Air Products upgraded to Buy from Hold at Jefferies

Jefferies analyst Laurence Alexander upgraded Air Products (APD) to Buy from Hold with a price target of $364, up from $295. After The Wall Street Journal’s Lauren Thomas reported on Friday that Mantle Ridge has built a more than $1B stake in Air Products and is planning to push for improvements at the company, the firm contends that an activist stake would give Air Products an opportunity to both reset its narrative to “quality growth” and, at least for a while, tie shareholder returns to company initiatives rather than policy shifts and commodity spreads. Pegging near-term valuations to Linde (LIN) on a sum-of-the-parts basis, coupled with the opportunity to unlock earnings, supports a path to $364 per share, or 27% upside, the analyst tells investors.