Seaboard

IThe business

Seaboard Corporation is a holding company. It was founded in 1918 as a flour broker, was organized as a Delaware corporation in 1946 and is run from Merriam, Kansas.² Today it owns six operating segments in food, energy and ocean transport, about 14,000 employees and operations in over 45 countries.² Its shares trade on the NYSE American under SEB.³ The chairwoman, Ellen Bresky, is the beneficial owner of 74.5% of the stock, mostly through two holding companies she manages for the family.⁵

A group like this is easiest to understand by splitting it up, because one number for the whole says little. Sales in 2025 were $9.7B. Operating income plus income from affiliates was $377M, or 3.9% of sales C (calculated).² Almost all the businesses sell commodities or move them, so their results depend on prices set elsewhere.

Pork

Seaboard Foods is the third-largest US hog producer by sows and the fourth-largest pork processor, counting its partners’ plants, by S&P Global’s 2025 count.² It can raise about eight million hogs a year, process six million at its Oklahoma plant and mill three million tons of feed. In 2025 it raised 94% of the hogs it processed.² It also owns half of Seaboard Triumph Foods, a plant in Iowa, and half of Daily’s, a bacon maker.² About a quarter of sales go abroad, to Mexico, Japan, China and others.²

Hogs are the one business here that Seaboard owns end to end, and the one where results swing most. The segment lost $423M in 2023, earned $101M in 2025 counting affiliates and lost $42M in the first nine months of 2026.²³ In the third quarter alone it lost $80M of operating income ($82M with affiliates), including a $51M write-down of pork inventory after forecast prices fell and feed costs rose. Management says it expects Pork to lose money for the rest of the year.³

Commodity Trading and Milling

Seaboard Overseas and Trading Group moves about 15 million metric tons of wheat, corn, soybeans and meal a year, mills about two million metric tons of flour, feed and maize meal at 14 plants in ten countries, and owns six dry bulk ships.² Most of its work is in Africa and South America. Africa and the Caribbean, Central and South America together took $6.9B of the group’s $9.7B of sales in 2025, and that includes Marine C (calculated).² It earned $160M including affiliates in 2025 and $91M in nine months of 2026.²³ Its profit has been the steadiest here, and it takes the most borrowed money to run: grain inventories were $766M and short-term lines of credit were $711M at the end of September.³

Marine

Seaboard Marine runs liner service from Miami, Houston and New Orleans to 27 countries in the Caribbean and Latin America. It owns 14 ships, eight of them new dual-fuel vessels fuelled mostly by liquefied natural gas, and charters 11 more.² Operating income was $591M in 2022 at the height of the freight boom, then $228M, $82M and $165M. In nine months of 2026 it earned $73M, down from $119M, on 7% more cargo but higher costs.²³ The ship-buying programme is done: six ships arrived in 2025 and one more is ordered at about $75M.²

Liquid Fuels

Seaboard Energy makes biodiesel in Oklahoma and Missouri and renewable diesel in Kansas, with capacity of 46, 32 and 85 million gallons a year. It sells the fuel and the government credits that come with it.² Its results swing with credit prices and fat prices. It lost $73M, $100M and $127M in 2023 to 2025, then earned $105M in the first nine months of 2026 as fuel and credit prices rose.²³ Management ties part of the fuel-price rise to the conflict involving Iran that began in February 2026.³ The plant was shut for maintenance in the last week of September and is expected to restart in November.³

Power, Turkey and the rest

Two barges can supply 258 megawatts to the Dominican grid. The newer one, EDM III, has been down since a July inspection found turbine damage, and Seaboard does not expect repairs before year end.²³ A third barge is being built for about $315M and is due to start in 2028.² Butterball, in which Seaboard owns 52.5%, makes turkey products. It earned $124M in the first nine months, and Seaboard recorded $65M of that.³ The rest is a sugar and alcohol mill in Argentina on nearly 70,000 acres, and the head office.²

The securities portfolio

Seaboard also runs an investment portfolio. On 3 October it held $159M of cash, $1,313M of short-term investments and $210M of long-term ones, about $1.68B in total, mostly stocks and funds that hold debt.³ That is 51% of the company’s market value C (calculated). Against it were $711M of short-term borrowings and $982M of long-term debt, mostly a term loan due 2033, so the net position is close to zero C (calculated).³ The portfolio matters because it produces earnings that have nothing to do with pigs or ships. In nine months of 2026, investment gains were $80M, and interest and dividends $28M, out of $135M of other income.³ In 2022 “other investment income” lost $239M.⁸ I take it out of the operating profit below and count it as its own item.

