Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney is taking a swipe at the Trump administration’s pandemic response, and also questioning President Donald Trump’s suggestion that his predecessor Barack Obama is responsible for the lack of a coronavirus vaccine. Romney chided …
The coronavirus pandemic is fueling demand for cardboard boxes - a boon for global food company Archer Daniels Midland Co's industrial starches business - as consumers rush to order goods online amid widespread shutdowns, company executives said onThursday. The starches, made from corn or wheat, are used as an adhesive in making corrugated cardboard. Demand for ethanol biofuel the company produces has plummeted along with gasoline use, meanwhile, as the pandemic wrecks havoc on the global economy.
ADM (NYSE: ADM) announced today commitments to reduce water intensity by 10 percent and achieve a 90 percent landfill diversion rate by 2035 as part of an aggressive plan to continue to reduce the company’s environmental footprint.
Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Brazilian beef processor Marfrig Global Foods SA said Wednesday they are creating a joint venture called PlantPlus Foods to create plant-based foods for the South and North American markets. The two companies have already been working together to produce plant-based meat substitutes for the South American market. Marfrig will own 70% of the new venture while ADM will own 30%. Marfrig will handle production and distribution of products using its South American facilities, mainly in Várzea Grande, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, as well as plants in the U.S. Archer Daniels will provide technical expertise and plant-based ingredients, flavors and systems from a specialty protein plan in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, and its network of U.S.-based ingredient and flavor facilities, including a new pea protein plant in Enderlin, North Dakota. Archer Daniels shares were up 2.3% premarket, but are down 18% in the year to date, while the S&P 500 has fallen 7%.
These are the consumer staples stocks with the best value, fastest growth, and most momentum for June.
Q1 2020 Archer Daniels Midland Co Earnings Call
President Trump and his top advisers had high hopes for a surge in deployments targeting South American contraband. They've been productive but not a panacea.
ADM earnings call for the period ending March 31, 2020.
It's been a good week for Archer-Daniels-Midland Company (NYSE:ADM) shareholders, because the company has just...
ADM’s (NYSE: ADM) Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of 36.0 cents per share on the company’s common stock. The dividend is payable on June 10, 2020, to shareholders of record on May 20, 2020.
Archer Daniels' (ADM) Q1 earnings are driven by continued growth in the Nutrition segment.
ADM (NYSE: ADM) will present at the Goldman Sachs Industrials and Materials Conference Webcast on Friday, May 15. Chief Financial Officer Ray Young will present at 12:10 p.m. Eastern Time.
A look at recent developments in the South China Sea, where China is pitted against smaller neighbors in multiple territorial disputes over islands, coral reefs and lagoons. Indonesia’s government has condemned what it calls the “inhuman” treatment of its nat…
DeepMind and Google Health have developed an AI that can predict who’ll get one of the world’s most common causes of blindness. The system was built to detect age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a disease that afflicts more than 25% of over-60s in Europe …
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a key member of the White House's coronavirus task force, plans to tell a Senate committee on Tuesday that the country risks "needless suffering and death" if states open up too quickly, he told The New York Times late Monday evening.
Coronavirus is probably the 1 concern in investors' minds right now. It should be. On February 27th we published an article with the title Recession is Imminent: We Need A Travel Ban NOW. We predicted that a US recession is imminent and US stocks will go down by at least 20% in the next 3-6 […]
Marfrig (B3:MRFG3 and Level 1 ADR: MRRTY) and ADM (NYSE: ADM) today announced an agreement to create PlantPlus Foods, a joint venture for the sale of plant-based food products across South American and North American markets.
On board the coronavirus-stricken USS Theodore Roosevelt, the crew is getting the aircraft carrier ready to head back out to sea.
Associated Press
Marinette Marine Corp.
While the fate of its former captain remains unclear, the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, sidelined in Guam with a coronavirus outbreak, is inching toward getting healthy and returning to sea duty. The top Navy officer has recommended reinstating Capt. Br…
Agricultural commodities trader Bunge Ltd reported a quarterly loss on Wednesday compared with a year-ago profit, impacted by a $385 million charge in its agribusiness segment. Bunge's agribusiness unit is involved in the purchase, processing and sale of agricultural commodities like oilseeds and grains. About 33% of the grain merchant's processing capacity is located in South America.
ADM (NYSE: ADM) announced today an additional $800,000 in donations to organizations focused on addressing needs during COVID-19, including food assistance, hunger relief, and local support to hospitals and first responders.
