Imperial Oil buys back more stock

Article Excerpt

IMPERIAL OIL LTD. $75 is a buy. The oil producer (Toronto symbol IMO; Conservative and Income Growth Portfolios, Resources sector; Shares outstanding: 604.8 million; Market cap: $45.4 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 0.9; Dividend yield: 2.7%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.imperialoil.ca) is using its strong cash flow to reward investors with higher dividends and stock buybacks. In December 2023, the company plans to buy back up to $1.5 billion of its shares through a Dutch auction process. That’s on top of the $2.3 billion it recently repurchased under an accelerated issuer bid that ended in October 2023. Note—Parent company ExxonMobil (New York symbol XOM) will tender a proportional number of shares to maintain its 69.6% stake in Imperial. Imperial also raised your quarterly dividend by 13.6% with the July 2023 payment. Investors now receive $0.50 a share instead of $0.44. The new annual rate of $2.00 yields 2.7%. In all, the company will return about $4.9 billion to shareholders in 2023, which is equal to 78% of its projected…