Lower costs spur Maple Leaf

Article Excerpt

MAPLE LEAF FOODS INC. $35 (Toronto symbol MFI; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; Shares outstanding: 129.6 million; Market cap: $4.5 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 1.4; Dividend yield: 1.3%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.mapleleaffoods.com) sells fresh and prepared meats under the Maple Leaf and Schneider brands. The company continues to benefit from a recently completed restructuring plan. That mainly involved shifting meat production to newer, more-efficient plants. Thanks to those savings, Maple Leaf earned $0.33 a share in the first quarter of 2017. That’s up 17.9% from a pershare profit of $0.28 a year earlier. Sales improved 1.8% in the quarter, to $811.2 million from $796.9 million. That was partly due to an increase in fresh pork exports to Japan. Maple Leaf has jumped 19% in the past year, and now trades at a somewhat high 24.3 times the company’s projected 2017 earnings of $1.44 a share. Maple Leaf Foods is still a hold. hold…