merger

Industrial and consumer products giant 3M has now completed the merger of its food safety operations with Neogen. The deal is part of 3M’s strategy to focus on its more-promising businesses. The next step will come in 2023 when it spins off its Health Care operations as a separate firm.


We feel these moves improve 3M’s long-term prospects....

APPLE INC., $149.70, Nasdaq symbol AAPL, remains a hold.

New COVID-19 lockdowns at the company’s assembly factory in Zhengzhou, China will slow the production of its new iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max smartphones. That facility makes roughly 80% of those premium models.

As a result, Apple will probably produce 87 million of these devices in 2022, down from its earlier forecast of 90 million.

The shortage comes at a bad time for Apple, as iPhone sales usually peak ahead of the busy Christmas shopping season....

As we’ve often said, we think spinoffs are about as close as you can get to a sure thing in investing. Statistics show that after a company sets up one (or more) of its businesses as a separate publicly traded entity and “spins it off,” the shares of both the parent and the spinoff generally do better than comparable companies for a number of years, if not decades.

We were so impressed by the proven long-term benefit of spinoff investing that we launched an investment advisory around it—our Spinoffs & Takeovers newsletter.

Of course, this “spinoff effect” can take months or years to show itself....

SUNCOR ENERGY INC., $48.70, Toronto symbol SU, remains a buy.

The company is Canada’s largest integrated oil firm, with major projects in the Alberta oil sands. Suncor also operates four refineries (three in Canada and one in Colorado), along with 1,875 Petro-Canada gas stations.

With the June 2022 payment, Suncor increased your quarterly dividend by 11.9%....

A key aspect of our Successful Investor approach is looking for stocks with hidden or underappreciated assets. Those assets include, for example, undervalued real estate holdings as well as the high research spending of technology companies.

Hidden assets also come in the form of businesses that a company can sell or spin off to unlock value for investors....

ALPHABET INC., Nasdaq symbols GOOG $96.58 [class C: non-voting] and GOOGL $96.29 [class A: one vote per share], is your #1 Aggressive Buy for 2022.

The stock is the parent of Google, the world’s leading Internet search engine. It gets most of its revenue from online advertising.

In addition to search, Google also offers a variety of other services and products....

ORACLE CORPORATION, $63.29, symbol ORCL on Nasdaq, is one of the world’s largest software providers. It started in database software but has since branched out to enterprise resource planning, human capital management, customer relationship management, and more....

These two leading U.S. telecoms are aggressively expanding their ultrafast 5G (fifth generation) wireless networks. 5G users tend to spend more than current 4G users, and that extra cash flow should support dividend increases over the next several years for investors in both firms.


AT&T INC....

Molson Coors now expects merger savings from its acquisition of MillerCoors to save $700 million between 2017 and 2019 and it has formed a joint venture with HEXO to develop a cannabis-infused beverage.

TAMARACK VALLEY ENERGY LTD., $3.54, symbol TVE on Toronto, is an oil and gas exploration and production firm in Western Canada. The company focuses on Alberta and Saskatchewan, and its output is 74% oil and 26% gas.

On September 12, 2022, the company announced it would pay $1.4 billion in cash and stock to acquire Deltastream Energy Corp....