{"id":277349,"date":"2010-02-04T11:38:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T16:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"e2249889-c78b-43e3-9643-b1d7d4aa587b:391373"},"modified":"2010-02-04T11:38:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-04T16:38:00","slug":"dividend-hike-likely-at-bce-nbf-analyst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/277349","title":{"rendered":"Dividend hike likely at BCE: NBF analyst"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Senior management for BCE Inc. provided an optimistic if cautious outlook for the telecommunications giant&#39;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.financialpost.com\/news-sectors\/story.html?id=2521366\" title=\"Competition, slow recovery wiegh on BCE growth\" >financial performance this year<\/a> on an earnings call with analysts on Thursday. <\/p>\n<p>Despite a forecast for a tepid economic recovery in the first half of 2010 as well as increasing wireless competition from the Montreal firm, analysts on the call came away bullish on BCE&#39;s ability to deliver another hike to its dividend based on its full-year guidance. <\/p>\n<p>&quot;Management and the board remain committed to dividend growth, which we think means a possible dividend increase in mid-late 2010,&quot; wrote National Bank Financial&#39;s Greg MacDonald in a research note. &quot;If the company can execute at the high end of guidance, then the chance of an increase&#8230; is good.&quot; <\/p>\n<p>The analyst was confident BCE (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.financialpost.com\/markets\/company\/index.html?symbol=BCE&amp;id=96924\" title=\"stock quote\" >BCE\/TSX<\/a>) will, upgrading the stock to a Sector Outperform from Perform with a $32 price target. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"mailto:jasturgeon@nationalpost.com\" title=\"jasturgeon@nationalpost.com\" >Jamie Sturgeon<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/network.nationalpost.com\/np\/aggbug.aspx?PostID=391373\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Senior management for BCE Inc. provided an optimistic if cautious outlook for the telecommunications giant&#39;s financial performance this year on an earnings call with analysts on Thursday. Despite a forecast for a tepid economic recovery in the first half of 2010 as well as increasing wireless competition from the Montreal firm, analysts on the call [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5219,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-telecom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5219"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}