SYY - Sysco Corporation

Do Institutions Own Sysco Corporation (NYSE:SYY) Shares?

A look at the shareholders of Sysco Corporation (NYSE:SYY) can tell us which group is most powerful. Large companies...

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3 Dividend Stocks You Can Safely Hold

More important, payouts serve as an incentive for investors to hold the stock should the industry or the broader market turn downward. Investors may also look to industries that remain steady regardless of economic cycles. Stocks fitting these descriptions bring a high likelihood that they will maintain growth and dividend streaks that will continue for decades.

Sysco (SYY) Looks Well Poised on Diversified Business Lines

Sysco (SYY) is likely to gain from its efforts to boost revenues by tapping diversified business channels.

Fed Needs Better Answers on Runaway Markets and Inequality

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Federal Reserve officials don’t like to talk about asset inflation.This is hardly surprising. The levels of stocks and corporate bonds, after all, aren’t part of their stated dual mandate of maximum employment and stable prices. Moreover, the central bank has tried desperately to come off as not just catering to Wall Street interests since the 2008 financial crisis. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has emphasized the importance of its “Fed Listens” forums, for one. Just last week, the New York Fed detailed a new event series called “The Fed and Main Street,” which aims “to discuss the challenges faced by vulnerable communities and highlight opportunities to work together toward an equitable economic recovery.”Such a statement sounds a little tone-deaf after the events of the past few months. The coronavirus pandemic has caused tens of millions of lower-paid and disproportionately black and Hispanic Americans to lose employment income while protests continue across the U.S. against systemic racism and police brutality. The Fed, meanwhile, has been given the lion’s share of credit for the V-shaped recovery in asset prices after increasing its balance sheet by $3 trillion and seizing control of bond markets. To further point out the contrast between Main Street and Wall Street:Main Street: The U.S. unemployment rate is 13.3%, up from 3.5% at the start of the year. Even though the federal government expanded aid, almost one-third of unemployment benefits estimated to be owed weren’t paid as of last week, and the program is set to end after July. Wall Street: The Fed’s corporate credit facilities opened up the bond market for Sysco Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., Omnicom Group Inc. and Cinemark Holdings Inc. Each company raised billions of dollars in cash — and then fired workers. In Sysco’s case, dividends to shareholders will continue. Main Street: The Fed found that among people working in February, almost 40% of those in households making less than $40,000 a year had lost a job in March. Broadly, more than half of households making less than $50,000 experienced a loss in employment income because of Covid-19 as of late May. Bloomberg Economics forecasts that the next wave of job cuts will target millions of higher-paid workers. Wall Street: The S&P 500 Index recently staged its biggest 50-day rally on record and is now higher than it was coming into 2020, up more than 47% from its March intraday low. The tech-heavy Nasdaq eclipsed its all-time high. Dave Portnoy is becoming an incarnation of market sentiment, recently boasting: “Stocks only go up. Only losers take profits.”This is a huge discrepancy that will have serious implications for the American economy should it persist. The Fed’s own data show that slightly more than half of U.S. households (about 65 million) own stocks in some form, with a median value of $40,000. But that doesn’t come close to telling the whole story. A Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association analysis from October breaks down holdings even further, which is best represented with a chart:In the Fed’s own words, wealth tends to increase “because of the feedback effect on higher incomes from the returns generated by accumulated assets.” Meanwhile, ownership of equities “varies substantially” based on race. More than 60% of white families own stocks, either directly or through a retirement account, compared with 31% and 28% for black and Hispanic families, respectively. This follows directly from the large gap in median net worth among the groups:So, the wealthiest Americans, who own the largest share of financial assets, are reaping the biggest windfalls from the Fed’s unprecedented intervention across financial markets. Meanwhile, according to minutes of the central bank’s December meeting, central bankers heard at their “Fed Listens” forums that retirees were struggling with rising health-care costs and representatives of low- and middle-income communities flagged the increased prices of basic necessities like food, housing and utilities. Their incomes might have gone down lately, but those costs haven’t. The Fed has no good answer for this. Analysts are already pondering whether the central bank’s $600 billion Main Street Lending Program, put in place to save U.S. small businesses and tens of millions of jobs, is destined to fail. Bill Dudley, the former New York Fed President and Bloomberg Opinion contributor, spelled out the issue candidly in a Bloomberg TV interview last week:“The Fed’s monetary policy tools are really about supporting economic activity and driving the economy to higher levels of employment. However, that can actually cause financial asset values to go up, and that can actually exacerbate inequality. The Fed’s choices: not have a recovery, have less inequality; or have a recovery with buoyant financial asset prices and more inequality. The Fed’s tools are just not suited to address the inequality problem. It’s pretty much that binary.How does the Fed actually get money to millions of households and small businesses? That’s difficult to do operationally. It’s much easier to intervene in the capital markets, where the Fed can rely on counter-parties, primary dealers and others, to essentially help the Fed buy financial assets.”Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, put it even more bluntly in a recent report. “Fed balance sheet expansion and banking sector money creation are used for savings and purchasing financial assets,” he wrote. “You can increase the Fed balance sheet and the money supply as much as you want, if the money goes into asset transactions rather than GDP transactions it will not be inflationary.” Except, of course, for asset prices.It’s important to say that out loud, particularly when Fed officials use euphemisms like providing “liquidity” to the system or restoring “market functionality,” while lamenting a lack of wage growth and inflation in consumer prices. Years of near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing are one reason investment proceeds have increased as a share of total income since the end of the last recession while those from wages and other labor sources have tumbled. It looks as if the Fed’s answer to the coronavirus crisis will only serve to exacerbate those trends. There are no easy answers. Dudley acknowledged in a Bloomberg Opinion column last week that the Fed has encouraged moral hazard. “This doesn’t seem to be a good road to stay on,” he said. “But getting off it is very difficult. After all, no one wants to risk a depression in order to teach hedge funds, mortgage REITs or mutual-fund investors a lesson.”Maybe there’s middle ground. Central bankers will probably never do this, but imagine if they explicitly factored asset inflation into their policy decisions and mandate for stable prices. If stocks or other risky investments started to run higher, at a level well beyond their historical rate of return, that would be a signal that they should increase short-term interest rates or shut down bond-buying programs. That, in turn, would increase the cost of credit and could prevent some of the questionable corporate-finance maneuvers from the last expansion — think debt sales used to fund share buybacks, or the prevalence of “zombie firms,” which do little to aid most Americans.As it stands, the Fed merely monitors undefined “financial conditions.” According to the Bloomberg U.S. Financial Conditions index, they are now just as accommodative as they were when the central bank raised interest rates in March 2018 and December 2018. The same goes for a Bloomberg index that layers indicators of asset-price bubbles — like tech-share prices and the housing market — on top of the original parameters. Why not have a stated target for financial conditions and pledge to take action when it’s breached?I concede it’s hardly a perfect solution. But at least it’s something, rather than widespread acknowledgment that the current strategy isn’t ideal but that there’s simply no other way. It’s telling that only after the longest U.S. economic expansion in history did job gains reach parts of the population that had been previously left behind. Will those same people have to wait another decade this time around?Powell and his colleagues need a better answer on asset inflation and income inequality. I’d press the Fed chair on this topic if I were asking questions on Wednesday after the Federal Open Market Committee meeting. Pledging to talk with leaders in low-income communities — and communities of color in particular — is a good first step.But it’s not enough. The word “unprecedented” is often tossed around when describing the Fed’s interventions in recent months. As of now, it looks as if those actions will also create new extremes between America’s “haves” and “have-nots.” This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Brian Chappatta is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering debt markets. He previously covered bonds for Bloomberg News. He is also a CFA charterholder.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Fed Vow Boosts Debt Binge as Borrowers Cut Thousands of Jobs

