Shareholders liked what Canadian Natural Resources had to say the most, as the company announced it was raising its dividend by 13%, making it a 45% increase overall this year. With the stock up a whopping 50% this year, it looks like investors are really digging the commitment to passing profits on immediately.
Suncor decided to take a different path than their oil sands brethren, CNQ. Rather than commit to passing all of their oil profits on to shareholders, management completed a major acquisition of Teck Resource’s oil sands properties. With rumored buyouts of CNOOC and Sinopec’s oil sands assets, it is clearly doubling down on their status as bitumen bulls for the long term. Shareholders appear to respond lukewarmly to the acquisition, and it remains to be seen if the commitment to oil sands production will pay off down the road.
By far the biggest surprise for me personally this earnings season was Nutrien. While the company forecasted that potash demand was edging downward, the market was shocked by its massive earnings miss, and punished the company with a 14% hit to its shareprice on Thursday. That said, the stock is still up over 7% year-to-date and 17% over the last 12 months.Â
Technical support issues for U.S. tech shares
U.S. tech stocks continue to see significant volatility, even in the face of solid earnings results. These high-multiple stocks just continue to come back down to Earth, as it looks like higher interest rates might be with us for a while.
Here’s a look at this week’s earnings news. (All figures in this section are in U.S. currency.)Â
Airbnb (ABNB/NASDAQ): Earnings per share of $1.79 (versus $1.44 predicted) and revenues of $2.88 billion (versus $2.84 billion predicted).
Uber (UBER/NYSE): Loss per share of $0.61 (versus a loss of $0.22 predicted) and revenues of $8.34 billion (versus $8.12 billion predicted).
eBay (EBAY/NASDAQ): Earnings per share of $1.00 (versus $0.93 predicted) and revenues of $2.4 billion (versus $2.33 billion predicted).
