Topic: Growth Stocks

STATE STREET CORP. $45 – New York symbol STT

STATE STREET CORP. $45 (New York symbol STT; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 504.0 million; Market cap: $22.7 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.5; Dividend yield: 1.6%; TSINetwork Rating: Extra Risk; www.statestreet.com) sells accounting and administrative services to large institutional investors, such as mutual funds and pension plans.

State Street continues to benefit from rising stock markets. Its fee income rises and falls with the value of the mutual funds and other securities it manages, so the company’s revenue and earnings benefit when the value of these assets rises.

The company is also cutting its long-term costs with a new restructuring plan, which mainly involves cutting 1,400 jobs (or 5% of its workforce) and selling surplus real estate. The plan will cost State Street $400 million to $450 million over the next four years. However, it should lower its annual expenses by $575 million to $625 million by the end of 2014.

Meanwhile, State Street earned $466 million, or $0.93 a share, in the three months ended March 31, 2011. That’s down 5.3% from $492 million, or $0.99 a share, a year earlier. If you exclude restructuring costs and other unusual items, earnings per share would have risen 17.3%, to $0.88 from $0.75. Revenue rose 10.1%, to $2.3 billion from $2.1 billion.

During the financial crisis, State Street cut its quarterly dividend to $0.01 a share to conserve cash. Now that its outlook has improved, the company has increased the quarterly payment to $0.18 a share, for an annualized yield of 1.5%. State Street also plans to buy back $675 million of its common shares this year.

The stock trades at 11.9 times the $3.77 a share that State Street will probably earn in 2011.

State Street is a buy.

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