Hillenbrand Customers: Dying to Buy

Crass jokes and mortuary humor aside, the search for “recession proof” industries continues. The recent favorite has fallen back to the ultimate recession proof industry: death. Funeral services like casket-maker Hillenbrand (NYSE: HI) provides are products that will always be in demand.

While life expectancies have been climbing over the past few decades, they’ll never climb high enough to put off the inevitable. The death rate for the U.S. has been relatively stable over the years. We lose about 8.27 people for every thousand a year. That’s a market of 2.5 million people who needed some sort of funeral services.

As the baby boomers age, the amount of Americans over age 65 will grow larger and so will the “target demographic” for funeral services.

Companies like Matthews International (Nasdaq: MATW), which also sells funeral products like mausoleums and Service Corporation International (NYSE: SCI), which runs a large network of cemeteries and funeral homes, should both do very well.

Death, as a business, goes back millennia. And with a few exceptions, namely plague disease and war, the death rate is as steady as a clock. In times of uncertainty and troubling economic conditions, that kind of steadiness is worth investigating.

Companies mentioned in this article: HI, MATW and SCI.

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