Money and Finance
- Semi Recent Buys
I've been a bit lax in announcing my purchases over the last 1-1.5 weeks and haven't had the free time to get a post written up. Well, that changes today. I recently added to my positions in both Baxter International and Proctor & Gamble....
- Recent Buy
With the early morning market selloff today, I pulled the trigger and added to my position in McDonald's. I picked up 25 more shares for $88.35. At the current dividend payout of $2.80 per share annually, my YOC for this purchase is 3.16%. This purchase...
- December Dividend Update
Time for my December dividend update, what a year it's been! My dividend total for the month of December was $285.71 which is a 34% improvement over last year but a 5.6% decrease from last quarter. The decrease in dividends this month was due to Walmart...
- Recent Buy - Unilever (ul)
It's that time again where I make my monthly stock purchase. This time around I chose Unilever (UL). I made my purchase on Monday morning when the markets were in a free fall after some oil companies were downgraded and this allowed me to get in under...
- Recent Buy - Unilever
It's that time again where I make my monthly stock purchase. This time around I chose Unilever (UL). The markets had really been in a free fall for the last week or two but I never had the funds available to make a purchase till now. A bunch of stocks...
Money and Finance
Fighting for the next billion shoppers
Worth reading in light of today’s news on Bill Ackman’s big P&G investment.
The eternal battle between Procter & Gamble and Unilever is intensifying in the developing world
A TRIP to Paris is not usually a miserable way to celebrate your birthday, but so it was this year for Bob McDonald. On June 20th, as he turned 59, the chief executive of Procter & Gamble (P&G) for the past three years gave a faltering and apologetic speech at a conference there hosted by Deutsche Bank, in which he predicted lower-than-expected profits in the coming quarter for the world’s largest maker of household and personal-care products, and confessed to deep-seated problems at his firm both in innovation and the broader execution of its strategy.
The same day, at the Rio+20 Summit in Brazil, Paul Polman, a former colleague of Mr McDonald’s at P&G and now boss of Unilever, a big European rival, was on a high. With his firm’s share price close to record levels, he was able to enjoy hobnobbing with world leaders as he called on other companies to join Unilever in adopting a range of strategies designed to tackle climate change. How Mr McDonald must have wished he were in Rio de Janeiro, too, not least because he shares Mr Polman’s fondness for talking about his firm’s similar “purpose-driven” goal of creating a better, more sustainable world. Instead, in Paris, as P&G’s share price tumbled, doubts were being raised about the sustainability of Mr McDonald’s hold on his job.
The sense that Unilever is on the up, whereas P&G is in trouble, is the latest swing of a pendulum that only five years ago saw Unilever struggling as P&G soared. The slow economic recovery in America and the deteriorating economic situation in Europe have hit P&G harder, because it earns a greater share of its revenues in those developed markets and its brands tend to be more expensive than Unilever’s—and thus more likely to be sacrificed by consumers who are being forced to count the pennies.
Mr McDonald’s promise to make P&G’s pricing more competitive, and his plan to cut costs by $10 billion, could, if delivered, help to restore P&G’s fortunes in these markets at the expense of Unilever and other consumer-goods firms. But the biggest questions concern how P&G can improve its performance in the developing economies on which both it and Unilever depend for long-term growth.
- Semi Recent Buys
I've been a bit lax in announcing my purchases over the last 1-1.5 weeks and haven't had the free time to get a post written up. Well, that changes today. I recently added to my positions in both Baxter International and Proctor & Gamble....
- Recent Buy
With the early morning market selloff today, I pulled the trigger and added to my position in McDonald's. I picked up 25 more shares for $88.35. At the current dividend payout of $2.80 per share annually, my YOC for this purchase is 3.16%. This purchase...
- December Dividend Update
Time for my December dividend update, what a year it's been! My dividend total for the month of December was $285.71 which is a 34% improvement over last year but a 5.6% decrease from last quarter. The decrease in dividends this month was due to Walmart...
- Recent Buy - Unilever (ul)
It's that time again where I make my monthly stock purchase. This time around I chose Unilever (UL). I made my purchase on Monday morning when the markets were in a free fall after some oil companies were downgraded and this allowed me to get in under...
- Recent Buy - Unilever
It's that time again where I make my monthly stock purchase. This time around I chose Unilever (UL). The markets had really been in a free fall for the last week or two but I never had the funds available to make a purchase till now. A bunch of stocks...