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Opinions Paul Harris, CFA
DuPont de Nemours Inc.DDBUY ON WEAKNESSDec 27, 2012
Stock 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.
Not expensive at about 12X earnings. Reasonable dividend yield. One of the issues they are facing is that in 2013 margins are going to be lower because they are having really strong headwinds in their chemical business and also, they are doing a lot of capital expenditures, which will help grow their business longer-term but will hurt operating earnings in the next little while. Feels you could get it cheaper at $39-$40.