• Dr. Anthony Fauci is expected to warn states Tuesday in Senate testimony prematurely reopening economies will cause “needless suffering and death.” Donald Trump is having a very anxious day. Today is the day the nation's top health authorities are to testif…
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — How to safely reopen businesses and schools but not kick off a second wave of coronavirus infections will be a key topic Tuesday as infectious disease experts testify at a Senate hearing — a setting where the agenda is not controlled by P…
Iran’s military accidentally hit one of its own ships with a missile during a training exercise on Sunday, according to a new report from Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency. At least 19 people were killed and 15 were wounded, according to several reports ear…
ADM (NYSE: ADM) will present at the 15th annual BMO Capital Markets 2020 Global Farm to Market Conference on Wednesday, May 13. Juan Luciano, Chairman and CEO, and Vince Macciocchi, President, ADM Nutrition, will present at 9:20 a.m. Eastern Time.
The U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt will sail with a scaled-back crew of about 3,000, leaving about 1,800 sailors on shore who are still in quarantine
The first-quarter earnings season has revealed how quickly companies are embracing digital and automation strategies, as they shift to dealing with consumers who are complying with stay-at-home rules and other restrictions on movement during the coronavirus pandemic.
In recent days, a top Senate Republican has said the coronavirus testing the United States has done so far is "not nearly enough."
A group of young, inexperienced volunteers was tasked with securing much-needed medical supplies for hospitals fighting coronavirus, hampering the government's response to a growing pandemic, according to reports by The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Check out these two videos of the flyover of the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group at sea in the Atlantic Ocean.
US Marine Corps/Lance Cpl. Joshua Brittenham
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- There’s one obvious culprit in the looming U.S. meat crisis being driven by the spread of Covid-19: The decline of the American slaughterhouse. Despite being the world’s second-largest meat consumer after China, the country stuns, kills and dismembers almost all of its annual production of 130 million pigs, 33.6 million cows and 2.3 million sheep in just over 800 facilities. Five decades ago there were more than 10 times as many.(1)If anything, those figures understate quite how concentrated the slaughter industry is. About two-thirds of America’s pork passes through the 24 giant facilities owned by Smithfield Foods Inc., JBS SA, Tyson Foods Inc. and Clemens Family Corp. More than 80% of beef comes from about a dozen abattoirs owned by Tyson, JBS, Cargill Inc. and Marfrig Global Foods SA.That presents a bottleneck for the American meat trade not unlike the one causing such ructions in the country’s oil business. It’s worryingly easy for disease outbreaks to spread among slaughter-plant staff, who work for low wages, in close quarters, in long shifts, and often share tightly packed break rooms and transportation around the site.Once one plant becomes a Covid-19 hotspot, the knock-on effects can be profound. Supply chains aren’t configured for pigs and cows to leave the site except in the form of chilled cuts, so it’s not easy to move them elsewhere. Read more: A Pork Panic Won’t Save Our BaconThose who expect the current situation will lead to a revival of smaller-scale abattoirs forget how America’s meat industry ended up this way in the first place. If the current shape of the livestock supply chain is a result of anything, it’s been the interplay of more than a century of food-safety regulation, logistics and labor force arbitrage. The coronavirus will just move that process another step forward.Scale, and the problems it engenders, has always been a central feature of the industry. When canals and rail routes through Chicago first joined the Midwestern farm belt to the populous East Coast in the mid-19th century, the slaughterhouse at the juncture — Union Stock Yards — grew to be the world’s largest. Conditions in the yards were notorious, with little regard for the safety of either the meat produced or the low-wage, immigrant workforce. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel “The Jungle” attempted to draw attention to the latter, but its most lasting result was the regime of federal slaughterhouse regulations. Now there’s approximately one government food inspector for every 10 employees in slaughtering and packing.Over the past 40 years, tighter oversight, better transport and economies of scale have driven slaughterhouses out of America’s cities to giant facilities across the Midwest, Great Plains and South. More than a dozen of these little-known sites are about as large as the Union Stock Yards. Modern slaughter plants are built close to feedlots and the grain and soy fields that supply them. That means most meat is transported in the form of cuts, which pound-for-pound cost about a hundred times as much as live animals. Located in rural areas, they can pay their workers less than would be expected in the city, too.It’s hard to see how making these facilities more resilient to infectious outbreaks among workers would reverse the concentration of previous decades. After all, better hygiene and humane standards for meat, and the (worthwhile) regulatory burden that entails, are one of the main reasons so many small-scale slaughterhouses have closed down in recent decades. The sorts of changes that would be needed post-coronavirus — spacing workers further apart and separated by screens, staggering shift periods and providing more break rooms — are likely to be easiest for larger plants to implement. To the extent that better practices help improve the meager wages of abattoir workers, that, too, will probably benefit the meat producers with the biggest market share and ability to pass on costs to consumers.Returns at the biggest businesses are sufficient to cover their capital costs, but hardly excessive. Investors generally prefer grains processors such as Bunge Ltd. and Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. Red meat consumption in the U.S. has fallen by a quarter since the 1970s. The concentration of America’s meat packing industry is ultimately a symptom of its weakness, rather than its strength.(1) We're counting only federally inspected slaughter plants, which make up more than 95% of the industry, as they're the only ones allowed to transport their product across state lines. There are also about 300 federally inspected poultry plants, in addition to several thousand downstream plants where carcasses are further jointed and processed.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies. He has been a reporter for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Guardian.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
