-reports-first-rise-in-sales-since-2011.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Stocks Jump on Wall Street and in Europe

The surge in equities was a welcome change of direction from last week, when Wall Street lost more than 4 percent as markets reacted to rising borrowing costs for European governments and the failure by a Congressional committee in Washington to cut the budget deficit.

On Monday, investors took note that Germany and France have been discussing a deal to fast-track European budget and financial coordination. Analysts said that a deal that does not require renegotiating European Union treaties could reassure markets and bring skeptics on board to support the beleaguered euro.

 “We are seeing slightly better news out of Europe,” said Kate Warne, an investment strategist for Edward Jones. With last week’s oversold conditions, she added, “not surprisingly, there are a lot of attractive opportunities.”

With less than two hours left in the trading session, the Dow Jones industrial average of 30 blue-chip stocks zoomed ahead 2.7 percent. The Standard Poor’s 500-stock index, a wider gauge of market activity, jumped 2.9 percent, and the Nasdaq composite index leaped 3.4 percent.

There were reasons to be guarded about the significance of one day of gains, however strong. Monday’s surge had not pushed any of the major indexes into positive territory for the month or for the year.

It could also be a symptom of rising market volatility. The S.P. 500, for example, has closed up at least 4 percent eight times since the beginning of 2009, as the financial crisis set in, while it has fallen by 4 percent or more 10 times in that period.

Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for Standard Poor’s, said a high proportion of the index’s big swings have, in fact, occurred just since 2009: Of 164 times the index has moved by at least 4 percent since 1962, 26 have been in the last three years.

In Europe, stocks closed even higher. The Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, rose more than 5 percent. The CAC 40 in Paris was up 5.5 percent and the DAX, the German index, rose 4.6 percent. The FTSE 100 index in London gained 2.9 percent.

The bond market reflected investors’ growing risk appetite, with the securities usually considered safest falling in price. That meant yields on the United States 10-year Treasury rose 3 basis points to 2.95 percent. The comparable German bond rose 4 basis points to yield 2.29 percent. A basis point is one-hundredth of a percent.

Bonds of countries that have been seen as more risky rose in price. Italian 10-year bonds traded to yield 7.191 percent, down 4 basis points. Spanish 10-years were down 13 basis points at 6.50 percent.

“Talk that European countries were discussing bilateral treaties to strengthen fiscal ties across the current monetary union seems to be easing tensions somewhat this morning, and driving a sizable sell-off in the U.S. rates markets,” wrote Guy LeBas, the chief fixed-income strategist for Janney Montgomery Scott, in a research note.

Rumors of preparations for an International Monetary Fund bailout of Italy — even though quickly denied by the fund — also contributed to a sense that official efforts to stabilize the euro were progressing.

Alessandro Frigerio, a fund manager at R.M.J. Sgr in Milan, said he had been “almost certain” that the market would rally before Dec. 9, when European leaders hold a summit meeting to discuss the sovereign debt crisis.

“The market had been selling off for weeks on all the talk and rumors,” he said. “Now, we’re going to start getting some facts,” including more detail on the European Financial Stability Facility, the primary euro zone bailout vehicle, and Italy’s plans to pay down its debt.

“I don’t know how the market will react after it gets the facts, though,” he said. “We’ll see when we get them.”

Investors seemed to shrug off dire warnings from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and from Moody’s Investors Service, both of which warned that the euro zone problems were well on their way to becoming serious issues for non-euro countries.

They also ignored another dismal debt offering in Italy, where the Treasury needed to pay 7.20 percent to sell 12-year bonds, 2.7 percentage points above what it paid at a similar auction in October.

Earlier in Asia, stocks rose modestly.

Markets also took a measure of optimism from the National Retail Federation, which said Sunday that spending in the United States per shopper over the Thanksgiving weekend surged 9.1 percent over last year — the biggest increase since 2006 — to an average of almost $400 a customer.

On Wall Street, consumer stocks were up about 3 percent, while energy stocks were up more than 3.5 percent as oil prices rose, with Brent crude topping $100 a barrel. The dollar was lower against most other major currencies. The euro rose to $1.3336 from $1.3239 late Friday in New York.

Bettina Wassener contributed from Hong Kong.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/business/global/daily-stock-market-activity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

RIM Unveils an Upgrade, but Little Else

OTTAWA — Research in Motion unveiled little more than a rebranding of what it called its “next generation platform” for BlackBerry smartphones and tablet on Tuesday at its software developers’ conference, disappointing many analysts.

Mike Lazaridis, the company’s co-chief executive, said that the software, which it is now calling BBX, will combine traditional BlackBerry features with the QNX operating system which now operates the company’s unsuccessful tablet computer, the BlackBerry PlayBook. Neither he nor any other speakers from the company explained how BBX differed significantly from previous plans to shift BlackBerry phones to QNX next year.

“Underwhelming is a good word,” said Troy Crandall, an analyst with MacDougall, MacDougall and MacTier in Montreal. “It seems like its QNX with some added features.”

While the conference in San Francisco was intended mainly to persuade app developers to produce software for future BlackBerrys, it was also followed widely by Wall Street analysts and even BlackBerry owners who were considering replacing their phones over the next few months.

Many analysts were disappointed that RIM again failed to set a release date for the new BBX phones and by its decision to not display prototype versions to the developers. And the company did not, as was expected, offer any information about a long-promised software upgrade which will overcome several significant shortcomings in the PlayBook, particularly its inability to send or receive e-mail without being linked to a BlackBerry phone.

“With RIM, it’s always the next big thing that will pull them out of the doldrums,” said Bill Kreher, an analyst with Edward Jones who has a sell rating on RIM’s stock. “RIM continues to be on a path of over promising and under delivering. We lack confidence in RIM’s long-term viability in the phone category.”

Shares of RIM rose 81 cents, or 3.62 percent, to close at $23.21 Tuesday, though analysts could not explain why investors reacted positively. The company’s stock is down 65 percent since February.

The mood among developers at the meeting was more defensive than negative. RIM did fulfill one longstanding promise to developers by unveiling a set of software tools that will allow them to move apps onto BlackBerrys that were originally created for phones running Google’s Android operating system.

The hope, at least on RIM’s part, is that it will help narrow the great difference in the number of apps available for BlackBerry compared with Android devices or iPhone and iPads using Apple’s iOS. Apple, for example, has about 500,000 apps in its iTunes store while RIM offers less than one-tenth of that.

Dylan Schiemann, a developer at SitePen, a Web app consulting company, said that the BBX phones provided a better environment for creating apps and could turn around RIM’s fortunes. “Anyone that believes BlackBerry’s platform is completely dead should look at what Apple pulled off, going from near dead to No. 1,” he said, adding that until recently, with BlackBerry “the Web browser was horrible and the devices were too slow. It was a crippled environment.”

Isaac Naor, project and operations manager at Ping Mobile, said that he still believed that business users remained a “huge target audience” with great potential for RIM. But he still expressed some frustration with Tuesday’s presentations. While the company was mute about the timing of fixes for the PlayBook’s lack of e-mail, there were several presentations showing off its abilities in purely consumer apps like games.

Nick Bilton contributed reporting from San Francisco.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=923e1c6fb82396bfa9bbd05926a10b93