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Opinions Norman Levine
DuPont de Nemours Inc.DDBUYMay 20, 2011
Norman LevineStock price when the opinion was issued
As of Jun 18, 2026. Market Open.
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They just finished a $3.25 billion share buyback and will start a $2 billion one. They've retired 7.6% of their shares so far this year. All told they will reduce shares by 13.5%, the 3rd-biggest buyback on the S&P 500. If you feel interest rates will continue to rise, Dupont is too risk; Dupont has some cyclicality because it's exposed to autos. Overall, he likes Dupont.
DD operates in a cyclical industry and is now trading at 20x times' Forward P/E. In the last few years, DD did actively sell some of its non-core assets, and redeploy the proceeds into significant share repurchases. The balance sheet is okay, with net debt of $3.7B (the debt has gone down substantially due to the proceeds from asset sales mentioned) and net debt/EBITDA is around 1.1x, okay for a cyclical name. Based on consensus estimates, sales are expected to decline by 5% this year and then normalize to around 5% growth going forward. Given the aggressive buyback (the company even cuts the dividends to do more buybacks), DD is quite attractive, but, given the cyclicality of the business, we would size the position conversatively.
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This is in a tentative deal with Dow Chemical. DuPont was a bit of an MBA class analysis that was not run particularly well. Always a little bit of an underachiever. Nelson Peltz came, got some board seats and encouraged change. If they get together with Dow, we’ll see what comes out of it. He wouldn’t buy it at this point, simply because of the change that is going on, but he likes this scenario.
