Nutrien Ltd. (TSXandNYSE:NTR) has received notice of an unsolicited “mini-tender” offer made by TRC Capital Investment Corporation (“TRC Capital”) to purchase up to 1,000,000 Nutrien shares, or approximately 0.20% of Nutrien’s outstanding shares, at a price of C$93.89 per share. The offering price represents a discount of 4.49% and 4.40%, respectively, to the closing prices of Nutrien shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange on April 4, 2023, the last trading day before the mini-tender offer was commenced.
Nutrien does not endorse TRC Capital’s unsolicited offer, has no association with TRC Capital or its offer, and does not recommend or endorse this unsolicited mini-tender offer. Shareholders are cautioned that TRC Capital’s offer has been made at a price below the current market price for the shares.
TRC Capital has made similar unsolicited mini-tender offers for shares of several other public companies. Mini-tender offers are designed to avoid many of the investor protections like disclosure and procedural protections applicable to most take-over bids and tender offers under Canadian and U.S. securities laws. Canadian securities regulatory authorities have expressed concerns about mini-tender offers, including the possibility that investors might tender to such offers without understanding the offer price relative to the actual market price of their securities. Comments from the Canadian securities regulatory authorities (the “CSA”) on mini tenders can be found in its notice at: http://www.osc.gov.on.ca/en/SecuritiesLaw_csa_19991210_61-301.jsp. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) has noted that some bidders make these offers at below-market prices “hoping that they will catch investors off guard if the investors do not compare the offer price to the current market price”. The SEC’s advisory to investors can be found at: http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/minitend.htm.
Nutrien urges shareholders to obtain current market quotations for their shares, consult with their broker or financial advisor and exercise caution with respect to TRC Capital’s offer. Shareholders who have already tendered their shares should consider taking actions to withdraw them including reviewing the withdrawal procedures in TRC Capital’s offering documents.
Nutrien strongly encourages brokers, dealers and other market participants to exercise caution and review the letter regarding broker-dealer mini-tender offer dissemination and disclosures on the SEC website at: Letter to SIA re: Broker-Dealer Mini-Tender Offer Dissemination and Disclosures (sec.gov) and the relevant provisions in the CSA’s notice referenced above. Nutrien requests that a copy of this news release be included with all distributions of materials relating to TRC Capital’s mini-tender offer related to Nutrien shares.
About Nutrien
Nutrien is the world’s largest provider of crop inputs and services, helping to safely and sustainably feed a growing world. We operate a world-class network of production, distribution and retail facilities that positions us to efficiently serve the needs of growers. We focus on creating long-term value for all stakeholders by advancing our key environmental, social and governance priorities.
In the latest trading session, Canadian Imperial Bank (CM) closed at $42.38, marking a -0.66% move from the previous day. This change lagged the S&P 500’s 0.09% gain on the day. Meanwhile, the Dow gained 0.2%, and the Nasdaq, a tech-heavy index, lost 4.87%.
Coming into today, shares of the bank and financial services company had gained 3.24% in the past month. In that same time, the Finance sector gained 3.03%, while the S&P 500 gained 3.31%.
Wall Street will be looking for positivity from Canadian Imperial Bank as it approaches its next earnings report date. In that report, analysts expect Canadian Imperial Bank to post earnings of $1.34 per share. This would mark a year-over-year decline of 4.29%. Meanwhile, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for revenue is projecting net sales of $4.08 billion, down 3.93% from the year-ago period.
CM’s full-year Zacks Consensus Estimates are calling for earnings of $5.63 per share and revenue of $17.32 billion. These results would represent year-over-year changes of +1.62% and +1.11%, respectively.
Investors might also notice recent changes to analyst estimates for Canadian Imperial Bank. These revisions help to show the ever-changing nature of near-term business trends. With this in mind, we can consider positive estimate revisions a sign of optimism about the company’s business outlook.
Our research shows that these estimate changes are directly correlated with near-term stock prices. To benefit from this, we have developed the Zacks Rank, a proprietary model which takes these estimate changes into account and provides an actionable rating system.
Ranging from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), the Zacks Rank system has a proven, outside-audited track record of outperformance, with #1 stocks returning an average of +25% annually since 1988. Over the past month, the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate remained stagnant. Canadian Imperial Bank is currently sporting a Zacks Rank of #1 (Strong Buy).
Digging into valuation, Canadian Imperial Bank currently has a Forward P/E ratio of 7.58. This valuation marks a premium compared to its industry’s average Forward P/E of 7.5.
