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Opinions David Burrows
DuPont de Nemours Inc.DDBUYSep 09, 2014
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.
We have gone from a market between 2000 and 2012 that was for price setters. Producers of products that were in short supply were able to set prices. Price takers, that had to pay those higher prices were under pressure. Feels we have gone through a watershed over the last few years, where the price takers are doing much better because commodity producers are having a hard time setting price. Anybody buying commodities now are benefiting from the weakness in commodity prices. The chemical industry has been a huge beneficiary of the boom in oil/gas production in the US. He likes chemical industries as a whole. This is a great company in that they have been shedding the commodity chemical business and focusing on specialty chemicals, which are higher margins.