Guggenheim initiated coverage with a buy rating on shares of Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) and set a price target of $58 per share, as reported by Benzinga.
The new target price per share set by analysts at Guggenheim represents a 15.4% upside from the analysts’ average target price of $50.27, which ranges between a low of $43 and a high of $58.
Source: Yahoo Finance
Guggenheim’s new target price per share represents a nearly 3% upside from the current share price of $48.82.
As of today, analysts suggested buying shares of Abbott with a recommendation rating of 1.9. The recommendation rating ranges between 1.0 (Strong Buy) and 5.0 (Sell). Six analysts out of a total of 18 recommended buying shares of Abbott.
Source: Yahoo Finance
Abbott is trading at $48.82, up 34 cents or 0.70% from the previous trading day. A volume of 3,164,153 shares was traded on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday versus an average volume of shares traded over the last 10 trading days of 7.47 million and an average volume of shares traded over the last three months of 6.78 million.
The company has a market capitalization of $84.72 billion and an enterprise value of $100.03 billion. Abbott has a price-earnings (P/E) ratio of 50.80, a price-book ratio (P/B) ratio of 2.70 and a price-sales (P/S) ratio of 3.80. The health care stock is trading a few cents below the 52-week low of $37.38. The 52-week high is $49.59.
For full fiscal 2017, analysts forecast an EPS of $2.47 on average that, combined with a forward P/E ratio of 17.64, gives a value of $43.57 per share. This value signals that Abbott is overvalued by the stock market at the moment; investors don’t buy shares of the health care giant just for capital gain reasons, though, but because it is a faithful issuer of dividends.
Abbott distributes a total of $1.06 per share every year through quarterly payments of 26.5 cents for a dividend yield of 2.18%. Furthermore, the health care company can easily neighbor $2.5 billion in free cash flow every year, and this is more than enough to sustain the payment of the dividend to its shareholders.
In 2016 Abbott paid dividends for a total of about $1.54 billion to the shareholders and a total amount of $460 million in the first three months of fiscal 2017.
Abbott has 1.77 billion shares outstanding, of which approximately 97.2% can be traded on the stock market. Abbott insiders hold approximately 0.21% of the company’s total shares outstanding while institutions hold approximately a portion equal to 70.50% of the company’s total shares outstanding.
As of the most recent quarter, of which most important figures can be read on this article, Abbott has a liquidity of approximately $8.9 million just in cash on hand and securities – not to mention the existence of a line of unused credit with maturity in 2019 that, when considered, will bring the total liquidity available to Abbott to about $15 billion. Plenty of cash that the company can use to expand its portfolio of products and meet short term obligations.
Among the top institutional holders, the Vanguard Group Inc. stands out with a volume of 126,545,892 shares held, or approximately 7.29% of the company’s total shares outstanding, valued approximately $5.6 billion on March 30, 2016.
Disclosure: I have no positions in Abbott Laboratories.
