Exotic Foods

By DENNIS NISHI

Lots of grumpy customers take potshots at companies in forums, review sites and social networks. But what happens when a rival makes anonymous digs at you?

Experts say these situations don’t come up often, but when they do, they need to be handled with an especially light touch. Rivals may be trying to draw you into a nasty public fight that could alienate your customers. Their advice: Avoid those kinds of showdowns, and don’t try to be sneaky by posting anonymous comments of your own. Both approaches are likely to backfire.

Here’s the smart way to handle the situation.

Be alert for signs a rival is hounding you.

In most cases, they’ll simply cut and paste the same messages across multiple online venues. If they don’t do that, they might use similar phrases from site to site, as well as the same links or photos. On forums, they might show up as a collusive gang of brand-new posters, without a track record on the site.

Take your suspicions to site administrators.

Creating a fake identity for deceptive purposes—sockpuppeting—is against the terms of service at most forums and review sites, and most administrators will be willing to work with you. If the overseers can trace the posts back to a rival’s Internet-protocol address, you can ask them to remove the posts, shut down fake member accounts or even—in extreme cases—block the IP address.

Once the posts are gone, follow up on forums to dispel any lingering suspicions.

You might provide company experts, for instance, who can clear up false claims. This is a vital step, since many forum messages will keep coming up in Google

searches, especially when specific terms are mentioned. If you respond after the fact, you can get the truth on record.

If any of the attacks gain traction with concerned customers, supply a response in a Q&A on your website or social-network page.

But don’t call attention to the false claims by referring to them directly. For instance, if a rival wrote falsely that your products are made in China, just make a point of saying that your goods are made in the U.S.

Whenever you counter claims, keep your tone helpful and neutral.

Don’t be as nasty as the company that slammed you. Discussion sites can be very close-knit places with peculiar social dynamics. If you come in and sour the tone—particularly if you seem to have an agenda—users will get turned off.

Start early.

Before you run into trouble, establish a presence on forums and maintain goodwill there by answering questions without trying to give users a hard sell. If you build loyalty, users will be suspicious of random attacks on you and stick up for the company.

Mr. Nishi is a writer in Los Angeles. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

A version of this article appeared April 29, 2013, on page R5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Pick Your Battles.

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

Houston

Mamas, let your sons grow up to marry female subsea petroleum engineers.

That is the advice Bob Dudley gives parents (though we’ve converted it to Houston vernacular). The oil and gas boom is real. It will last decades. Young people, especially young women who make up a large share of college graduates, would be smart to get on the bandwagon, says Mr. Dudley, who runs oil giant BP

—”they will have phenomenal opportunities.”

BP? If you follow the news, you might have thought that BP, rather than creating jobs, was getting ready to be pulled back into the hole it has been trying to escape ever since the disastrous Deepwater Horizon spill of three years ago. Mr. Dudley is in Houston (from London, where BP’s global headquarters remains) to attend a big annual energy conference. The meeting, sponsored by Dan Yergin’s Cambridge Energy Research Associates, is a one-stop canoodling opportunity for CEOs, energy ministers and deal makers. BP finds itself in an odd position—caught between the industry’s new golden age and America’s doghouse.

Mr. Dudley is bullish on oil exploration in the fracking age, the ultra-deepwater age, the oil-sands age. Now if his company could just get out from under the Macondo spill and the Gulf States’ (especially Louisiana’s) apparent desire to use BP as a bottomless cash register. Last month, a trial began in New Orleans that could saddle the company, in addition to $40 billion already spent or committed, with many additional billions in penalties if the company is found guilty of “gross negligence.” Waiting in the wings are further claims from Louisiana and other states, who say they’re owed as much as $34 billion for lost tax revenue and damage to property.

BP, since the spill, has become a much more American company. Its CEO is American, born in Queens, and grew up in Mississippi and Illinois. While some advised the company to remove its assets as far as possible from the U.S. judicial system, BP did the opposite. It doubled down on the risks and rewards of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, committing to spend an average $4 billion a year for the next decade.

The company is spending billions and hiring thousands to upgrade its remaining “northern tier” refineries in Indiana, Ohio and Washington state to handle a gush of heavy crude from Canada’s tar sands. BP has started drilling in Ohio’s Utica shale. “Who would have thought 10 years ago we would be exploring in northeast Ohio,” says Mr. Dudley. “This is amazing stuff.”

