Updating Walmart Inc., Mondelez International Inc. and Visa Inc.

Article Excerpt

WALMART INC. $86 (www.walmart.com) plans to open FedEx Office outlets inside 500 of its 4,761 U.S. stores following a successful trial. Those outlets, staffed by FedEx employees, provide a variety of shipping and packaging services. They should also help draw more customers to Walmart’s stores. Buy. MONDELEZ INTERNATIONAL INC. $41 (www.mondelezinternational.com) makes cookies and crackers (Oreo, Ritz), chocolate bars (Cadbury, Toblerone), gum and candy (Trident, Chiclets) and Halls cough drops. In the fourth quarter of 2017, Mondelez’s sales rose 2.9%, to $7.0 billion from $6.8 billion a year earlier. If you exclude currency rates and businesses the company bought and sold, sales gained 2.4%. Thanks to a plan to improve efficiency, earnings per share jumped 29.5%, to $0.57 from $0.44. However, sales will likely remain sluggish as consumers switch to more healthful snacks. Hold. VISA INC. $117 (www.visa.com) operates the world’s largest electronic payments network. It can process over 65,000 credit, debit, prepaid and commercial transactions per second. The company recently raised its quarterly dividend by 7.7%, to $0.21 a..