A survey of North American equities heading in both directions
On the rise
Canadian oil and gas company Suncor Energy Inc. (SU-T) was higher by almost 4 per cent after it said late Monday it saw higher upstream production and throughput at its refineries in the fourth quarter.
The Calgar-based company’s upstream quarterly production rose to 874,000 barrels per day (bpd) from 808,000 bpd during the same quarter last year.
Suncor said its refinery throughput rose by 31,000 bpd to 487,000 bpd during the quarter, meanwhile its refinery utilization jumped to 104 per cent from 98 per cent last year.
“Our strong operational performance also supported strong financial performance, including enabling us to achieve our $8 billion net debt target nine months ahead of the projection outlined in our May 2024 three-year plan,” CEO Rich Kruger said.
Last month, the producer forecast higher oil and gas production as well as lower spending in 2025, hoping to benefit from the increase in export capacity since the commencement of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion last year.
In a research note, TD Cowen analyst Menno Hulshof said: “Ahead of energy conferences this week, SU pre-released Q4/24 and 2024 operating results, which showcased record (and 2024 guidance) breaking upstream/downstream performance. SU has now beat the Street six straight quarters, representing every single quarter under the new leadership. Our expectation is that Street estimates need to grind higher to capture what could prove to be the new norm at SU.”
Lithium Americas (LAC-T) saw gains of over 0.8 per cent after it said on Tuesday it has raised the reserve estimate for the Thacker Pass lithium project and also appointed industry veteran Luke Colton as the new chief financial officer, effective Jan. 29.
The Thacker Pass project is slated to open later this decade and be a key supplier to General Motors (GM-N), which last year contributed US$625-million to buy a 38-per-cent stake in their new joint venture, Lithium Nevada Ventures, for developing the project.
U.S. automakers are ramping up their output of EVs and hybrids and aiming to reduce their reliance on China for battery-related materials in a competitive market.
The mine’s first phase is expected to be completed in late 2027, and produce 40,000 metric tons of battery-quality lithium carbonate per year, enough for up to 800,000 EVs.
The company now expects mineral reserve estimate of 14.3 million tons (Mt) lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE), an increase of 286% and mineral resource estimate of 44.5 Mt LCE, an increase of 177 per cent since the November 2022 Feasibility Study.
“Thacker Pass is now the largest measured lithium reserve and resource in the world” said CEO Jonathan Evans.
The lithium miner said it expects the new estimates to support an expansion of up to five phases with an 85-year mine life.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy finalized a US$2.26-billion loan for Lithium Americas to build the Nevada mine.
The Canadian firm said on Monday, Mr. Colton will replace interim CFO April Hashimoto, who will resume her role as the company’s senior VP, Finance and Administration.
Calgary’s Total Energy Services Inc. (TOT-T) increased 0.5 per cent after saying it is planning $61.9-million in capital spending for 2025.
The company says the plan comprises $34.3-million of expansion capital and $27.6-million for equipment maintenance and recertifications.
The expansion spending includes $27.8-million for Canadian drilling and service rig upgrades and $6.5-million for continued growth of the North American natural gas compression rental fleet and parts and service business.
Total Energy also says $16.6-million of 2024 capital spending commitments, primarily related to Australian drilling and service rig upgrades, will carry forward into 2025.
The company plans to finance the capital spending with cash on hand and cash flow from operations.
Total Energy provides contract drilling services, rentals and transportation services in North America and Australia.
Getty Images Holdings Inc. (GETY-N) soared 24.1 per cent after announcing it is buying Shutterstock Inc. (SSTK-N) to create a US$3.7-billion stock image powerhouse geared for the artificial intelligence era, in a deal that would likely draw antitrust scrutiny.
The move comes at a time when the licensed visual content industry is facing threats from generative AI tools such as Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E, which can generate images and video in response to a simple text prompt from users.
Under the deal, Shutterstock shareholders can opt to receive either US$28.80 per share in cash, or 13.67 shares of Getty Images, or a combination of 9.17 shares of Getty and US$9.50 in cash for each Shutterstock share they own.
Stocks of both the companies have declined for at least the past four years, as the rising use of mobile cameras drives down demand for stock photography.
The deal will help the companies in enhancing “content offerings, expanding event coverage and delivering new technologies,” said Craig Peters, CEO of Getty Images.
Mr. Peters will serve as the CEO of the combined company, of which Getty Images investors will own about 54.7 per cent and Shutterstock stockholders will own the rest.
Aurora Innovation’s (AUR-Q) shares jumped over 29 per cent on Tuesday after the self-driving technology developer announced a long-term deal with Nvidia (NVDA-Q) and Germany’s Continental to deploy self-driving trucks.
Uber-backed Aurora’s stock has nearly doubled in the past 12 months, as investors bet that the market for autonomous driving technology used in trucks will grow rapidly in the coming years.
“Nvidia’s CEO has been clear that he sees huge potential in the autonomous driving space over the next few years,” said Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Aurora already has partnerships with truck makers including PACCAR and Volvo to develop and test its self-driving system, Aurora Driver, on their trucks.
Aurora plans to launch its driverless trucking service in Texas in April, the company said on Monday.
“Many investors may have only heard the name Aurora Innovation for the first time today and its association with Nvidia and Continental is a tantalizing one, but this is a space with a huge amount of competition and requiring a massive amount of investment,” Hewson said.
Under the deal, Nvidia’s computing platform DRIVE Thor, designed to centralize autonomous and assisted driving as well as other digital functions, and its automotive operating system, DriveOS, will be integrated into the Aurora Driver system.
Continental will mass produce this system in 2027, to enable a large-scale deployment of self-driving trucks.
