NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 20, 2018 / The Clorox Company and Procter & Gamble both sank to new lows on Thursday. The Clorox company saw its shares decrease after a downgrade from a Morgan Stanley analyst while Procter & Gamble shares sank despite the company announcing a big acquisition and earnings that beat estimates.

RDI Initiates Coverage on:

The Clorox Company
https://rdinvesting.com/news/?ticker=CLX

The Procter & Gamble Company
https://rdinvesting.com/news/?ticker=PG

The Clorox Company shares closed down nearly 6% on Thursday with almost 4 million shares traded. The stock sank to a new low of $118.92 after Morgan Stanley downgraded the stock citing that consumers are moving to smaller brands. According to Morgan Stanley analyst Dara Mohsenian, who cut his rating on Clorox from "equal weight" to "underweight," the challenges the company faces are pricing pressures and consumers shifting away from "large established brands towards smaller brands." He wrote, "We believe consensus expectations for CLX are too high on both organic sales growth and gross margins over the next few years," and "Historically, CLX has adroitly navigated through a competitive HPC environment from a market share standpoint, driven by its innovation contribution vs. inferior competition, particularly private label. However, going forward, we believe the overall US HPC environment is becoming more challenging." Mohsenian also cut his price target on the stock from $128 to $116.

Access RDI's The Clorox Company Research Report at:
https://rdinvesting.com/news/?ticker=CLX

The Procter & Gamble Company shares closed down 3.27% on Thursday with nearly 17 million shares traded compared to an average trading volume of about 10.4 million shares. The stock sank to a new low of $74.20 yesterday despite announcing a big acquisition. The company said it would be buying Merck KgaA's consumer health unit for $4.2 billion. The acquisition will give Procter & Gamble vitamin brands that include Seven Seas and would increase its exposure in Asian and Latin American markets. According to Morgan Stanley analyst Vincent Meunier, the deal "will help (Merck) focus on its pharma unit and refurbish its pipeline." The company (P&G) had also reported third quarter results and revealed a $2.5 billion profit on $16.3 billion in sales which beat what analysts had been waiting for. However, the results gave out some disappointing trends. Organic sales growth of 1% was much slower than the 2% growth seen in the 1st half. According to analyst Mark Astrachan of Stifel, "Overall we view the F3Q result as disappointing and suggestive the company continues to lose share in the majority of markets/categories." Astrachan did also say he thinks the acquisition would be "modestly favorable" to future sales growth.

Access RDI's The Procter & Gamble Company Research Report at:
https://rdinvesting.com/news/?ticker=PG

Our Actionable Research on The Clorox Company (NYSE: CLX) and The Procter & Gamble Company (NYSE: PG) can be downloaded free of charge at Research Driven Investing.

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