(Bloomberg) -- Soon after the Federal Reserve’s March 23 assurance that it would make borrowing easier for American corporations, Sysco Corp. sold $4 billion of debt.Not long after that, the food-service giant announced plans to cut one-third of its workforce, more than 20,000 employees. Dividends to shareholders would continue, executives said.That process repeated itself in April and May as the coronavirus spread. The Fed’s promise juiced the corporate-bond market. Borrowing by top-rated companies shot to a record $1.1 trillion for the year, nearly twice the pace of 2019. Companies as diverse as Sysco, Toyota Motor Corp., international marketing firm Omnicom Group Inc. and movie-theater chain Cinemark Holdings Inc. borrowed billions of dollars -- and then fired workers.The companies were under no obligation to behave any differently, but their actions call into question the degree to which the U.S. central bank’s promise to purchase corporate debt will help preserve American jobs.While the Fed has yet to buy a single bond, its pledge threw a lifeline to the market that undoubtedly kept some people working. Retail chains such as Dollar General Corp., CVS Health Corp., Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., Lowe’s Cos. and Costco Wholesale Corp. said they’re adding personnel after tapping the bond market.But unlike the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, which has incentives for employers to keep workers on the job, the taxpayer-backed facilities that the Fed and Treasury Department created for bigger companies have no such requirements. To make sure the emergency programs help fulfill one of the Fed’s mandates -- maximum employment -- the central bank is essentially crossing its fingers that restoring order to markets will translate to saving jobs.“They could set conditions, say to companies, hire back your workers, maintain your payroll to at least a certain percentage of prior payroll, and we will help,” said Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor for President Bill Clinton who now teaches economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s hardly clear that if you keep companies afloat they’ll hire employees.”Unanimous SenateThe lending programs -- credit for big companies and the so-called Main Street facilities for midsize firms -- are supported by the CARES Act, a law that passed the House with more than 96% of the chamber’s votes and cleared the Senate unanimously. For many supporters, putting conditions on the assistance was a step too far. If Congress had intended any, it would have made it explicit in the legislation, they say.“Really it’s all about creating a context, a climate, in which employees will have the best chance to either keep their job, or go back to their old job, or ultimately find a new job,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in a May 29 webinar hosted by Princeton University. “That’s the point of this exercise.” A spokesman for the U.S. central bank declined further comment.Even as businesses around the country began reopening in May after months of stay-at-home orders, helping a battered U.S. economy add 2.5 million jobs in May, prospects remained grim for millions of Americans who’ve been let go since February. An extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits that Congress approved in March is slated to stop on July 31. The prohibition against firing workers in the $25 billion government rescue of U.S. airlines expires Sept. 30, and the biggest recipients have said they intend to shed employees after that date.Protecting WorkersReich’s view is echoed mostly by progressive Democrats and supporters of stricter regulatory oversight of the financial system.“The Fed’s primary motivator in creating these lending facilities is not protecting workers,” U.S. Representative Katie Porter, a California Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, said in an email interview. “The American people should not be asked or expected to loan $500 billion with no strings attached.”A letter, circulated by the Wall Street watchdog group Americans for Financial Reform and published May 27, urged Congress to attach conditions favorable to workers to any Covid-19-related rescue programs. It was signed by 45 organizations, including labor unions and religious and environmental groups.Without provisions for employees, “the credit assistance will tend to boost financial markets, but not the broad economic well-being of the great majority of the population,” Marcus Stanley, Americans for Financial Reform’s policy director, said in an interview.Stanley said the corporate-lending programs don’t have to require companies to keep or rehire workers, but they could give priority to those that do.In its legislation, Congress did express an intent that workers benefit from taxpayer-funded assistance, but it left a lot of the details to Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.“Our No. 1 objective is keeping people employed,” Mnuchin said during a May 19 Senate Banking Committee hearing after Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, accused him of “boosting your Wall Street buddies” at the expense of ordinary Americans. “What we put in the Main Street facility is that we expect people to use their best efforts to support jobs,” Mnuchin said.The phrase “best efforts” echoes the original terms for the Main Street program, which required companies to attest they’ll make “reasonable efforts” to keep employees. The wording was subsequently changed to “commercially reasonable efforts,” which Jeremy C. Stein, chairman of the Harvard University economics department and a former Fed governor, called a welcome watering-down of expectations that the central bank would dictate employment policies to borrowers.Emergency Help“It was smart of them to weaken that,” Stein said. “You can’t expect companies to borrow to pay employees.”Companies might not seek emergency help if too many strings are attached to the aid, Stein said. Others question the practicality of tying workers to their companies as economic realities shift.