A resurgence for business of death

[Joanne98]

The North American funeral business is showing signs of life.

A year ago, most public “death care” companies were reporting mysterious drops in the number of funerals they were performing, but now things have improved and some are seeing growth close to long-term trends.

And all of the companies in the funeral industry are looking forward to the next few decades, when business should be brisk as baby boomers come to the end of their run.

The hardest-hit company last year was Service Corporation International, (SCI-N8.560.091.06%) the biggest death care company on the continent, with more than 1,600 funeral homes and cemeteries in the United States and Canada. In the first quarter of 2009 it experienced an 11-per-cent downturn in the number of funerals it performed. While the quarter-to-quarter decline was only 3.6 per cent by the fourth quarter, the company conducted 6.7 per cent fewer funerals in all of 2009 than it did in 2008.

Houston-based SCI was so puzzled by the downturn that it hired outside consultants to find out why. The research is not complete, so the company won't release it yet, but chief executive officer Tom Ryan told a recent conference call with analysts that there appear to be two major factors: medical advances, and a dip in the number of births between 1929 and 1936, the deepest years of the Depression.

“We know those two events are going to put downward pressure on the numbers of deaths in our relevant markets,” Mr. Ryan said. “We're operating under the assumption that we're probably going to see down comparable volumes generally for the next few years.”

But he also noted that death rates are very volatile, and any dips “can be overcome temporarily by big flu seasons other types of things that could drive deaths.”

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/a-resurgence-for-business-of-death/article1494188/

Multi-national funeral homes! You know we've hit bottom now.