And because oil exists under the North Sea and off Norway, BP is looking off Nova Scotia, where it recently scored drilling rights. Mr. Dudley believes the promise extends down the eastern coast of the U.S. The reason is plate tectonics. “People have realized that the source rocks, which is where hydrocarbons are generated, on the western Atlantic side are the same as on the eastern.” Oil in offshore Angola has meant oil in offshore Brazil; oil off Northern Europe likely means oil off the eastern shores of North America.

But there’s a problem. These opportunities compete with claimants who want to keep milking the spill. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was the key holdout from a settlement that would have made the current trial unnecessary. Mr. Jindal long ago unleashed his coastal adviser, Garret Graves, to tout claims publicly that have led Louisiana voters to expect a sum billions greater than the $16 billion in fines and penalties that the Obama Justice Department reportedly was proposing as a settlement just before the trial got under way.

BP, which has reserved large sums for other claims, has put nothing aside against Louisiana’s claims for lost tax revenue because the company apparently considers these claims not worth much. Louisiana weathered the late recession better than most other states precisely because of BP’s huge cleanup and compensation spending.

“We’ve settled a lot,” says Mr. Dudley, ticking off agreements with federal agencies, prosecutors and private litigants. “I think we’re known as a company that’s looking for a reasonable settlement. But if the demands are not tethered in reality, we’ll go through the court system.”

Most of all, Mr. Dudley seeks finality, not agreements that leave parties free to keep coming back for more.

Mr. Dudley delivers all this without a trace of angst or anger. A product himself of Hattiesburg, Miss., he appreciates the damage done to the Gulf—but also the benefits BP brings in jobs and investment.

He took over for British-born Tony Hayward, whose public performance during the spill was not a PR masterpiece. Mr. Dudley, who came to the British company via its 1998 Amoco acquisition, previously was newsworthy for his role in managing BP’s fabulously lucrative yet surreal joint venture with four Russian oligarchs. At one point, he was obliged to flee the country lest he become target for some of the more aggressive forms of Russian business persuasion.

Mr. Dudley, who looks a bit like the actor Michael Moriarty, without the hangdog foreboding, has made good use in his career of a thick skin. In the late 1970s, after studying chemical engineering, he joined the oil industry because, he says, “All I really wanted to do at that age was see the world.” Some friends stopped talking to him because of his career choice.

On his first day of work at Amoco in Chicago, he had to walk through a Jane Fonda rally. “I was given a little ‘Stop Big Oil’ button, which I wore up onto the floor until the first person I met said, ‘Uh, You should take that off.’ “

Many would have guessed that BP would be willing to pay just about any sum to put the Macondo spill behind it. This appeared to have been the company’s attitude too, when, in advance of any legal proceeding, it put up a $20 billion trust fund to compensate victims. Lately, though, the company seems to have awakened to political reality. As long as politicians sense BP’s willingness to pay, BP will have to keep paying. The company undoubtedly hoped its lean-forward approach would pay dividends by now. Instead it finds itself gently trying to correct a notion that, if BP is doing OK financially, it must mean the legal system hasn’t punished BP enough.

About all this, though, Mr. Dudley will only tell me that “justice,” not “affordability,” should be the measure of any final settlement.

BP was born as the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. in 1909, and even at the time of Macondo still accounted for one pound out of every six received by British subjects as corporate dividends. Yet faced with an existential crisis, BP discovered its greatest strengths were bound up with its worst headaches—Russia and America.

The TNK-BP joint venture in Russia that Mr. Dudley ran was a stupendous success—BP invested $8 billion and received $19 billion in dividends, plus another $28 billion in estimated value when a deal closes this month to sell the venture to Rosneft. Another CEO would take the money and run. Not Mr. Dudley. After some false starts and pratfalls, BP cut a deal that will leave BP owning 20% of state-controlled Rosneft, which will become the world’s largest publicly traded oil company.

“You should see the map of TNK and Rosneft assets,” Mr. Dudley tells me. “They’re peppered across the country right next to each other.” Great industrial efficiencies are ripe to be realized when the two start “hooking their pipes together.” Mr. Dudley says Russian President Vladimir Putin personally assured him: “We want you, BP, and other companies that are partnering with Rosneft to help increase the value of Rosneft” toward the company’s eventual privatization.

