Credit rating firm offers value and growth

Article Excerpt

DUN & BRADSTREET CORP. $82 (New York symbol DNB; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 40.9 million; Market cap: $3.4 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.0; Dividend yield: 2.0%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.dnb.com) began operating in 1841 and is now the world’s largest provider of credit reports on individual companies. Its database contains information on 220 million businesses in over 200 countries. Companies use these reports to make lending and purchasing decisions and to cut their credit losses. The company gets 63% of its revenue from credit reports. The remaining 37% comes from other information products, including software to help businesses manage customer data and websites. Why Dun & Bradstreet is different We recently recommended that investors sell Moody’s (New York symbol MCO) and McGraw-Hill Companies (New York symbol MHP), which owns Standard & Poor’s. That’s because the U.S. Justice Department has accused Standard & Poor’s of failing to downgrade mortgage-backed securities even though it knew home prices were falling and…