Acquisition doubles Cintas

Article Excerpt

CINTAS CORP. $267 (Nasdaq symbol CTAS; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 104.5 million; Market cap: $27.9 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 4.1; Dividend yield: 0.8%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.cintas.com) designs and makes uniforms, then sells them to businesses, mainly in North America. It also offers related products and services such as office cleaning and first-aid kits. The company continues to benefit from its $2.2 billion acquisition of rival uniform supplier G&K Services in March 2017. For its fiscal 2020 first quarter, ended August 31, 2019, Cintas’s revenue gained 6.7%, to $1.81 billion from $1.70 billion a year earlier. If you exclude acquisitions and foreign currency rates, revenue rose 8.3% in the quarter. Rising U.S. employment continues to spur demand for the company’s uniforms and other business services. Disregarding costs to integrate the new operations, Cintas earned $2.32 a share in the quarter—a jump of 20.2% from $1.93. The company now expects to earn between $8.47 and $8.57 a share in fiscal 2020. The stock,…