Meanwhile, CM’s PEG ratio is currently 2.25. This metric is used similarly to the famous P/E ratio, but the PEG ratio also takes into account the stock’s expected earnings growth rate. Banks – Foreign stocks are, on average, holding a PEG ratio of 0.92 based on yesterday’s closing prices.
The Banks – Foreign industry is part of the Finance sector. This group has a Zacks Industry Rank of 68, putting it in the top 27% of all 250+ industries.
The Zacks Industry Rank gauges the strength of our industry groups by measuring the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks within the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.
Make sure to utilize Zacks.com to follow all of these stock-moving metrics, and more, in the coming trading sessions.
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CALGARY and PHOENIX, April 25, 2023 /PRNewswire/ – Canadian Pacific Kansas City (TSX:CP.TO) (NYSE:CP) (CPKC) and Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings Inc. (NYSE:KNX) announced today a new multi-year agreement to provide truckload intermodal transportation service on CPKC’s new single-line north-south corridor connecting Mexico, the United States and Canada. Knight-Swift is one of North America’s largest and most diversified freight transportation companies, providing multiple truckload transportation and logistics services.
Glencore’s ambition to take over Teck Resources has morphed into a protracted industry saga, and the Swiss commodities giant is now scrambling to win over the Canadian miner’s shareholders with promises of a third bid for the company.
Its initial two offerings for Teck – the first totalling £19bn and the second including a £6.6bn cash sweetener – were knocked back by the miner’s senior leadership, including top shareholder Norman Keevil. Now, Glencore has gone to extreme measures, urging Teck shareholders in a public letter to reject the company’s own plans to spin off its critical minerals business from its coal operations at a crunch demerger vote this week.
The FTSE 100 company’s offer for Teck, which represented a 20 per cent premium on both its share classes, would have seen the both parties merge their minerals businesses and separately spin off their combined coal assets into a new listed company.
Glencore’s shareholders would own 76 per cent of the combined entity whereas Teck incumbent investors would hold the remaining 24 per cent.
Theoretically, Glencore is the perfect suitor for Teck.
It’s takeover attempt is a cool, rational attempt to diversify its business and shift towards future-facing minerals, which will be in high demand for wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicle batteries as the world moves towards a greener future.
As Teck has vast copper resources and zinc deposits in the Americas, it’s a credible target for Glencore – and its bid follows rival BHP Group’s imminent £5.2bn takeover of Aussie copper producer Oz Minerals.
Meanwhile, Teck could benefit from Glencore’s sheer size and leading position in the commodities market.
Last year, Teck made £3.92bn earnings with shareholders clawing back £3.28bn.
By contrast, Glencore posted pre-tax profits of £28bn over the same period, and handed almost £6bn to shareholders amid widespread volatility in the economy and soaring fossil fuel prices.
However, Teck has proposals of its own to turn its business into two publicly listed companies.
This would include Teck Metals, focused on metals production, and Elk Valley Resources, built around its steelmaking coal assets.
Teck predicts its proposals could see its shares trade at a 55 per cent premium on its latest closing price. Yet, the debate is not solely around contrasting valuations – a matter that would typically come to a resolution, with Glencore’s bigger size and revenue streams enabling it to present a figure that would finally appeal to Teck’s shareholders.
Instead, investors are highly divided over the proposed deal, because the true nature of the impasse is not finances, but coal.
Coal’s role causes shareholders headaches
Climate conscious Legal and General Investment Management (LGIM) has lent its support to Teck’s proposals, alongside Bluebell Capital Partners and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.
Meanwhile, Glass Lewis has urged shareholders to support Glencore’s bid, and ISS has raised concerns over Teck’s break-up plans but stopped short of backing the Swiss firm’s proposed takeover.
Coal giants raked in massive profits last year, with the world’s top 20 companies raking in £77.8bn of collective earnings – but there are concerns with the long-term sustainability of such bumper numbers.
After all, this was an outcome driven by the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with the International Energy Agency still expecting coal consumption to plateau around 2025.
Coal is also the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, and with companies looking to divest to achieve net zero targets, it appears Teck’s board and many of its shareholders have seen the scale of Glencore’s large thermal coal business and oil trading businesses and opted against any negotiations.
Glencore has pledged to shift away from coal but its massive earnings last year included £7.6bn from its coal producing units – with the company mining 103.3m tons of coal through its industrial business.
The company faces scrutiny not just from Teck shareholders, but also its own investors over its climate ambitions.
Shareholders will vote at Glencore’s annual meeting next month on a resolution urging the company to explain how its thermal coal business aligns with efforts to limit the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, in line with the Paris Agreement.
