The Hershey Co

HSY: XNYS (USA)

Morningstar Rating for Stocks	Fair Value	Economic Moat	Capital Allocation
	$545.00	Ptz	Kssmfmp

Hershey Earnings: Margin Gains Not Enough to Placate the Market, Rendering Shares a Bit Undervalued

Erin Lash

Oct 26, 2023

While our $196 fair value estimate shouldn’t see much change, the market continued to sour on wide-moat Hershey despite fair third-quarter marks: 10.7% organic sales growth, 240 basis points of adjusted gross margin expansion to 44.9%, and a 230-basis-point bump in adjusted operating margin to 24.9%. In this context, Hershey’s stock price is down around 17% since January but has slid around 30% from its peak in early May.

Free Trial of Morningstar Investor

Get our analysts’ objective, in-depth, and continuous investment coverage of HSY so you can make buy / sell decisions free of market noise.

Start Free Trial

Transparency is our policy. Learn how it impacts everything we do

Transparency is how we protect the integrity of our work and keep empowering investors to achieve their goals and dreams. And we have unwavering standards for how we keep that integrity intact, from our research and data to our policies on content and your personal data.

We’d like to share more about how we work and what drives our day-to-day business.

How we make money

We sell different types of products and services to both investment professionals and individual investors. These products and services are usually sold through license agreements or subscriptions. Our investment management business generates asset-based fees, which are calculated as a percentage of assets under management. We also sell both admissions and sponsorship packages for our investment conferences and advertising on our websites and newsletters.

How we use your personal data

How we use your information depends on the product and service that you use and your relationship with us. We may use it to:

Verify your identity, personalize the content you receive, or create and administer your account.
Provide specific products and services to you, such as portfolio management or data aggregation.
Develop and improve features of our offerings.
Gear advertisements and other marketing efforts towards your interests.

To learn more about how we handle and protect your data, visit our privacy center.

How we approach editorial content

Maintaining independence and editorial freedom is essential to our mission of empowering investor success. We provide a platform for our authors to report on investments fairly, accurately, and from the investor’s point of view. We also respect individual opinions––they represent the unvarnished thinking of our people and exacting analysis of our research processes. Our authors can publish views that we may or may not agree with, but they show their work, distinguish facts from opinions, and make sure their analysis is clear and in no way misleading or deceptive.

To further protect the integrity of our editorial content, we keep a strict separation between our sales teams and authors to remove any pressure or influence on our analyses and research.

Read our editorial policy to learn more about our process.