The third quarter

Results came out on 3 November. Sales rose 9% to $2,771M. Operating income fell to $13M from $84M, and net earnings to $28M from $109M, or $29.23 a share against $113.71.⁹ Pork lost $80M. Liquid Fuels made $15M against a $37M loss a year earlier, Marine made $32M against $18M, and Commodity Trading and Milling made $54M against $37M.³ Over nine months net earnings were $300M against $243M, helped by $194M of better Liquid Fuels profit and a tax rate of 21.5% against 11.2%.³ The stock closed at $3,410.25 on 3 November, down from $3,889.25 on 30 October, a fall of 12% in two sessions C (calculated).¹ I don’t know what drove each day.

What the NYSE American listing means

Seaboard is listed on the NYSE American, the exchange formerly called AMEX.³ Three facts about that matter to an owner. First, it is a controlled company under the exchange’s rules, because the family holds more than half the votes. That exempts it from many rules on committees and independent directors, and the board has no compensation committee.⁵ Second, the free float is small. Outside holders own about 25% of the shares, or about $839M C (calculated).⁵¹ Third, the stock traded about 13,600 shares a day over the last year, or roughly $47M, so it is liquid enough for most investors but not for a large one C (calculated).¹ There are 6,004 holders of record, a $9 annual dividend, a yield of 0.26% C (calculated), and no split in the last ten years.²¹ I make no claim here about index membership, because I could not source one.

IIThe moat

I start with the evidence, not the story. If Seaboard had a lasting edge, ten years of reinvestment would show up as higher profit on the capital. It has not. Net property, plant and equipment went from $1,006M in 2016 to $2,820M in 2025, a rise of 180%, while operating income plus affiliate income rose from $311M to $377M, or 21% C (calculated).⁴² The profit per dollar of plant fell from 31 cents to 13 cents. Return on average equity, taken from the year-end figures, averaged about 7.4% over the nine years I can compute C (calculated).⁴

That doesn’t mean the businesses are poor. Part of the rise in plant is new ships and barges that earn little until they are running, and part is a renewable diesel plant that has not yet earned its keep. But it does set the bar. I do not credit the whole group with a lasting edge when its record points the other way.

Evidence it is wide

Two things say there is something real. Marine and trading and milling have made money in all of the last eight years: the first never earned less than $4M of operating income, and the second never less than $35M with affiliates, in the segment figures I have, which start in 2018 C (calculated).¹⁰² And the group as a whole earned a profit each year of the ten, even in 2023 when operating income was −$87M and affiliates plus investment income carried it C (calculated).⁴ Diversity is a kind of protection. A disease in hogs doesn’t sink a ship.

Evidence it is narrow

The other side is the five pieces that depend on prices they do not set. Pork lost money in four of the eight years I have, once the biofuel plant is counted, and when 2020 to 2025 are added together, Pork and Liquid Fuels earned −$296M, on $1.7B of capital spending C (calculated).¹⁰⁸² The best two years of profit came from a global shipping squeeze in 2021 and 2022, when Marine earned $197M and $591M. Neither was Seaboard’s doing. And the 2025 Liquid Fuels result of −$127M reminds me that a business which relies on government credits can have its edge cut by a rule change.²

My honest reading is that Seaboard has a few niche positions, one very good trading and milling business, and a lot of exposure to the weather of commodity markets. I call the protection narrow overall. That is a statement about the group, not a rating of any part.

IIIThe competitive advantage

Against its rivals, Seaboard’s advantage is a set of habits and assets, not a product. It integrates, it owns, and it goes places others avoid. I think it helps most in Marine and trading, and least in pork.