“To go to great lengths to make companies keep employees that they don’t need, in light of new expectations that economic activity will remain below pre-Covid levels for a long while, doesn’t make sense,” said Mark Carey, a former Fed staff member and now co-president of the Risk Institute of the Global Association of Risk Professionals.The Fed approached this crisis with the intent of keeping credit flowing everywhere, from municipalities to small businesses to big corporations to households. Powell said the programs are about lending, not spending -- in other words, they aim to ease a financing pinch rather than stimulate the demand companies need to keep workers on the payroll.Weird Hybrid“For the Fed to second-guess a corporate survival strategy would be a step too far for them,” said Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and author of “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.” Putting explicit conditions on program beneficiaries would make the central bank “a weird hybrid of the Federal Reserve, Treasury, BlackRock and an activist stockholder.” BlackRock Inc. is the world’s biggest money manager and was hired by the central bank to assist with bond programs.Through the Main Street facilities, which are scheduled to begin operations any day, the Fed will buy as much as $600 billion in four-year loans made to companies by commercial banks with principal and interest deferred for one year. The program is aimed at midsize businesses, with 15,000 or fewer employees or annual revenue of $5 billion or less in 2019.The central bank’s credit backstop for larger companies is split in two. The $500 billion primary program is designed to buy slices of syndicated loans or new bonds from companies with investment-grade credit scores or one notch below. It’s available to corporations that can prove they can’t borrow elsewhere. The $250 billion secondary facility buys individual corporate bonds already on the market and exchange-traded funds that include investment-grade and junk bonds. The Fed kicked off the program last month; its balance sheet as of June 2 listed ETF holdings valued at $4.3 billion.European DifferencesEuropean countries are charting a different policy course by paying workers directly. The U.K., for example, is offering 80% of salaries up to 2,600 pounds ($3,207) a month. The Netherlands and Denmark have effectively nationalized private payrolls.The U.S. government paid adults who make less than $75,000 a year a one-time sum of $1,200, with $500 for every dependent child. The cost was $239 billion.The S&P 500 has jumped 38% since March 23, the day the Fed intervened. Observers of the stock market wonder how it could be so bullish at the same time as the country faces an avalanche of joblessness unsurpassed in its history. The choices companies are making provide an answer.Since selling $4 billion in debt on March 30, Sysco has amassed $6 billion of cash and available liquidity, enabling it to gobble up market share, while cutting $500 million of expenses, according to Chief Executive Officer Kevin Hourican. Sysco, which is based in Houston, will continue to pay dividends to shareholders, Chief Financial Officer Joel Grade said on a May 5 earnings call.Junk BondMovie theaters were one of the first businesses to close during the pandemic. Cinemark, which owns 554 of them, shut its U.S. locations on March 17. Three days later, the company paid a previously announced dividend. It has since said it will discontinue such distributions. Cinemark borrowed $250 million from the junk-bond market on April 13, the same day it announced the firing of 17,500 hourly workers. Managerial staff were kept on at reduced pay, according to company filings. Cinemark, which is based in Plano, Texas, said it plans to open its theaters in phases starting June 19.The theater chain opted to go to the bond market over seeking funding from the government because “it didn’t come with any of the strings attached that government-backed facilities can include,” CEO Mark Zoradi said on the April 15 earnings call. It “was really no more complicated than that.”Sysco and Cinemark declined to comment for this story, and referred to their executives’ previous remarks.Omnicom issued $600 million in bonds on March 27. In an April 28 conference call to discuss quarterly earnings, CEO John Wren said the company was letting employees go but didn’t say how many. He said the company was extending medical benefits to July 31 for employees furloughed or fired.Wren added: “Our liquidity, balance sheet and credit ratings remain very strong and we have no plans to change our dividend policy.” Omnicom didn’t respond to requests for comment.Toyota borrowed $4 billion from investors on March 27. Three days later, the Japan-based car company said it would continue paying dividends to shareholders. Eight days after that it said it would drop roughly 5,000 contract workers who helped staff its plants in North America. Scott Vazin, a Toyota spokesperson, declined to comment.In a March 24 letter, 200 academics, led by Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor Jonathan Berk, called lending programs aimed at corporations “a huge mistake.” Better to focus help directly on people living paycheck to paycheck who lost their jobs, it said.“Bailing out investors who chose to take high-risk investments because they wanted the high returns undermines capitalism and makes it an unfair game,” Berk said in an interview. “If you don’t have a level playing field in capitalism, it doesn’t work.”(Updates with details of May jobs report in 10th paragraph)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Why Is Sysco (SYY) Up 13.9% Since Last Earnings Report?

