Suncorp-Metway (SUN) Stocks Recommendation

Suncorp-Metway (SUN) have an unchanged Neutral 2 shares recommendation and a steady price target of $23.20 per share from market analyst UBS. The banking company have made extensive changes to their executive management team. Suncorp-Metway have hired 3 managers from PMN (Belleville: personal insurance; Fox: WM; Bell: Vero NZ) & an external candidate (Smith: IT). Five SUN executives were retained (Foster: retail bank; McDonald: business banking; Milliner: commercial insurance; Inglis: strategy & HR; Blucher: integration), though there was a redistribution of responsibilities. PMN's West & SUN's Eilert have decided to leave new group. Today's broad restructure followed a similarly extensive redistribution of executive roles less than one year ago. Prior to that restructure, changes in the group executive were infrequent. With Blucher filling the newly created role of Integrations, we believe that management's prime focus will be on the PMN merger. (A similar role was created at the time of the GIO acquisition.) While the company today said that they would not be providing frequent synergy updates, there was a commitment to update investors on the integration progress at the FY07E result (27 August). The analyst estimates c2% FY09E EPS accretion (ex integration costs) & assuming targeted synergies of $225mn pre-tax. They valued SUN using a sum-of-the-parts methodology and estimate that SUN is trading on a 12.5x FY08E PE.

Suncorp-Metway Limited is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) under stock code SUN. You can view their investor website here. SUN was listed on the ASX on 7 July, 1988. John Story is the chairman of Suncorp-Metway and the CEO is John Mulcahy. The Suncorp Group is one of Australia's leaders in banking, insurance, investment and superannuation. The Group focuses on retail consumers and small to medium businesses. Providing banking, insurance, superannuation and funds management products and services to the retail, corporate and commercial sectors. Find out the meaning of the recommendations in this primer. Browse for other stockbroker recommendations. You can use Instalment Warrants to trade SUN. Check your charts and good luck with your share trading!