HSBC Asset Management and LGIM are among signatories to the document.
While the company has previously pledged to cap coal production at 2019 levels and reach net zero emissions by 2050, banking group Credit Suisse does not expect a material decrease in Glencore’s coal production until 2036.
Coal is not the only headwind Glencore has to navigate in its bid to buy Teck.
The Canadian miner maintains a byzantine dual-shareholder structure – dominated by its A-shareholders.
This means Glencore will also have to coax the Keevil family, the company’s primary A-shareholders, into changing their mind over a deal.
With their dominant position in Teck’s corporate composition, doing this may be enough to push through a deal for Glencore.
However, with increasingly climate conscious B-shareholders, Glencore is going to need to resolve investor concerns over coal, unless it wants every push for growth to be a painful battle.
Falcon Premium Intermodal Service Will Offer the Best Transit Times and Reliability
MONTREAL, April 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — CN (TSX:CNR.TO) (NYSE:CNI), Union Pacific Railroad (NYSE:UNP) and GMXT (BMV:GMXT) proudly announced today the creation of Falcon Premium intermodal service, a best-in-class Mexico-US-Canada service with a seamless rail connection in Chicago, Illinois. It will directly connect all CN origin points within Canada and Detroit, Michigan to GMXT terminals in Mexico: Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, and Silao, Guanajuato. This service will directly benefit intermodal customers shipping automotive parts, food, FAK (freight all kinds), home appliances, and temperature-controlled products. READ BELOW
The Canadian Press – Canadian Press – Mon Apr 24, 3:33PM CDT
MONTREAL — Canadian National Railway Co. says it reaped record first-quarter revenues due to a bumper grain crop and higher oil prices.
CN is reporting revenues of $4.31 billion for the quarter ended March 31, a 16 per cent boost from $3.71 billion a year earlier.
The Montreal-based company says net income jumped to $1.22 billion in its first quarter from $918 million in the same period last year.
On an adjusted basis, diluted earnings increased 38 per cent to $1.82 from $1.32 a year ago, beating analyst expectations of $1.72 per share, according to financial data firm Refinitiv.
CN is also boosting its forecast for the year, predicting adjusted diluted earnings per share growth in the mid-single digits compared with 2022, up from a low single-digit target set in January.
The company says its board approved a second-quarter dividend of 79 cents per common share, to be paid after markets close on June 30.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 24, 2023.
U.S. consumer confidence fell to a nine-month low in April led by a darkening outlook that augers a recession beginning in the near future, a survey showed on Tuesday.
The Conference Board said its consumer confidence index fell to 101.3 – the lowest since July 2022 – from a revised 104.0 in March. Economists polled by Reuters had expected the index to be unchanged from March at 104.0.
“While consumers’ relatively favorable assessment of the current business environment improved somewhat in April, their expectations fell and remain below the level which often signals a recession looming in the short-term,” said Ataman Ozyildirim, senior director of Economics at The Conference Board.
The share of consumers viewing jobs as “plentiful” ticked up to 48.4 per cent from a downwardly revised 47.9 per cent a month earlier, and the share of those describing them as “hard to get” edged down 11.1 per cent from an upwardly revised 11.4 per cent in March.
Consumers’ 12-month inflation expectations slipped to 6.2 per cent from 6.3 per cent last month.
Thirteen billion dollars in government subsidies are going to Volkswagen to build an electric vehicle battery plant in Ontario. That’s what the Liberal government calls a “business case.” Thirteen billion dollars to build a $7-billion factory. Of course such a massive payout — bribe? — would only be provided for a “green” business case.
More and more countries — from Brazil to Southeast Asian nations — are calling for trade to be carried out in other currencies besides the U.S. dollar.
To be clear, the U.S. dollar remains dominant in global forex reserves even though its share in central banks’ foreign exchange reserves has dropped from more than 70% in 1999, IMF data shows.
Geopolitical risks and economic dynamics have accelerated the trend to move away from the U.S. dollar.
Calls to move away from relying on the U.S. dollar for trade are growing.
More and more countries — from Brazil to Southeast Asian nations — are calling for trade to be carried out in other currencies besides the U.S. dollar.
The U.S. dollar has been king in global trade for decades — not just because the U.S. is the world’s largest economy, but also because oil, a key commodity needed by all economies big and small, is priced in the greenback. Most commodities are also priced and traded in U.S. dollars.
But since the Federal Reserve embarked on a journey of aggressive rate hikes to fight domestic inflation, many central banks around the world have raised interest rates to stem capital outflows and a sharp depreciation of their own currencies.