Where it wins

It wins on integration in pork and fuels. Hogs raised on its own farms are fed by its own mills, processed at its own plant, and the fat goes to its own biodiesel and renewable diesel plants, which are fed from the same stream.² Pork sold $43M of fat to Liquid Fuels in nine months, while Liquid Fuels’ total feedstock costs rose 57%.³ I can’t tell how much of the group’s result is the integration itself, and how much is simply the price of hogs.

It wins on being local where others are not. Its mills are in Ghana, Mozambique, Zambia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, the Republic of the Congo and elsewhere, many on owned land.² A trader in Geneva can’t easily copy a flour mill in Lusaka. And Seaboard Marine serves 27 countries with its own ships and its own terminals.

And it wins on patience with capital. Over ten years it spent 1.8 times its depreciation on new plant, ships and barges, and it did that with borrowings of $1.7B against $1.7B of investments.⁴³

Where it loses

It loses on scale in pork. Smithfield, the closest listed peer, earned $1,292M of operating income in its latest fiscal year, about thirteen times what Seaboard’s Pork segment earned that year including affiliates, and its enterprise value is 6.9 times that income C (calculated).⁶² Seaboard Foods says it is third in hog production and fourth in processing, which is a respectable place and not a commanding one.²

It loses on disclosure. Seaboard gives a full segment table each quarter, but Butterball gets a three-line summary of sales, operating income and net income, and I found no statement of how much of the securities portfolio the trading book needs. A shareholder can see what happened. It is harder to see why.

And it loses on speed in biofuels. The sector’s economics depend on the price of fat, on credits that governments create and may change, and on a federal tax credit that was replaced in 2025 by a smaller one: the old credit gave Seaboard $125M in 2024, and the new one recorded $66M in 2025, 53% as much.² Rivals compete on price, and Seaboard is a small producer among them.²

IVManagement

Seaboard has a chairwoman whose family controls the company and a chief executive who runs it. Ellen Bresky, 72, joined the board in 2020 and is its chairwoman. Through Seaboard Flour LLC and SFC Preferred LLC, which she manages, she controls 714,040 shares, 74.5% of the votes, worth about $2.5B at the close C (calculated).⁵¹ Robert Steer, 66, has been chief executive since July 2020.⁵ Her son, Jacob Bresky, runs the trading and milling group.

The board has five members. Three are independent under exchange rules: David Adamsen, 74, on the board since 1995; Douglas Baena, 83, since 2001; and Frances Shifman, 75, since 2021.⁵ Paul Squires, 71, is chief operating officer of Seaboard Flour LLC and reports to the chairwoman. Since the second quarter of 2024 there is no lead independent director, and there is no compensation committee: the full board sets pay.⁵ The company says it has no formal policy for approving related-party deals, only a conflict-of-interest policy and an annual questionnaire for directors and officers.⁵ None of that is unusual for a controlled company, and none of it protects a small holder.

How they are paid, and what that pays them to do

The chief executive was paid $7.0M for 2025, 154 times the median employee, who works in the hog barns in Iowa and earned $45,429.⁵ None of it is stock. He gets a salary, a bonus and a growing retirement benefit, and the proxy says Seaboard “does not provide any equity incentive compensation, such as stock grants or stock options.”⁵ The board sets the bonus “based upon a subjective determination,” on recommendations from the chairwoman and from the president, who is Steer himself.⁵ It considers his individual performance and the company’s general financial and operational performance. His contract sets a floor of $2.275M.⁵

What does a plan like this pay him to do? It pays him to keep a large, complicated group running smoothly and to stay in the chairwoman’s favour. It does not pay him to lift the share price, return on capital or earnings per share. The 2024 bonus is the clearest example: earnings fell by more than half, and the bonus went up. I don’t think that is dishonest. A family owner may well prefer judgement to formulas. But an outside shareholder cannot see which of the choices that follow were tested against a return.

How much of their own money is in

Almost none, except the family’s. The proxy shows no shares at all for Steer, Rankin, Gonzalez, Groves or Jacob Bresky. The three independent directors own 20, 115 and 27 shares.⁵ Insiders as a group are the Bresky family, with 74.5% held through the holding companies. That is a large stake and it does align the family with the share price. It also means that the named executives have no shares and no options.

