Large cap natural and organics supermarket stock Whole Foods Market, Inc (NASDAQ: WFM) reportedQ2 earnings after the Wednesday market close with several other announcements coming along side earnings. For the 12-week second quarter ended April9, 2017, total sales increased 1.1% to a record $3.7 billion. Including an estimated negative impact of 30 basis points from Easter shifting from the second quarter last year to the third quarter this year, comparable store sales decreased 2.8%. Net income was $99 million versus net income of $142 million.
The Board also announced a 29% increase in the regular quarterly dividend to $0.18 per share and authorized a new $1.25 billion share repurchase program, with the intent to opportunistically utilize the authorization over the next 18 months. In addition, the Company announced theappointment of five new independent directors and named Gabrielle Sulzberger the new Chair of the Board and Mary Ellen Coe the new Chair of the Nominating & Governance Committee plus announced the appointment of Keith Manbeck as its new CFO.
Top Dividend Stocks To Watch For 2018: Bunge Limited(BG)
Advisors’ Opinion:
- [By Ben Levisohn]
Bunge (BG) has dropped 1.5% to $76.14 after getting cut to Underweight from Neutral at JPMorgan.
L Brands (LB) has jumped 3.9% to $44.80 despite reporting weaker than expected same-store sales.
- [By Steve Symington]
Shares ofBunge Ltd.(NYSE:BG)rose 10% on Wednesday after the agribusiness and food company released strong fourth-quarter 2016 results.
So what
Quarterly revenue grew 8.6% year over year, to $12.1 billion, and translated to 14.1% growth in adjusted earnings per share, to $1.70. Analysts, on average, were only expecting Bunge to report revenue of $11.4 billion and adjusted earnings of $1.57 per share.
- [By Casey Wilson]
Many companies provide the infrastructure needed for farmers to move crops from the farm to the grocery store. Among those are Bunge Ltd. (NYSE: BG), an agribusiness and food company that specializes in the purchase, storage, processing, and transport of agricultural goods. BG is up over 8% year to date and has grown over 1.5% in the past 30 days.
Top Dividend Stocks To Watch For 2018: Intelligent Content Enterprises Inc. (ICEIF)
Advisors’ Opinion:
- [By James E. Brumley]
In May of this year, at the annual Collision Conference, advertising and media executives of the world’s biggest traffic-oriented (and ad-supported) websites asked themselves a crucial question: How do we save online advertising from itself?
The question itself is a reflection of the new reality of the internet…. it’s become so big, so full, so cross-border, so competitive, and so promotional that it’s become an unwieldy mess. Twenty years ago, click-through rates were greater than 40%. Now they’re a mere 0.6%, as consumers (1) are saturated by marketing messages, and (2) have largely learned that ads don’t lead them to a product or service they care about. Digital advertising simply isn’t what it used to be.
While the answer to the question “how can digital advertising be saved?” is a complex one, a company called Intelligent Content Enterprises Inc. (OTCMKTS:ICEIF) addresses at least one aspect of the question, by doing what the web’s capitalists have failed to figure out how to do well. What’s that? ICEIF understands that an ad has to be relevant to a user no matter where that user is, and that to see an ad at all, a user has to be able to read the web’s content in his or her native language.
Intelligent Content Enterprises, through its Digital Widget Factory website www.digiwidgy.com, has tackled the aforementioned issue head-on, creating a rich website with a built-in translation tool which displays advertisements and offers unique to that reader’s location, and delivers that marketing message in his or her native language.
It may sound like a lot of work at first glance. But, it’s worth it.
Digital industry research outfit Common Sense Advisory reports that of the more than 3 billion internet users worldwide, approximately 73% — 2.2 Billion people — are browsing the web in a language other than English. That’s quite a disparity from the fact that more than 50% of the content on the web is na
- [By Bryan Murphy]
In hindsight, June’s news from Intelligent Content Enterprises Inc. (OTCMKTS:ICEIF) should come as no surprise. In May the organization announced it was buying Catch Star Studios LLC for the purpose of creating its own sports-related television shows that would be aired by broadcast as well as online. Now it’s begun creating that television content, following in the footsteps of much bigger original-content creators such as Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX).
What might comes as a surprise to existing and potential ICEIF shareholders, however, is how big highly-focused original television programming is now that the lines between the internet and cable television have not only been crossed, but erased.
May wasn’t just a pivotal month for Intelligent Content Enterprises because it’s when the acquisition of Catch Star Studios was put into motion. May was also the month Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported some stunning results of a new study about digital video-viewing habits and preferences. The key findings? Regular viewers of original digital video programming in the U.S. have grown from 45 million in 2013 to 63 million, and the advertisements displayed via a digital broadcast of such programming are liked and remembered by far more viewers than they are when part of a conventional cable television broadcast.
Said another way as far as advertisers are concerned, the world wide web is the new cable television. That’s not to say cable television has become irrelevant. Savvy content makers are now doing both, while also making a point of creating their own customized content now that the fight for viewers has gotten brutal.
Take Netflix as an example. It has a pair of smash hits with its self-produced ‘Orange is the New Black’ and ‘House of Cards.’ Amazon.com is getting into the game too, with its ‘Mozart in the Jungle’ recently being awarded two Golden Globes.
This same paradigm shift h
- [By Bryan Murphy]
If there was any doubt that the future of video as a digital medium was here to stay, Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) just wiped that doubt away. It’s going to open up its video-sharing platform to anyone — not just vetted creators with huge followings — and split ad revenue with them. In so doing, it now offers a similar deal (though a more generous deal) that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and YouTube also offers video creators.
It’s just a microcosm of the shape of things to come… or the shape of things as they already are. Last year was the first year internet users spent more time watching videos online than they did engaged in social media, averaging more one hour and sixteen minutes of video viewing per day.
Perhaps more important, the amount of ad revenue the likes of Facebook, and now Twitter, generate via online video is small, but growing very fast. The total ad spend allocated for digital video has jumped from 2.4% in 2013 to 4.4% today, and that’s expected to double again in two years.
Yet, for as much revenue as online video can drive and as big as it’s gotten, the ad-display technology remains alarmingly inelegant, even or veteran players like YouTube and Facebook. This clunky display of ads — and Twitter will likely keep it clunky, at least initially — increasingly makes a company called Intelligent Content Enterprises Inc (OTCMKTS:ICEIF) not just well-positioned, but a potential acquisition target.
Intelligent Content Enterprises has developed a tool called Clix Video(tm), which the company described as a way to enable “digital and mobile viewers to instantaneously connect to web and mobile sites by clicking on custom interactive tags within the video broadcasts to make social media connections, to review extra and exclusive content and make online and mobile purchases directly via the video broadcast providing a richer, deeper consumer experience related to the video content. “
In English, it just means Clix Vide
Top Dividend Stocks To Watch For 2018: Tarena International, Inc.(TEDU)
Advisors’ Opinion:
- [By Lisa Levin]
Tarena International Inc(ADR) (NASDAQ: TEDU) shares dropped 23 percent to $14.24. Tarena International reported Q2 earnings of RMB$1.00 per share on sales of RMB$455.83 million. Nomura downgraded Tarena from Buy to Neutral.
- [By Monica Gerson]
Tarena International Inc(ADR) (NASDAQ: TEDU) is estimated to post a quarterly loss at $0.03 per share on revenue of $39.35 million.
Ituran Location and Control Ltd. (US) (NASDAQ: ITRN) is projected to post earnings for the recent quarter.