Cynics might hear famous last words but the BP chief is convinced that Russia has changed since the wild-east 1990s and that the “sense of unease” that minority shareholders once felt is no longer appropriate. Then again, more than a few international CEOs probably would also look upon BP’s travails in the U.S. as a reason not to invest in America too.

Mr. Dudley obviously does not agree, whatever his frustrations with the legal system. He goes out of his way to praise the “stable and predictable fiscal regime” established by the U.S. government for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which allows BP to undertake massive investments with confidence. He sees a great future for Alaska if the state will reform a problematic tax code—and appears confident that Alaska politicians understand their interests clearly and will meet industry halfway.

Yet he’s also befuddled by America’s Hamlet act over the Keystone XL pipeline, which would help unlock Canada’s energy bounty. The decision has been so “shocking” to Canadians, Mr. Dudley says, “because it’s effectively bottled up their national resource,” forcing the country to accept below-market prices for Alberta crude. The damage is likely permanent: Canada “now will build pipelines and some of the oil will be shipped to Asia. Canada has realized they can’t depend on one customer.”

Though the “Beyond Petroleum” rhetoric of BP’s former chief, Lord Browne of Madingley, has been shelved, Mr. Dudley does not dismiss climate worries. On a wells-to-wheels basis, he points out, Canada’s oil sands aren’t worse for the environment than Mideast crude shipped to the U.S. on a supertanker. Still, the day is gone when BP wanted to be a leader in the carbon discussion. “We need to focus on other problems right now,” he says.

Mr. Dudley has even less truck with “peak oil” pessimism. BP figures the industry will deliver an additional 16 million barrels per day by 2030. In many older fields, technology is rejuvenating production. “It’s like wringing paint out of a paint brush. You never stop getting paint out of a paint brush.” Resources long presumed to be unproducible are now being tapped or eventually will be through fracking, horizontal drilling and a BP-led project to develop materials and equipment capable of drilling at greater ocean depths.

“In most of the world,” adds Mr. Dudley, “if people are living on the land and there’s hydrocarbons underneath it, they will fight it.” America is different. Private ownership of mineral rights, along with a “lattice of pipelines” allowing new resources to find their way to market, have given the U.S. its big head start. But technologies and techniques developed in America will eventually be employed everywhere—especially in Russia and China, where governments can issue diktats and make things happen quickly. “If the rocks are there, they’ll do it.”

Which brings us to “the great crew change.” Mr. Dudley and fellow industry veterans speak of a generational hole in their ranks. In the late ’80s and ’90s, nobody went into petroleum engineering, so now companies must rely on a cadre of aging graybeards plus an influx of newbies who can’t come onstream fast enough.

“When I go to Angola and around the world, there are many fantastic young women going into this industry. Employment is difficult in many places in Europe and [the U.S.], but anybody who goes through petroleum engineering, chemical engineering, any of these skills, there will be jobs for them.”

If Mr. Dudley has anything to say about it, many of those jobs will be with BP even before it has finally and honorably dealt with the legacy of the worst oil spill in history. Mamas, you have your marching orders.

Mr. Jenkins writes the Journal’s Business World column.

A version of this article appeared March 16, 2013, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Three Years After the Spill, BP Gets Bullish.

Tim Evans/Saturn Lounge for the Wall Street Journal (macau); Eli Meir Kaplan for The Wall Street Journal (cat and dog)

Faces of the insured: Big Bird, a 29-year-old macaw, had a partial wing amputation due to a bone infection before he got coverage. Insurance helped pay for Burmese cat Raisin’s pancreatitis treatment and golden retriever Birdie’s allergy testing.

The cost of medical care for pets is rising as fast as it is for humans, and that’s helping to spur sales of pet insurance.

Pet owners are able to choose from a rapidly growing array of policies, featuring everything from high-deductible designs to coverage of alternative-medicine treatments like acupuncture. Some pet policies focus on accidents and illness, while others include wellness checkups and shots. And some things that traditionally weren’t included in pet insurance, such as hereditary conditions, are now paid for under many plans.

Consumers need to be careful, since many pet policies can be as confusing as coverage you buy for yourself. Pet insurance often places strict limits on how much it will pay for particular procedures. And policies can have tricky designs that can leave consumers with big out-of-pocket bills for their animals. Premiums vary from around $10 a month to $75 a month, depending on factors including the richness of the plan, your location and your animal’s breed and age.