The dividend is $9 a share a year, or about $8.6M for the whole company, $6.4M of it to the family C (calculated).³⁵ It is a trivial sum beside a $3.3B market value, so nobody is held by it.

What they did with capital over a full cycle

Over six years the group spent $2.8B on plants, ships and barges and earned $2.1B of operating income plus affiliates C (calculated).⁴²⁸ Where that went is the real story, and the table shows it. Ships, mills and barges earned their keep. Pork, once the biofuel plant is counted, did not.

Pork with biofuels spent $1.7B of capital in six years and earned −$296M. That includes the new renewable diesel plant, farms bought from The Maschhoffs in 2022 for $58M, and nine biogas sites.⁸² It is the largest drag on the group’s return, and the place where I judge capital to have been poorly used so far. I allow for one thing: a hog cycle bottom and a fuel credit reset both landed in the same stretch. A decade will tell.

The other side is Marine and trading and milling. Trading and milling spent $112M and earned $803M. Marine spent $785M, mostly on the new fleet, and earned $1.3B, though $591M of that was a freak year. These are good uses of money, within what freight and grain prices allow.

Then there is the stock. In October 2023 Seaboard bought 189,724 shares from Seaboard Flour LLC, SFC Preferred LLC and REP23 LLC, entities of the Bresky family, for $600M, at “a price below the traded market price.”⁷ That works out to $3,162 a share, or 16% of the shares then outstanding C (calculated).⁷⁴ The stated reason was “internal family planning and structuring objectives.”⁷ Book value per share at the end of 2022 was $4,304, so the company paid about 0.73 times book and the remaining holders’ book value per share rose C (calculated).⁴ On its face that is good for outside owners, and I take it at that. But it moved $600M out of the company to the family, with no outside price test I can see.

Since then the company has bought back little. It authorized $100M in 2025 and bought 13,261 shares for $39M, about $2,941 each. It has bought none in 2026, and $62M is left.²³ The price reached $5,958.89 in April and is $3,442.75 now, above the 2025 average paid.¹ I would have liked to see them buy when the stock was below book. At today’s 0.60 times book the remaining authorization would retire about 18,009 shares, 1.9% of the company C (calculated).³ It is small beside a $600M family deal.

My view of management is mixed. The family’s stake is large, there is no stock pay to dilute anyone, and trading and Marine have earned good returns on the capital they use. But the chief executive owns nothing, pay does not follow results, a $600M deal with the family had no outside test, and the largest use of capital since 2020 has lost money. Nothing here is dishonest. It is a structure in which the minority has to trust the majority, and I cannot price that trust.

VFinancials

Ten years of Seaboard show growing sales, a small and swinging profit, and almost no cash left after the investment the business needed.

Sales have grown 6.8% a year since 2016, from $5.4B to $9.7B C (calculated). I would not read all of it as volume, since the segment discussions credit prices and freight rates as well. Profit did not follow. Operating income plus affiliate income was $311M in 2016 and $377M in 2025, and in between it ran from $18M to $809M.⁴ That is the nature of the group. The average is a better guide than any single year, and the average is $294M C (calculated).

What an owner could really take out

This is the number I care about most, and it is far below earnings. From 2016 to 2025 Seaboard reported net earnings of $3.09B. Cash from operations was $3.94B and capital spending $3.61B, so cash after capital spending was $323M C (calculated).⁴ That is 10 cents of cash for each dollar of earnings. In 2025 it was $6M against $496M of earnings.² There is no stock pay to take off, so the gap is reinvestment, working capital and gains that arrive as securities and not as cash.

But some of that reinvestment was growth, so let me ask a stricter question: what is left if I charge only the capital needed to stand still? I treat depreciation as the stand-still bill, which is a rough guide, because the ships and barges cost more to replace than their old cost. On that basis cash from operations less depreciation was $1,948M over ten years, or 63% of earnings, and $250M in 2025 against reported earnings of $496M E (estimate).⁴² The 2025 figure includes a $170M tax benefit from releasing a valuation allowance, so underlying earnings were nearer $326M. On that, stand-still cash was about three quarters of earnings C (calculated).² I use $250M as the 2025 owner cash and call it a rough number.

