Topic: Dividend Stocks

MOLSON COORS CANADA INC. – Toronto symbols TPX.A $44 and TPX.B $44

MOLSON COORS CANADA INC. (Toronto symbols TPX.A $44 and TPX.B $44; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; Shares outstanding: 181.2 million; Market cap: $8.0 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.3; Dividend yield: 2.9%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.molsoncoors.com) continues to benefit from the 2005 merger of Canada’s Molson brewing operations with those of U.S.-based Coors. The combined company later merged its U.S. business with rival Miller Brewing Company.

The ongoing savings from these mergers has helped Molson Coors, which is the world’s seventhlargest brewer by volume, to compete with larger multinational brewers.

Molson Coors now aims to expand in emerging markets, where beer sales are growing faster than its main markets of North America and the U.K. That’s why it paid $3.4 billion for StarBev LP in June 2012. StarBev owns nine breweries in Central and Eastern Europe (all amounts except share prices and market cap in U.S. dollars).

Thanks to the StarBev purchase, Molson Coors’s earnings probably rose 2.4% in 2012, to $3.85 a share from $3.76 in 2011. The stock trades at just 11.4 times the 2012 estimate. The $1.28 dividend yields 2.9%.

The company has also benefited from the end of a four-month labour dispute between the National Hockey League and its players. The lockout hurt sales of Molson Coors’s beer during the fall, particularly in Canada, which supplies nearly half of its overall sales.

Molson Coors’s class B shares have less voting power to elect directors than the class A shares, but they are more liquid and receive the same dividend.

Molson Coors B is a buy.

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