This year, pet owners are expected to spend around $12.2 billion for veterinary care, up from $11.1 billion last year and $8.2 billion five years ago, according to the American Pet Products Association. Complex procedures widely used for people, including chemotherapy and dialysis, are now available for pets, and the potential cost of treating certain illnesses has spiked as a result.

Donna Oliver, in Austin, Texas, has shelled out about $32,600 since 2007 to care for two dogs who passed away earlier this year. Marley, a Labrador, got stem-cell therapy for his arthritis, surgery on his windpipe to deal with a condition that was choking off his breathing, and, at the end, medication to ease the pain of advanced cancer. Maddie, a corgi mix, suffered from Cushing’s disease, a hormonal disorder, and got treatment including surgery to heal ulcers on her corneas.

“It does cost a lot if you want to do the right thing by them,” says Ms. Oliver, a 38-year-old customer-service manager, who says she is still paying off the credit-card bills. To avoid a similar situation with her three remaining dogs, Chelsea, Jasmine and Runner, she recently bought insurance for them.

One Million Insured

Currently, around a million U.S. pets are insured, according to the North American Pet Health Insurance Association. The number is growing about 10% a year, the group estimates, though that still represents just a tiny fraction of all pets.

Around 90% of the insured are dogs, with about 10% cats and a small number of other animals. The biggest U.S. pet-insurance company, Veterinary Pet Insurance, or VPI, a unit of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., says it has written policies for hedgehogs, snakes, turtles and geckos, among other creatures.

Eli Meir Kaplan for The Wall Street Journal (6); Tim Evans/Saturn Lounge for the Wall Street Journal (Parrot)

These pets’ owners got insurance so financial concerns don’t guide their pets’ care. “I want it to be because of quality-of-life issues,” says Karen Becker, owner of Darwin, whose policy helped cover the parrot’s broken leg.

Karen Becker, an art-school program director in Baileys Harbor, Wis., has insured her African grey parrot, Darwin, and blue and gold macaw, Big Bird, since she got them in 2001 and 2008, respectively. Treatments for birds can be at least as pricey as those for larger animals, she says, and the parrots may live for decades. Ms. Becker, 52, says she doesn’t want financial concerns to guide decisions about her pets’ care: “I want it to be because of quality-of-life issues.”

If you’re considering pet insurance, start by shopping around. It’s best to start when the animal is still young and healthy, since new policies won’t cover pre-existing health conditions and some insurers won’t take on pets over a certain age.

The industry has grown in recent years, with new competitors such as Pets Best LLC, Petplan Inc., Embrace Pet Insurance Agency LLC and Trupanion, a unit of Vetinsurance International Inc., entering the market. In the past, a number of startup pet-insurance firms have gone out of business, so it is worth checking with your state regulator about companies’ age and record.

Workplace Benefit

Consumers may also be able to buy pet insurance through their workplace, which can often be cheaper than buying on your own. Around 19% of employers offer the policies as a voluntary benefit, according to a survey conducted this year by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans. That includes firms such as Colgate-Palmolive Co. and Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc.

To learn about policies, you can start with overview Web sites such as petinsurancereview.com, dogtime.com and petinsuranceguideus.com. For definitive information, though, you should click through to the sites of the individual pet insurance firms, which can offer premium quotes.

Once you’ve narrowed down the list, get full policy documents, which are often posted online or available through a phoned request. Use those, in combination with phone calls or emailed inquiries to the companies, to delve into the details of the plans.

You will want to check how the company will raise premiums as you renew the policy. Often, they go up with age and veterinary inflation. They may also be linked to your animal’s claims history—so a pet with a lot of health issues in a given year could see a heftier increase the following year.

You also want to take a close look at what you would have to spend out of your own pocket if your pet got injured or ill. Pet-insurance firms tend to limit what they reimburse for various treatments. And you’ll generally have to pay the bills up front, then seek reimbursement from the insurer.

Crystal’s Surgery

When Elizabeth Pannill’s Labrador, Crystal, needed back surgery a few years ago, the insurance covered less than half of the nearly $4,000 total bill. Then, when Crystal got a tumor removed from her rib earlier this year, spending 10 days in an animal-hospital intensive-care unit, the plan paid about $1,700 of the nearly $5,500 total, which already included a professional discount for Dr. Pannill, a veterinarian who isn’t currently in clinical practice.