The rest of the gap is growth spending. Capital spending was 1.8 times depreciation over ten years, and net plant rose from $1,006M to $2,820M.⁴² If that spending earned its keep, profit ought to have risen with it, and I showed above that it has not yet. For 2026 the picture is better. Capital spending was $299M in nine months, with about $145M budgeted for the last quarter, against the $625M planned in February.³² The ships are delivered. Cash from operations was $236M in nine months, so owner cash is negative for now: −$63M after capital spending C (calculated).³ The 10-Q shows $119M of that was barge payments in Power, and I did not find why the rest ran below plan.

Quality of earnings

Five items change what the headline number means.

• Tax. In 2024 the company set up a $212M valuation allowance, and in 2025 it released $170M. The tax line swung from a $156M charge in 2024 to a $91M benefit in 2025 C (calculated).² In nine months of 2026 the rate was 21.5%, against 11.2% a year earlier, so net earnings of $300M grew 23% when pre-tax earnings grew 39%.³
• The securities. Investment gains and interest were $108M of the $386M of pre-tax earnings in nine months C (calculated).³ They come from a portfolio of stocks, funds and bonds that is not the business.
• Equity income. Income from affiliates is not cash. In 2025 it was $138M and dividends from affiliates were $91M. In nine months of 2026 it was $93M and dividends were $137M, which is a good sign.²³
• Inventory and derivatives. The Pork segment wrote inventory down by $51M in the third quarter. In 2024 it had released $42M of an earlier reserve.³² Trading and milling books unrealised gains and losses on commodity contracts that reverse on delivery.³
• Tax credits. Seaboard sold $81M of tax credits in 2025 and $55M, net, in the second quarter of 2026. That turns inventory into cash and flatters operating cash flow in the year of sale.²³

None of this is concealed, and the filings are clear about it. But it means the reported figure needs adjusting before it is used. That is why I lean on the five-year average of operating income plus affiliates, $382M, and the ten-year average of $294M.

The balance sheet

On 3 October Seaboard had $1.68B of cash and investments and $1.69B of debt, the first including $210M of long-term investments, the second $711M drawn on credit lines and $982M of term debt.³ The term loan is $945M at 5.63%, due 2033.³ Of the lines, $313M of the $465M uncommitted borrowing is in foreign currencies, including $148M in South African rand and $116M in euros.³ Equity was $5,513M and total assets $8,782M. Current assets were 2.4 times current liabilities.³ Pension underfunding is small, at $75M.³

The balance sheet is sound, with one catch. The securities are at once a cushion and a funding source for the trading book, and the filing calls them a principal source of liquidity.³ I treat all of them as available in my base case and show what happens if only half are, below. Other claims are normal for the business: $1.2B of purchase commitments due within a year and $1.8B later, undiscounted lease payments of $177M within a year and $396M after, and a minimum $335M fuel purchase over eight years for the LNG ships.²³

The last chart is the one I would show a friend. Book value per share has risen from $2,701 to $5,756, helped by the 2023 repurchase and ten years of retained profit. The share price on 4 November 2016 was $3,201.95. Today it is $3,442.75. The market no longer pays for retained profit, and the return it earned, shown in Section II, is a likely reason.

VIValuation

First, how this goes badly wrong

Before the numbers, I asked what would most likely hurt this investment, and worked back. Three things could, and none needs a surprise.

• Pork and fuels keep losing while capital keeps going in. Pork with its biofuel plants earned −$296M over 2020 to 2025 on $1.7B of capital spending, and management expects Pork to lose money for the rest of this year.³ Fuel profit this year came from price spikes and credits, which can reverse. If both stay poor, about $2.7B of segment assets earn nothing and the rest of the group carries them C (calculated).³
• A shock in the places Seaboard trades. Africa and Latin America bring most of the sales, and the 10-K lists price controls, currency inconvertibility, hyperinflation and expropriation among the risks.² Trading and milling is where the profit has been steadiest, so a bad year there would hit the part I trust most.
• Money that does not earn its keep. The family decides how capital is used and no outsider can stop it. The group has already put 1.8 times its depreciation into new plant in ten years with little profit to show, and a third power barge is on order for $315M.² This is the slow risk. It does not show in any one year.

