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Our monthly Ice Best Buys Now are designed to highlight our team’s three favourite, most timely Buys from our growing list of income-focused Ice recommendations, to help Fools build out their portfolios.
“Best Buys Now” Pick #1:
Unilever (LSE:ULVR)
- The consumer goods giant’s new management team have a sensible plan for reinvigorating growth and winning investors back on board. Nothing earth shattering and the devil is in the details but so far we like what CEO Hein Schumacher and co are saying.
- And actual operating results are slowing improving as well. In H1 underlying sales growth was a solid 4.1% with both volumes and price hikes contributing.
- The ‘Power Brands’ that management are focussing on continue to grow much faster with USG of 5.7% in the period. That makes it easy to see why Schumacher is keen to continue divesting smaller, lower growth brands and directing increased marketing spend and R&D efforts on these €1bn+ turnover brands.
- The split of the Ice Cream division will be an ongoing process but Unilever has priors here, so we don’t expect a GSK/Haleon style years-long and tortuous process.
- There’s work to do to get growth more consistently towards the 5% level but a Unilever is a cash generative, defensive, and growing business that pays a nice dividend and frequently buys back its own shares. As such we think it’s worth inspecting in October.