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“By diversifying their holdings reserves into a more multi-currency sort of portfolio, perhaps they can reduce that pressure on their external sectors,” said Cedric Chehab from Fitch Solutions.
To be clear, the U.S. dollar remains dominant in global forex reserves even though its share in central banks’ foreign exchange reserves has dropped from more than 70% in 1999, IMF data shows.
The U.S. dollar accounted for 58.36% of global foreign exchange reserves in the fourth quarter last year, according to data from the IMF’s Currency Composition of Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER). Comparatively, the euro is a distant second, accounting for about 20.5% of global forex reserves while the Chinese yuan accounted for just 2.7% in the same period.
Based on CNBC’s calculation of IMF’s data on 2022 direction of trade, mainland China was the largest trading partner to 61 countries when combining both imports and exports. In comparison, the U.S. was the largest trading partner to 30 countries.
“As China’s economic might continues to rise, that means that it’ll exert more influence in global financial institutions and trade etc,” Chehab told CNBC last week.
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China — long among the top 2 foreign holders of U.S. Treasurys — has been steadily reducing its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities.
In early April, Indian media widely reported that theMinistry of External Affairs (MEA) had announced that India and Malaysia were starting to settle their trade in the Indian rupee.
Economic benefits
Analysts say changing global economic dynamics are driving the co-called de-dollarization trend which can benefit local economies in a number of ways.
Trading in local currencies “allow exporters and importers to balance risks, have more options to invest, to have more certainty about the revenues and sales,” former Brazilian ambassador to China, Marcos Caramuru, told CNBC last week.
Another benefit for countries moving away from using the dollar as the middle man in bilateral trade, is to “help them move up the value chain,” said Mark Tinker from ToscaFund Hong Kong told CNBC “Street Signs Asia” early April.
“It isn’t about selling cheap stuff to Walmart, keeping down the prices for American consumers in order to earn dollars to buy its energy. This is now about actually a completely bilateral trade bloc,” Tinker said.
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Meanwhile, growth of non-U.S. economic blocs also encourage these economies to push for wider use of their currencies. The IMF estimates that Asia could contribute more than 70% to global growth this year.
“U.S. growth might slow, but U.S. growth isn’t what it’s all about anymore. There is a whole non-U.S. block that’s growing,” said Tinker. “I think there is going to be a re-internationalization of flows.”
Geopolitical concerns
Geopolitical risks have also accelerated the trend to move away from U.S. dollar.
“Political risk is really helping introduce a lot of uncertainty and variability around how much of a safe haven that U.S. dollar really is,” said Galvin Chia from NatWest Markets told “Street Signs Asia” earlier.
Tinker said what accelerated the calls for de-dollarization was the U.S. decision to freeze Russia’s foreign currency reserves after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The yuan has reportedly replaced the U.S. dollar as the most traded currency in Russia, according to Bloomberg.
So far, the U.S. and its western allies have frozen more than $300 billion of Russia’s foreign currency reserves and slapped multiple rounds of sanctions on Moscow and the country’s oligarchs. This forced Russia to switch trade toother currencies and increase gold in its reserves.
Although analysts don’t anticipate a complete break away from dollar-denominated oil trade over the short-term, “I think what they’re saying more is, well, there’s another player in town, and we want to look at how we trade with them on a bilateral basis using yuan,” said Chehab.
Dollar is still king
Despite the slow erosion of its hegemony, analysts say the U.S. dollar is not expected be dethroned in the near future — simply because there aren’t any alternatives right now.
“Euro is somewhat an imperfect fiscal and monetary union, the Japanese yen, which is another reserve currency, has all sorts of structural challenges in terms of the high debt loads,” Chehab told CNBC.
The Chinese yuan also falls short, Chehab said.
“If you look at the yuan reserves as a share of total reserves, it’s only about 2.5% of total reserves, and China still has current account restrictions,” Chehab said. “That means that it’s going to take a long time for any other currency, any single currency to really usurp the dollar from that perspective.”
Data from IMF shows that as of the fourth quarter of 2022, more than 58% of global reserves are held in U.S. dollar — that’s more than double the share of the euro, the second most-held currency in the world.
The international reserve system “is still a U.S.-reserve dominated system,” said NatWest’s Chia.
“So long as that commands the majority, so long as you don’t have another currency system or economy that’s willing to step up to that international reach, convertibility and free floating and the responsibility of a reserve currency, it’s hard to say dollar will be displaced over the next 3 to 5 years. unless someone steps up.”
— CNBC’s Joanna Tan and Monica Pitrelli contributed to this report.