All three come back to one question: are these assets worth more than their earnings, or is the market right that they earn too little? The bear case is built on the second answer.

What the price implies

At $3,442.75 the market values Seaboard at $3,297M, on 957,794 shares from the 10-Q cover.¹³ About half of that is cash and investments. Take them out, add back borrowings, pension and minority interests, and the price puts a value of $3,480M on the operating businesses, using a $75M placeholder for the pork lawsuits C (calculated). That is 9.0 times what I call the businesses’ normal income, 11.8 times the ten-year average, and 9.1 times the last five years.³⁴

What would make the price right? I turn it into a reverse question. If the group earns a steady normal income and grows 3% a year, and the new money it puts in earns a given return, how much normal income does the price need? Using a 10% required return and a 20% tax rate, and if the new money earns 10%, the price needs about $435M of normal income a year before tax C (calculated). If new money earns only 8%, it needs $487M. My base is $385M. So the price assumes either a little more profit than my base or a better return on new capital than the group has shown.

What I can’t judge

Several of the inputs here are unknowable to me, and I would rather say so than give one number.

• The hog cycle. Pork has ranged from a $423M loss to a $230M profit in eight years. I have no edge in predicting hog or pork prices, and I allow for $40M, $75M or $160M a year in the three cases.
• Fuel credits. The 2026 profit of $105M in nine months followed three loss-making years. The credits are set by government rules. I cannot say whether they last, so the bear case counts only $150M for the whole segment.
• The pork lawsuits. Seaboard has settled with the main classes and three governments, but it is still fighting direct-action plaintiffs it has not settled with, others may sue, and it says it cannot estimate losses beyond what it has accrued.³ My $75M base placeholder is a guess to keep the arithmetic honest, not a finding.
• Butterball. Seaboard owns 52.5% but does not control it, and I see only a three-line summary. Profit swung from losses in 2018 to 2021 to $103M in 2022.¹⁰⁸
• The securities. I can’t tell how much of the $1.5B is needed to run the trading book. The table below shows the effect.
• What the family will do. I cannot see their plans for capital, for succession, or for the listing.

The discount rate

I require 10% a year. The ten-year Treasury yields 4.90%, so that is 5.1 points over it.¹³ For a cyclical group with a controlling family, a thin float and most of its sales outside the US, I would not accept less. I did not compute a beta, because a thin float makes one unreliable. The rate is a hurdle I chose, so I show the answer at 9% to 12% above.

The sum of the parts

For each segment I take a normal year of operating income plus income from affiliates before tax, and multiply it by a multiple of enterprise value to operating income. Then I add the cash and investments, take off the borrowings and other claims, and divide by the shares. The multiples come from the three peers in the table in Section III: Smithfield at 6.9 times, Matson at 13.1 and Hormel at 20.3.⁶¹²¹¹ In the base case I use 7.5 times for pork, 7 for fuels, trading and power, 8 for Marine and Butterball, and 7 for the centre. All sit well below Hormel and Matson, because Seaboard’s profits swing more than theirs and much of the rest is in emerging markets, where I pay less. The multiples are on operating income before tax, the same basis as the peers, so I do not tax the segments separately. These are my judgements.

A few of the choices need defending. Pork: the median of the segment’s results over 2018 to 2025 is about $74M, so I use $75M, and the mean including 2023 is lower. Liquid Fuels: the three years of losses and the one profit year give no normal, so $30M is a guess and the bear case uses a floor. Trading and milling: $120M is close to its median of $121M, and I use a lower multiple than for ships because it lends heavily against grain. Marine: the eight-year median is $128M, but that includes 2021 and 2022, so I take $110M. Power: $50M is below the $60M average of the last three years because one barge is down. Butterball: the median is $14M and the mean $30M, so $40M is generous and depends on the recent run. It is Seaboard’s share of Butterball’s net income, so 8 times works like a price-to-earnings multiple on a stake. The centre: −$40M is the 2026 run rate of −$36M plus a little.¹⁰²³ I capitalize it, because head-office cost does not go away.