Dr. Pannill says that despite the limited payouts, she also has purchased insurance for two other dogs and a pair of cats. “It just gives you a little peace of mind that you would have some financial help when an illness came along,” says the 56-year-old, who lives in Staples, Texas.

VPI pays flat amounts for various treatments. Other pet insurers pay a percentage of vet bills, although some limit payouts to a percentage of what they consider “usual and customary” fees, which may be lower than what vets actually charge.

As with insurance for people, consumers need to look closely at how the out-of-pocket charges on pet insurance are structured. Pet plans offer a range of deductibles, some as high as $1,000 a year. These may be levied on an annual basis, or charged anew for each illness or incident.

Congenital conditions, behavior modification and pregnancy-related costs are often not included, in addition to pre-existing health issues. VPI is beginning to introduce a cat-focused plan that offers limited payouts for certain common feline issues, like chronic kidney failure.

At least two companies, Embrace and Petplan, offer coverage of alternative treatments such as acupuncture and chiropractic.

Many policies now include coverage for hereditary conditions. It’s often worth paying for this, particularly for pure-bred dogs. Each insurer has its own lists of genetic illnesses, and they vary somewhat, says John Albers, executive director of the American Animal Hospital Association.

Write to Anna Wilde Mathews at anna.mathews@wsj.com

Fund Scope | Scoreboard

Japan’s stock market has been on a tear, with the benchmark Nikkei index posting its best April in two decades to cap nine straight months of gains. The rally, fueled by the new government’s stimulus policies, has been a boon for short-term investors. But could Japan, with two decades of economic stagnation behind it, again be attractive for long-term investors as well?

Skeptics abound. David Breuhan, a portfolio manager at Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based Gregory J. Schwartz & Co., dismisses the rally as a result of a government “sugar shot” and warns the long-term-minded to stay away. But fund investors are plowing in — to the tune of $10.4 billion over the six months through April 24, according to Lipper. And some international fund managers have gradually been adding Japanese stocks. The Columbia Pacific/Asia

fund (ticker: CPAWX) has increased its Japan holdings to 35% of the portfolio, from 29% in recent months, says manager Daisuke Nomoto.

The optimism about Japan flows from the December election of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, swept into office after promising economic shock therapy. “Abenomics” includes aggressive monetary easing, stimulus spending, and a push for reforms.

Much attention has focused on plans to weaken the yen and nudge inflation to 2%. Campbell Gunn, who runs the T. Rowe Price Japan

fund (PRJPX), hopes the falling yen creates a tail wind for holdings like Toyota Motor

(TM) already up 23% for the year. Fund managers say that real-estate shares and banks are good inflation plays. Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Holdings

(8309.Japan), one of Nomoto’s larger holdings, has returned 63% this year.

The falling yen is a concern for investors in U.S.-based funds since returns are diminished when translated back into dollars. Hedging strategies are sometimes used to address that risk, but many fund managers say the strong returns from Japan outweigh the currency drag.

As investors flooded in, stocks have risen to what Gunn describes as fair levels, with the Nikkei’s price-to-current-earnings ratio around 14. Finding good values from here is getting tougher, says William Kennedy, manager of the Fidelity International Discovery

fund (FIGRX). “We’ve had the beta rally, but there’s still a lot of alpha to generate by getting earnings [prospects] right,” he adds.

Japan continues to face serious risks. It’s burdened with an enormous debt. Its population is graying rapidly, and there are too few workers to support the elderly. And some worry that letting the inflation genie out of the bottle is courting disaster. Charles Lewis Sizemore, chief investment officer at Sizemore Capital Management in Dallas, warns of hyperinflation that will “crush Japanese equities.” He, like Breuhan, advises long-term investors to give Japan a wide berth.

BUT SOME FUND MANAGERS see a solid case for Japanese stocks.

Says Taizo Ishida, lead manager of the Matthews Japan

fund (MJFOX): “I would argue that fundamentals of Japanese companies are even better today than five years ago, since they went through very tough times mainly because of the strong yen.” Kennedy adds that Abe’s program is much more than monetary stimulus. It includes increasing the number of female workers, developing tax-free zones, and lowering corporate taxes. “Abe is doing a lot of structural reforms, not just throwing money at the problem,” he says.

