Welcome to Morningstar. Making its debut as stock of the week is Rentokil Initial, which has just put out a trading update for the most recent quarter.
The company made its name in pest control, but it has now expanded into office hygiene and wellbeing. So you’ll typically see its products in office washrooms etc. But pest control remains big business and is still 94% of group profits. It’s probably as close to a recession-proof industry as you can get, apart from funerals. Apparently big cities are struggling with rodents again, leading New York to appoint a rat czar – the job ad specified a “highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty” individual. The Big Apple describes this as “rat mitigation”. Extermination, mitigation – the result ends up the same. Rentokil can now monitor individual rodents remotely using technology.
And there appears to be a lot of pest control work in the US. Rentokil’s North American revenue more than doubled in the first quarter - which includes the takeover of US firm Terminix in October last year – and now makes up 60% of total revenue.
After the update, Morningstar analysts have modestly upgraded the full-year profits forecasts to just shy of one billion pounds for the full year. Rentokil Initial is assigned a wide economic moat and the shares are roughly fairly valued around six pounds per share. Year to date the shares are up 16% and have doubled over 5 years. Dividend wise, it’s not a massive yielder, but has been steadily increasing its dividends over the last decade.
Looking ahead, our analysts argue that the company can still benefit from future growth and consolidation in pest control and hygiene services industries.
For Morningstar, I’m James Gard.