On the decline
Shares of Canadian waste management giant GFL Environmental Inc. (GFL-T) slid over 1 per cent on news it is selling a majority stake in its environmental services to two private equity firms, Apollo Global Management (APO-N) and BC Partners, delivering $6.2-billion in cash proceeds that can be used to pay down its heavy debt load.
GFL’s environmental services division offers liquid waste management and soil remediation services, among other things, and the company launched an auction for the division in mid-2024.
The business is appealing to private equity buyers because it has predictable revenues and can be considered an infrastructure asset. GFL itself expanded under multiple rounds of private equity owners, including Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, before going public in March, 2020.
The deal ascribes an $8-billion enterprise value to GFL’s environmental services divisions, and after the deal closes Apollo and BC Partners will each own 28-per-cent stakes in it, and GFL will hold the remaining 44 per cent. GFL values its equity stake at $1.7-billion.
GFL will use up to $3.75-billion of the cash proceeds to pay down its $9.5-billion debt load, and will use the remaining $2.25-billion for share repurchases, and general corporate purposes. Apollo is a new business partner for GFL, while BC Partners is already GFL’s largest shareholder – and therefore already has some ownership of the division.
Under the terms of the transaction, GFL has the option, but not an obligation, to repurchase the environmental services business within five years.
GFL put the division up for auction after investors grew nervous about its debt load. The company’s share price struggled in early 2024 because higher interest rates made GFL’s interest costs more expensive, and as GFL’s share price fell, the company lost a premium market valuation relative to its large U.S.-based competitors.
- Tim Kiladze and Robyn Doolittle
TransAlta Corp. (TA-T) was down 3 per cent after Brookfield Corp. (BN-T) disclosed it has sold 8.8 million common shares in the company for about $169-million, reducing its stake by 2.9 per cent to 9 per cent.
Brookfield said the move is “providing significant liquidity for its renewable power and transition business.”
Late Monday, Clarios International, a car battery maker owned by Brookfield, filed to withdraw its initial public offering plans in the United States.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based Clarios did not immediately respond to a Reuters request asking for more information on the withdrawal.
Clarios filed to go public in the U.S. in 2021, but postponed its plans indefinitely later that year due to market volatility and macroeconomic pressures.
The company was aiming for a valuation of nearly US$11-billion in the offering by raising up to US$1.85-billion at the top end of its IPO pricing range. Clarios said at the time it would reassess market conditions.
Its withdrawal comes at a time when U.S. IPO activity has seen an uptick, bolstered by a bullish equities market and expectations of business-friendly policies from the incoming Trump administration.
Nvidia (NVDA-Q) gave back early gains and dropped over 6 per cent after briefly reclaiming the title of the world’s most valuable firm by market cap following CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech at the CES 2025 conference on Monday.
AI to better train robots and cars as well as new gaming chips dominated the address as he expounded upon its potential to expand its business.
Nvidia introduced what it calls Cosmos ‘foundation’ models that generate photo-realistic video which can be used to train robots and self-driving cars at a much lower cost than using conventional data.
By creating what is known in the tech industry as “synthetic” training data, the models can help robots and cars understand the physical world similar to the way that large language models helped chatbots generate responses in natural language.
Users will be able to give Cosmos a text description that can be used to generate video of a world that obeys the laws of physics.
This promises to be much cheaper than gathering data as it is done today. To train self-driving cars, for example, companies have fleets of vehicles that roam streets to gather data, and humanoid robots are often trained by having real humans repeat tasks over and over.
Mr. Huang, however, cautioned that the Cosmos models will need much more data before hitting their ‘ChatGPT moment.’
The new gaming chips use Nvidia’s ‘Blackwell’ AI technology to give video games movie-like graphics, especially in a field known as ‘shaders,’ which can help images like a ceramic teapot look more realistic by adding imperfections and fingerprint smudges to its surface.
The new chips also have AI technology to help game developers generate more accurate human faces, an area where players are apt to notice even slightly unrealistic features. The chips, which Nvidia calls its RTX 50 series, will range in price from US$549 to US$1,999, with top models arriving on Jan. 30 and lower-tier models coming in February.
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta (META-Q) dipped 2 per cent after it said Tuesday it’s scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes program written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
Starting in the U.S., Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked.
Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model that uses crowdsourced fact-checking contributions from users.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post.
The social media company also said it plans to allow “more speech” by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion in order to focus on illegal and “high severity violations” like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.
Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has “gone too far” and has made “too many mistakes” by censoring too much content.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by political events including Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an online video.
Meta also has appointed three new members to its board of directors, including Dana White, the president and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a key figure in the orbit of incoming President Donald Trump.
The social media company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is also adding auto tycoon John Elkann and tech investor Charlie Songhurst, Mr. Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post late Monday.
Medical-device maker Stryker (SYK-N) lost 1.6 per cent after announcing it has agreed to acquire Inari Medical (NARI-Q), which makes devices that treat patients with venous diseases, in an all-cash deal worth US$4.9-billion.
The deal for Inari bolsters Stryker’s efforts to build out its offerings to treat a condition called venous thromboembolism, where a blood clot forms in a vein, and other vascular diseases. Under the terms of the deal, Stryker will pay US$80 per share for Inari.
“The acquisition of Inari expands Stryker’s portfolio to provide life-saving solutions to patients who suffer from peripheral vascular diseases,” said Stryker CEO Kevin Lobo. “These innovations elevate the standard of care for venous thromboembolism patients and will accelerate Stryker’s impact in endovascular procedures.”
Inari had been working with advisers to explore a sale in recent weeks after fielding acquisition interest from Stryker and other parties, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal, which has been approved by the boards of both companies, is expected to close by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
With files from staff and wires