The answer is $2,820 in the base case, and that is the plain result. My weighted value, at 25%, 50% and 25%, is $3,208.

The price is 22% above my base value and 7% above the weighted value. Why might the market be right? Because it can see what the segment tables show: hogs are still losing money, the fuel gain came from prices that can fall, Butterball is not controlled and a 74.5% holder decides what happens to the cash. And because about half of the price is liquid assets I count at full value, if the market counts them at less, the rest of my number changes.

Why might I be too low? Pork is near a trough, and my base counts a recovery to only $75M. I also treat this year’s strong Liquid Fuels and Marine numbers as partly one-off. If they are not, the grid below shows what follows. The price lies near two of its cells: my income with one more turn on every multiple, and 20% more income at my multiples.

Other uses of the same dollar

The ten-year Treasury pays 4.90%.¹³ On my base normal income of $385M, a buyer at $3,442.75 earns about 9.2% a year on the operating cash I can see, with 3% growth forever and new money earning 10%, against my 10% hurdle E (estimate). That is above the Treasury and short of my rate. The best comparison on this site is Berkshire Hathaway, another holding company with many unrelated businesses and a large investment portfolio. There I have bear, base and bull at $394, $467 and $561, and a price 16% above the base. Seaboard’s price is 22% above its base and its range is far wider. A page on this site where the price sits below my base is Brookfield, at 9% below. Each page uses its own method, so I treat gaps of a few points as noise. Seaboard’s ratio of bull to bear is 5.1 times, which is a measure of how much of this I cannot know.

Two different questions

How good is the business, and how good is the price? As a business, Seaboard is mixed. It has a very good trading arm, a useful ship line and a Butterball stake, and it has pork and fuels that have cost more than they earned. It has not turned ten years of reinvestment into higher profit. As for the price, it is 0.60 times book and the stock has gone sideways for ten years, but that discount is the market’s verdict on what the capital earns, and my numbers do not argue with it. So this looks like a middling business at a fair-to-full price, which is different from a good business at a bad one. A reader who thinks pork and fuel will recover has a reason to put the value higher, and the grid shows by how much.

The margin of safety

• Price$3,442.75Close, Q4 2026 [1]
• Base value$2,820My estimate E (estimate)
• Margin of safety below$1,580set from my bear case C (calculated)

I set the margin of safety from the bear case: at $1,580, my $1,190 bear value is at least three quarters of the price paid, and that price is 44% under my base value. Why the bear? Because the danger here is the group earning less than I think for years, and a discount to the base would not protect against that. The stock has not closed below $1,580 in the last ten years. At $3,442.75 the price is 2.2 times that level, so there is no margin of safety and no cushion against my base. The price is also 44% above the low of $2,390.98 on 30 December 2024, which is the lowest close in ten years.¹

VIIThe case for the price

What most people miss

Three facts cut in Seaboard’s favour and get little notice. First, take away the Pork segment’s $80M third-quarter loss and operating income was $93M, against $26M a year earlier C (calculated).³ Second, Butterball earned $124M in nine months and Seaboard’s 52.5% share was $65M, on a carrying value of $369M, so the stake earned about 18% of its book value in three quarters C (calculated).³ Third, capital spending is falling, from $562M in 2025 to about $444M in 2026, nine months of $299M plus the $145M budgeted, and the eight new ships are in.³²

The bull case

The argument, in plain words: half the price is liquid, hogs are at a bottom, fuels have turned, Marine has a new fleet and Butterball is earning. I found one named investor view. Palm Valley Capital Fund’s third-quarter 2025 letter says it bought Seaboard in late 2024 “at a large discount to tangible book value,” which grew to nearly 50% in early 2025, and that it sold in the third quarter.¹⁴ Goodwill is only $166M, so book value less goodwill is about $5,580 a share, and today’s price is 38% under it C (calculated).³ Insider Monkey, a secondhand write-up on 8 October 2025, reports the letter as saying the shares rallied past the fund’s valuation.¹⁵ The shares closed at $3,536.60 on 7 October 2025, about 3% above today’s $3,442.75.¹⁵¹ Management’s own outlook in the 10-Q is that Liquid Fuels, Marine, Butterball and trading and milling (excluding mark-to-market) will be profitable for the rest of 2026, and that Pork and Power will not.³ I found no other named investor view on Seaboard. I did not check 13F filings for other holders.

