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Topic: Wealth Management

Falling costs for rubber, oil and labour help tire giant

Investment Counsellor

Every Thursday we bring you one of our best U.S. stock picks. You get our specific recommendation on the stocks we profile, with a full explanation of how we arrived at our opinion. You will read about stocks making moves you should know about, most often from our newsletter on U.S. investing, Wall Street Stock Forecaster. This week the choice is from our newsletter on more aggressive investing, Stock Pickers Digest.

GOODYEAR TIRE & RUBBER CO. (Nasdaq symbol GT; www.goodyear.com ) is the world’s largest tire maker, with 52 plants in 22 countries.

In the three months ended December 31, 2014, Goodyear’s sales fell 9.1%, to $4.36 billion from $4.80 billion a year earlier. The rising U.S. dollar hurt the contribution of foreign sales, and Europe experienced one of the warmest winters on record, cutting winter tire demand.

Excluding one-time items, earnings fell 20.6%, to $166.0 million, or $0.59 a share, but that was still ahead of the consensus estimate of $0.58. A year earlier, Goodyear earned $209.0 million, or $0.74 a share.

Even with the weaker quarter, the company has reaffirmed its 2015 targets and expects its earnings to rise 10% to 15% this year. Goodyear’s costs— including for oil, rubber and other raw materials— keep falling.


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Best stocks: Goodyear crafts favourable labour deal with United Steelworkers

Goodyear now has a favourable labour deal with the United Steelworkers. This four-year deal, which covers about 8,000 employees at the company’s six U.S. plants, gives it flexibility to reduce staffing and continues medical-benefit cost sharing.

Goodyear also plans to build an efficient new facility in the U.S. that will manufacture higher-value-added tires. The plant should be completed between 2017 and 2019, and will have annual capacity of around six million tires.

Goodyear has also made several moves to enhance shareholder value, including raising its quarterly dividend by 20.0% in September 2014, to $0.06 a share from $0.05. It now yields 0.9%.

In addition, Goodyear plans to buy back up to $450 million worth of shares by the end of 2016, up from its earlier goal of $100 million.

The stock trades at just 8.3 times the $3.15 a share the company is forecast to earn in 2015.

Recommendation in Stock Pickers Digest: buy.

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