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Here's Why You Should Consider Investing in ITT Stock Now

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ITT Inc. (ITT - Free Report) currently boasts solid prospects on its diversified businesses, strong product portfolio, innovation investments and a sound capital-deployment strategy.

Notably, the Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) company has a market capitalization of $6.5 billion. In the past six months, it has gained 27.1% compared with the industry’s growth of 31.2%.



Let’s delve onto the factors that make investment in this company a smart move at the moment.

Diversified Business & Strong Operational Execution: ITT is poised to benefit from its diversified business structure, which allows it to mitigate the adverse impacts of weakness in one end market, with strength across others. Also, the company’s strong product portfolio, focus on improving operational efficiency and ongoing cost-reduction measures are likely to be beneficial. Notably, its cost-reduction measures are anticipated to yield savings of $160 million in 2020. For the fourth quarter of 2020, the company anticipates its revenues and earnings to grow in low-double digits on a sequential basis.

Investments in Innovation: The company remains focused on improving its competency with innovation investments.  Notably, in May 2020, its engineered valves business unveiled the Integrated Sensing Platform, which is expected to simplify operations for customers apart from reducing piping footprint and lowering set-up time. Also, it enhanced its wireless condition monitoring offerings with the launch of automated machine health diagnostics products. Further, several other investments made over the past few quarters, including the upgrade of its ITT Smart Pad and expanding manufacturing automation capabilities are likely  to be beneficial.

Rewards to Shareholders: It remains committed to rewarding shareholders through dividend payouts and share buybacks. In the first three quarters of 2020, the company paid out dividends worth $29.7 million and repurchased shares worth $83.9 million. Also, in February 2020, it announced a 15% hike in its quarterly dividend rate. It’s worth mentioning here that although its dividend plans remain intact, the company’s share buyback activities have been temporarily halted owing to the pandemic.

In the past 30 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its 2020 earnings has trended up from $2.97 to $3.09 on four upward estimate revisions against none downward. Also, earnings estimates for 2021 have increased from $3.40 to $3.54 on four upward estimate revisions versus none downward.

Other Key Picks

Some other top-ranked stocks from the same space are 3M Company (MMM - Free Report) , Crane Co. (CR - Free Report) and Raven Industries, Inc. , each carrying a Zacks Rank #2. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

3M delivered a positive earnings surprise of 1.85%, on average, in the trailing four quarters.

Crane delivered a positive earnings surprise of 14.59%, on average, in the trailing four quarters.

Raven delivered a positive earnings surprise of 41.18% in the last reported quarter.

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