Against reality

If Pork earns $160M, Fuels $80M, Marine $170M and Butterball $75M, as in my bull case, and the parts get peer multiples, the stock is worth about $6,010. The price needs much less: about $435M of normal income by the reverse model, or about $460M at my multiples, against my base of $385M and a ten-year average of $294M C (calculated). The route is short. Pork at $120M and Fuels at $60M together add $75M. I put about 40% on the first and 35% on the second, which is about 14% together, and perhaps 20% allowing for the way they move together E (estimate). So the price needs a good but not heroic result from two things I can’t forecast. Today’s numbers are far from it: Pork lost $42M in nine months, and management expects it to lose money for the rest of the year.³

What a 10x would take. Ten times $3,442.75 is $34,428 a share, or $33B of market value. At 12 times earnings, a little above this stock’s 10.7 times on its ten-year average, that needs about $2.7B of net earnings C (calculated). That is 5.5 times 2025’s $496M, which included a $170M tax benefit, and 9 times the ten-year average. At a 5% net margin it needs $55B of sales, 5.6 times 2025, and by 2036 that is 19% growth a year for ten years, from a company whose sales grew 6.8% a year over the last nine. Buying back 3% of the shares a year helps only a little. In my ten-year file the best gain this stock made was 2.5 times, from December 2024 to April 2026. I know of no commodity-linked group of this kind that has multiplied its value tenfold from this size. For Seaboard, tenfold is close to impossible, and I would not build a case on it.

Where I come down

What moved me: non-pork profit of $93M in the third quarter, and a carrying value for Butterball well below what it earns. What did not move me: book value, because ten years of retained profit have not lifted the share price, and the fuel gain, because I can’t tell if it lasts. Two years in a row of Pork and Fuels earning over $100M together, with capital spending near depreciation, would raise my values most. My bear, base and bull stay at $1,190, $2,820 and $6,010.

VIIIRisks, and what would change my view

The three ways this goes badly wrong are at the start of Valuation. These are the rest.

• Pork lawsuits. Seaboard Foods settled with the direct purchaser class in June 2023 and with the two indirect classes in 2024 (the consumer class deal still needs court approval), then with Alaska, Puerto Rico and New Mexico. Direct-action plaintiffs it has not settled with remain, summary judgment was denied in March 2025, and the company says it cannot estimate loss beyond its accruals.³ A single large verdict could cost a year of profit.
• Biofuel rules. Credits, tax credits and blending targets are set by governments. The federal credit changed at the start of 2025 and income fell.² A further change could do the same again.
• Trade and tariffs. About a quarter of pork sales go abroad, and the 10-K warns about tariffs, border closures and countermeasures.²
• Emerging markets. Colombia alone was 12% of 2025 sales. Mills in Africa and South America face price controls, currencies and unions: 53% of mill staff are covered by agreements that expire between 2026 and 2027.²
• Labor in pork. The Oklahoma plant’s collective agreement was due to expire in July 2026. The Q3 10-Q is silent on it, and I can’t judge the status.²³
• Power. EDM III is out until year end, EDM II’s environmental permit ran to October 2026 and the 10-Q is silent on renewal, and customers are mostly government-owned.²³ I treat the permit as unknown.
• Disease. The 10-K blames disease and hog availability for lower pork volumes in 2025.²
• Control and succession. The chairwoman is 72 and the chief executive 66. I found no succession plan in the filings. A family can also decide to use the company in ways an outside holder would not.⁵
• Thin float. Outside holders own 25% of a stock that traded about 13,600 shares a day over the last year.¹ A large seller has few places to go.
• Portfolio marks. The securities lost $239M of “other investment income” in 2022 and can do so again.⁸
• Oil and the Iran conflict. Fuel prices help Liquid Fuels and hurt Marine and Power at the same time.³