Sysco (SYY) reported earnings 30 days ago. What's next for the stock? We take a look at earnings estimates for some clues.

Why Sysco Is a Retiree's Dream Stock

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a major hole in Sysco's (NYSE: SYY) otherwise-solid business model -- a model that has served it and its shareholders well for decades. The company caterers to the foodservice industry, selling foods and other products to restaurants, educational institutions, and hospitality businesses; as such, Sysco was knocked back on its heels when the coronavirus forced virtually all of those outlets to shut down. Over the past 50 years, Sysco has returned over 30,000% to investors compared to returns of 2,800% by the S&P 500 as a whole, so considering only its performance over just two (admittedly terrible) months is clearly the wrong way to gauge it as an investment.

Could Sysco Corp. Stock Really Be Headed to $64?

While Sysco Corp. (NYSE: SYY) has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, at least one analyst believes the company has made the right moves and has the strategy in place to improve its business post-crisis. Nicole Miller Regan, a Piper Sandler analyst, has upgraded Sysco to "overweight" and with that upgrade boosted Sysco's price target from $58 up to $64, suggesting a roughly 12% premium to today's trading price. Sysco has been hit with a 15% stock price decline over the past three months.

Why Sysco Stock Gained 23% in April

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Sysco Corp (SYY) Q3 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

On today's call, we have Kevin Hourican, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Joel Grade, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, please note that statements made during this presentation, which state the company's or management's intentions, beliefs, expectations or predictions of the future, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, and actual results could differ in a material manner.

Sysco's (SYY) Earnings Miss Estimates in Q3, Sales Down

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Sysco (SYY) Misses Q3 Earnings Estimates

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Sysco's (SYY) Q2 Earnings Surpass Estimates, Revenues Miss

Sysco's (SYY) second-quarter fiscal 2020 earnings gain from improved sales. The U.S. Foodservice segment continues to deliver a solid show.

Sysco (SYY) Surpasses Q2 Earnings Estimates

Sysco (SYY) delivered earnings and revenue surprises of 1.19% and -0.44%, respectively, for the quarter ended December 2019. Do the numbers hold clues to what lies ahead for the stock?