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...balance sheet by tightening credit standards and dumping bad loans, and he wooed customers with free checking and online bill paying and eliminated fees for using a live teller rather than an ATM. Wall Street rewarded his turnaround of Bank One with a near 60% jump in its stock price, which hasn't hurt Dimon's bank account either: when he took over, he plunked down nearly $60 million of his Citi-made fortune to buy his new employer's beaten-down shares...
Investing for dividends fell deeply out of favor in the grow-grow 1990s, when the number of companies that pay them declined steadily and the average dividend yield shriveled to just 1.1%. Before this unusual period, an average dividend yield of 3% was considered abysmally low. But with tech stocks in favor and aggressive CEOs reinvesting for earnings growth, the number of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 that paid a dividend sank to just 351 at the end of 2002 from a peak of 469. This decline reversed last year. An improving economy and a new law that...
...this apparent foresight, L'Oreal's recent stock performance has at times been less than lustrous. Its P/E ratio has more than halved over the past three years, suggesting the market feels that its growth prospects have slowed. Analysts cite the company's big ad and promotions budget and the fact that its manufacturing is less efficient than that of its competitors. Says Citigroup's Smith: "L'Oreal has the cost structure of a prestige cosmetics house, yet only 25% of its products are in the prestige category. The rest is mass market." Such criticisms draw a scathing response from...
Owen-Jones has the good fortune to run a company that is not entirely beholden to analysts. Because of a complex arrangement, just over half of L'Oreal's stock is controlled through a holding company that includes Nestle and Liliane Bettencourt, Eugene Schueller's only child and--thanks to her L'Oreal stake--one of the wealthiest people in Europe...
Total officials insist that, these incidents aside, their efforts to clean up and green up are both sincere and vital for the firm's long-term health. The main reason: they're feeling pressure from investors, not just activists. There's a small but growing industry of politically correct stock funds in Europe, with an estimated $40 billion under management, that invest only in companies they consider socially responsible. "Investors want the best possible investment. Even if ethics is not their cup of tea, they consider companies that take into account good ethical principles to be well managed," says Jean...