(Bloomberg) -- The world’s largest agricultural commodities traders, already contending with the closure of restaurants, now have one more thing to worry about: the slowdown of American meat plants.Lockdowns from New York to Los Angeles already meant people were eating more at home, hitting demand for cooking oil made from soybeans. Now shutdowns and slowdowns at American meat plants are forcing farmers to cull their animals, cutting the need for soy meal, a key ingredient in feed rations.Bunge Ltd., the top processor of soybeans globally, has already slowed crushing operations in the U.S. by 10%, according to Chief Executive Officer Greg Heckman. Rival Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. reduced utilization rates of its factories in North America by 5 percentage points, the company said last week.“We’ll run for margin and we’ll run the crush to meet demand,” Heckman said in an earnings call Wednesday. In the U.S., between maintenance and adjusting to demand, “we’ve cut crush almost 10%,” he said.Soybean processing yields oil, which is used for cooking and biodiesel, as well as the meal that goes into animal feed. With both markets being upended by the novel coronavirus, profits from crushing the oilseed have already tumbled to their lowest level in about six months.President Donald Trump recently ordered meat plants to stay open and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said facilities that previously closed should be up and running in 10 days. Still, many will operate at slower-than-usual rates for social distancing, meaning producers will continue to euthanize animals. As many as 7 million pigs are expected to be killed in the second quarter, according to CoBank, a lender to the agriculture industry.Bunge reduced crush rates in the U.S. to match supply and demand and because it had deferred maintenance from the first quarter. ADM ran at “extremely strong rates” in the first quarter, matching the previous record for the period and, while it has reduced production, it’s still running at “relatively strong utilization rates,” it said in emailed response to questions.Soybean meal buyers are also opting to pick up supplies in the spot market “and not filling the pipelines as much,” Bunge said by email.The lack of meal demand is adding to the backup of soybean oil, with stockpiles in the U.S. rising 7.8% in March from a month earlier, according to National Oilseed Processors Association data released by Thomson Reuters. That’s prompted a squeeze for storage space in the U.S.“There’s a lot of people fighting for liquid storage these days in North America,” ADM CEO Juan Luciano said in an earnings call last week. “We’re comfortable with the level of adjustment in production that we have at this point.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
ADM (ADM) delivered earnings and revenue surprises of 20.75% and -2.42%, respectively, for the quarter ended March 2020. Do the numbers hold clues to what lies ahead for the stock?
(Bloomberg) -- China is stepping up purchases of soybeans from the U.S. as Brazilian sales start to wane and the Asian nation seeks to meet its pledges under the trade deal with Washington, according to people familiar with the matter.State-run buyers have purchased more than 20 cargoes, or over 1 million metric tons, of American soybeans in the past two weeks, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The beans were bought using tariff waivers previously issued, the people said. Purchases of 136,000 tons reported by the U.S. government Tuesday were probably made Monday.Top trade negotiators from both nations spoke by phone last week and pledged to create favorable conditions for implementation of the bilateral trade deal and cooperate on the economy and public health, according to a statement from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. President Donald Trump later said he’s struggling with Beijing in the wake of the global coronavirus pandemic.In another sign the phase-one trade deal could be on shaky ground, the Global Times, a communist party publication, reported that China may weigh voiding the agreement after U.S. criticism of the country’s handling of the coronavirus triggered anger among trade insiders. A suggestion to negotiate a new deal to tilt the balance more toward the Chinese side has also been floated, the hardline tabloid said.China pledged to buy $36.5 billion in American agricultural goods, but the pandemic that is thought to have originated in the city of Wuhan has delayed the pace of purchases. While the nation has picked up a wide range of commodities from sorghum to wheat to corn and pork, sales of soybeans, the poster child for the trade war, have now started to accelerate.Most of the purchases in the past two weeks were for loading at ports in the Gulf of Mexico, the people said. While some were for shipment from the current crop, others were for later in the fall when the new U.S. harvest starts. Calls to the Chinese customs department went unanswered.After three days of gains, soybeans for delivery in July were down 0.3% to $8.5225 a bushel at 9:26 a.m. in Chicago.Crop giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. said this month it was encouraged by China’s purchases so far. The Chicago-based company expects the Asian nation to buy 30 million to 35 million tons of American soybeans this year, Chief Financial Officer Ray Young said in a call with analysts on April 30.(Adds purchases in second paragraph, prices in penultimate)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
Authorities in the Chinese city where the pandemic began were moving forward with efforts to test all 11 million residents for the virus