If you’re invested in Japan, keep an eye on Abe’s progress in areas like cutting business taxes and loosening immigration restrictions. His results may determine whether the country’s economy — and stock market — thrive after the stimulus wears off. 

E-mail:
editors@barrons.com

Corporate bigwigs American Express,

International Business Machines,

and PepsiCo

all enriched their dividends last week.

For American Express (ticker: AXP), it was a matter of making official its intention, disclosed in March, to raise its payout. It will disburse 23 cents a share quarterly, up 15% from 20 cents. When the travel and financial-services giant hiked its dividend by two cents in March 2012, it marked the first increase since November 2007.

American Express stock, a Dow Jones industrial component, set a 52-week high Friday above $71, so it now yields a modest 1.3%. Dividends have been paid without interruption since 1870. The new payout will put an additional $132 million in investors’ accounts annually. The company is moving ahead with plans to repurchase enough common shares to return up to $3.2 billion to holders during the rest of 2013 and another $1 billion in 2014′s first quarter.

In announcing a 2% advance last month in first-quarter net over the year-earlier total on a 4% revenue gain, CEO Kenneth Chenault said that the company is off to “a strong start in 2013, thanks to our ability to grow revenue in a slow-growth economy, control expenses, and maintain a strong balance sheet.”

For its part, IBM (IBM) enhanced its quarterly dividend for the 18th year in a row, raising it 12%, to 95 cents a common share from 85 cents, which is worth an extra $443.5 million to stockholders annually. This is the 10th consecutive year of double-digit boosts, and Big Blue has increased its payout by more than 600% since the start of 2000. Continuous dividends date back to 1916.

IBM also added $5 billion to its stock-repurchase program. That’s atop the $6.2 billion remaining at the end of March from a prior authorization, and directors will consider upping the buyback ante again when they meet in October. The Armonk, N.Y., company has cut its share count by one-third over the past 13 years. Since 2000, it has returned more than $150 billion to investors through cash payouts and share repurchases.

The dividend and buyback were welcome news, in contrast to IBM’s report that first-quarter profit had dropped 1% on a 5% revenue decline. The tech giant blamed a disappointing performance by its sales force. Another Dow Jones industrial stock, Big Blue set a 52-week high of $215.90 on March 15. It was recently quoted at about $205, for a 1.9% yield. Barrons.com income-investing editor Michael Aneiro noted in an April 30 blogpost that IBM’s bonds due in August 2022 were yielding 2.314%.

Moody’s Investors Service senior vice president Richard Lane says that IBM’s Aa3 senior unsecured credit rating and stable outlook remain supported by its strengthening business profile, which includes “a growing emphasis on higher-margin software and services businesses (88% of total pretax profit) in lieu of more commoditized hardware offerings.”

PepsiCo (PEP) sweetened its common dividend for the 41st consecutive year, at an additional cost of $185.5 million annually. The new quarterly will be 56.75 cents, up three cents, or 5.6%. Yield: 2.7%. Dividends have been paid since 1952. (Archrival Coca-Cola

[KO] hiked its quarterly in February to 28 cents from 25.5 cents, also for a 2.7% yield.) Since 2002 began, PepsiCo has returned more than $58 billion to stockholders via dividends and share repurchases. This year’s expectation: upward of $6 billion.

Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo earned 69 cents in the first quarter, down from 71 cents. However, excluding the effect of Venezuela’s currency devaluation, commodity hedges, and restructuring charges, the 97-year-old maker of sodas, Tropicana juices, and Frito-Lay snacks, to name a few of its products, earned 77 cents a share, helped in part by price increases. That topped a FactSet analysts’ poll forecasting 70 cents. Revenue also surpassed estimates, growing 1%, to $12.58 billion. PepsiCo set a 52-week high of $84.32 on April 23 (Coke hit a 12-month high of $42.96 the same day).

BEATING WALL STREET’S first-quarter consensus profit estimate by 19 cents a share, for a 52% jump on a 39% sales surge, gun maker Sturm, Ruger

(RGR) announced an increased quarterly common dividend of 49 cents, up from 40.4 cents. The company pays a variable dividend based on the size of its earnings. At its current price of about $51, the stock yields 3.9% with the new payout. 

Coments? E-mail: shirley.lazo@barrons.com