4. Shell Plc (NYSE:SHEL)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 37
Shell Plc (NYSE:SHEL) is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England. At the close of Q1 2022, 37 hedge funds were long Shell Plc (NYSE:SHEL) and held stakes worth $5.63 billion, This is compared to 41 positions in the previous quarter with stakes worth $2.63 billion.
On July 28, Shell Plc (NYSE:SHEL) reported market-beating earnings for the fiscal second quarter of 2022. The company reported earnings per share of $3.08 and beat EPS estimates by $0.28. The company’s revenue came in at $100.06 billion, up 65.35% year over year, and outperformed Wall Street consensus by $17.76 billion.
Shortly after its earnings release, Shell Plc (NYSE:SHEL) declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.50 per ADS share. The dividend is payable on September 19 to investors of record at the close of business on August 12. As of August 3, the stock has a forward dividend yield of 3.82% and trailing twelve-month free cash flows of $35.86 billion.
Wall Street is bullish on Shell Plc (NYSE:SHEL). On July 29, RBC Capital analyst Biraj Borkhataria raised his price target on Shell Plc (NYSE:SHEL) to 3,200 GBP from 3,100 GBP and reiterated an Outperform rating on the shares. On August 1, Berenberg revised its price target on Shell Plc (NYSE:SHEL) to EUR 31.50 from EUR 33 and maintained a Buy rating on the shares.
As of March 31, Fisher Asset Management owns roughly 19.6 million shares of Shell Plc (NYSE:SHEL) and is the largest shareholder in the company. The fund’s stakes were valued at $1.07 billion.
Here is what Harding Loevner had to say about Shell Plc (NYSE:SHEL) in its “International Small Companies Equity Fund” first-quarter 2022 investor letter:
“While risks of unforeseen consequences arising from the Ukraine conflict are high, on this front we are cautiously optimistic that China will work hard to maintain its neutrality in a credible way, as it is a huge beneficiary of trade with the rest of the world, especially the rich developed nations. We think it likely that China, along with India, will continue to buy oil and gas from Russia (just as Europe, at least for now, plans to keep its gas pipelines open), and do not expect that fact to alter China’s trade relations with the West much. Nevertheless, we must contemplate that our optimism is misplaced on the importance of membership in the global network of exchange. If our central and optimistic case—admittedly an educated guess—is wrong, then we’d need to greatly modify our views of which companies in our opportunity set will face new barriers to profitable growth, and which might stand to benefit, relatively, from a further receding of globalization. (Global trade, after all, has never matched the peak share of GDP it reached in 2008, before the Global Financial Crisis.) We’d expect such a world to be less efficient, as the cold logic of comparative advantage is demoted as a determinant of which goods or services are produced and where. That would lead to a less prosperous world, since exploiting comparative advantage is a cornerstone of wealth creation. If regional blocs began to raise limits on the movement of capital as well as goods, we’d need to parse which of our multi-national companies were at risk of declining sales from increasingly hostile, siloed countries. Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:SHEL) has found its Siberian oil and gas joint venture assets stranded by the combination of sanctions and the public opprobrium of Russia’s actions.”
