Our reports for the period of July thru September 2020 come to an end with today’s report on Matthews International. Funeral Director Daily files reports every quarter on the eight public companies that make up our financial Death Care Index (DCI). Today’s report on Matthew’s International, which you can access here, encompasses the mentioned time period which is the 4th Quarter of Matthews fiscal year so we can give you Fiscal Year 2020 numbers also. First of all, for 4Q […]
I’m kind of tired of the word “unprecedented”. It seems every time that I turn around someone is using that term in relation to the world and times we have been living in since February in the United States. Yes, 2020 is different, but I’m not so sure that it is “unprecedented” for the upstaging of people’s lives. No doubt, for most of us living as adults in 2020 this is a year unlike any other we have probably faced. […]
A little over a year ago we told you of the case of Aimee Stephens and the Harris Funeral Home. That court case was about to be heard at the United States Supreme Court at that time which would be ruling on whether or not there had been discrimination against a transgender person in a funeral home setting. If you remember the basics of the case, Ms. Stephens had been fired by the funeral home in defiance of wearing the […]
We continue to roll out the earnings reports of the public death care companies and today is no exception. Today we tell you about one of the quieter companies that is starting to make a name for themselves as they grow. That company is Utah based Security National Financial Corporation (SNFC) and divisions of the company are involved in mortuaries, cemeteries, funeral funding through insurance assignments, and preneed insurance. In essence, from our point of view, while still small by […]
Over the last couple of years that I have published Funeral Director Daily, I’ve written on this topic a couple of times. “This topic” is that of smaller association cemeteries and the financial plights more and more of them seem to be falling into. I limit this discussion to “association cemeteries” simply because church cemeteries, municipal cemeteries, veteran cemeteries, and for-profit cemeteries have something to fall back to when the revenues start coming up less than the expenses. Association cemeteries, […]
It’s Friday and we are heading into the weekend preceding the Thanksgiving holiday. With all of the death care companies reporting earnings reports in the last couple of weeks and our coverage of those we have a few articles that we feel our readers should have access to, yet we are not able to feature them in individual articles. So, here are some links that you can check out on your own this weekend. . . . .and they bring […]
This article will be published on Friday morning because I figure it won’t be real business like, but it will be something that the reader can carry into the weekend. Lots of people talk about PK’s – Preacher’s Kids – but there is another group of us who grew up in a funeral home or near a funeral home and sometimes were expected to toe the line even more properly than PK’s because we were Funeral Director’s Kids (FDK’s). . […]
A couple of years ago I looked at StoneMor and their operations and told readers that they should, if they had a StoneMor competitor in their market, look at a possible acquisition of that competitor. Quite frankly, I was of the opinion that the way StoneMor was moving would probably lead to a liquidation and some of those businesses might be able to be purchased at the right price. However, while there has been some pain and some selected liquidation […]
You can read this article from Australia’s Market Herald that announced that Australia’s largest human funeral and cremation provider finalized a deal to purchase two pet cremation business in the country for a combined price of US $36.44 million ($49.8 million in Australian dollars). We learned that last week, InvoCare, purchased Family Pet Care and Pets in Peace to add to its pet cremation brand, Patch and Purr, which it started in 2018. According to the article, Family Pet Care, […]
In late October Assurant hinted that they will be divesting what they call their Global Preneed business. That segment of their business consists of preneed funeral insurance products and Final Need insurance products. In reporting the company’s 3rd Quarter financial results, CEO Alan Colberg gave another hint as to the Global Preneed business potentially disappearing from the Assurant portfolio of businesses. He did not mention Global Preneed at all when he said of 3Q results, “Our third quarter 2020 performance […]
