I learned through an article from Sky News and in this article from KillBait that Epiris, the private equity firm that acquired London area-based Direct Cremation provider Pure Cremation just over two years ago, is beginning a process to sell the company.

Pure Cremation, arguably the most financially successful start-up in Death Care business history started in 2015 by husband/wife founders Bryan and Catherine Powell.  The timing was evidently perfect for the business which serviced the cremations of Death Care clientele who preferred “simple services with no mourners present”.

That type of service, now christened “Direct Cremation” has grown exponentially since that time in Great Britain, somewhat driven by a combination of price, simplicity, and a decline in religious funeral traditions.

The Powells were quick to learn of the value of Preneed and Pre-arrangements for Pure Cremation.  They employed an aggressive marketing campaign for Preneed with an advertising budget stressing the Pure Cremation “No fuss” cremation options.  According to this 2022 article from Sky News, they sold over 65,000 preneed policies in 2021.   In my opinion, greatly increasing the value of the company.

While no purchase price was, to my knowledge, ever reported when private equity company Epiris purchased Pure Cremation in July 2023, Sky News articles estimated that the company was worth “up to US$ 533 million” at the time.

The above linked KillBait article suggests “Although the current owners (Epiris) are targeting a sale worth upwards of £500 million (US$ 667 million), estimates suggest the business could fetch as much as £700 million (US$932 million) based on its profitability.

Here is the July 31, 2023, press release from Epiris announcing that they had purchased Pure Cremation.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take:  From my point of view “Growth Companies” are companies that increase revenue and value greatly in a short period of time.  They do so, in many cases, because they have invented new “widgets” that consumers prefer over other options.  For instance “Vizio” creates “smart TV’s” that consumers now prefer over old analog television sets.  The rapid growth of Vizio, which is owned by WalMart, certainly would qualify the company, in my book, as a “Growth Company”.

As an aside here. . . .just think of the opportunities for WalMart to build relationships with those free (advertiser supported) content streaming companies such as Tubi, Pluto, and others.  WalMart can probably make agreements to advertise their products on those streaming services in return for the opportunity for those services to be “imbedded” in the Vizio product.  As long as that Vizio smart TV is in the family room WalMart can probably arrange to have low-cost access to advertising and the opportunity to customize (through AI) those ads to the content a viewer watches. No wonder they sell those TVs so inexpensively — they are not only viewing screens but advertising mechanisms set up right in your television-watching room for WalMart.

Back to the article, compare that thought process of a “Growth Company” with funeral home public companies such as Service Corporation International and Carriage Services. . . . who I look at as mature companies whose operations and finances, in my opinion, operate more like utility companies.  That is, they are “Slow-growth”, generally through acquisitions, funded by debt rather than high-growth cash-flow, without the fast-growing “new widget” or idea that could propel them into “Growth companies”.

In my opinion, Pure Cremation is somewhat different and exhibits itself as more of a “Growth Company” that can fetch a higher valuation for its company because of the long-range, hypothetical growth potential based on the “new widget” of Direct Cremation coupled with aggressive Preneed marketing and sales.

Again, in my opinion, there is nothing wrong with “slow, methodical growth” of a business.  However, businesses need to know what they are.  Later in this article is a chart that I made of four public Death Care stocks along with a couple of “new widget” growth companies.  Again, in my opinion, “Growth Companies” have a characteristic of “higher potential gains accompanied by more financial risk” and companies that operate in a field such as traditional Death Care and have “Slow-Growth” characteristics of “slower growth and less financial risk”.

The chart below is representative of that phenomena.  It shows the annual revenue of the companies that comprise the Funeral Director Daily Death Care Index (DCI) and two other “new widget” public growth companies.  It also shows the value of those companies as indicated by Market Capitalization (Defined as the Stock price x Number of Outstanding shares of stock).  (Note:  All values come from Seeking Alpha data as of October 9, 2025.)

Again, at least from my perspective, it is very easy to see that the Death Care companies do not have a high valuation in relation to the revenues that they bring in —  more than likely because of their “slow-growth” perception to investors.  I see that is where Pure Cremation differs from them in that they have the growth expectation of the consumer’s increased use of “Direct Cremation” raising their value.

Market Capitalization of Death Care Companies and “True Growth” Companies

At any rate, it will be interesting to see who might be the purchaser of Pure Cremation.  It very well could be a public company that wants to add a perceived “high growth” company to its portfolio.

Disclosure:  The author of this article for Funeral Director Daily is a shareholder of Service Corporation International, Carriage Services, Security National Financial Corporation, ATS Spacemobile, and Applied Digital Corporation.

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There is no doubt that while many investors (and President Trump) have waited for the Federal Reserve to set lower interest rates going forward and negotiated tariff rates lots of other investors have simply stayed invested and have found gains in the stocks of the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Nasdaq.  Those indexes have returned gains of 10.4%, 7.1%, and 12.6% respectively year-to-date (up to September 5) in 2025.

And, of course, if you had invested in the Morningstar Global Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Index, that you can read about here, your investment would have grown 26.4% year-to-date up to September 5.

However, if you had put your money into the four stocks that comprise the Funeral Director Daily Death Care Index (DCI) from January 2 to September 5, 2025, you would be sitting on a negative return of just less than 1% for the same time period.  The unscientific Death Care Index is comprised of owning one share of stock of each of four public companies that have at least a portion of their revenues coming from Death Care.

Those stocks are Service Corporation International, Carriage Services, Matthews International, and Security National Financial Corporation (SNFC).  The DCI had a cumulative value on January 2, 2025 of $155.13 and on September 5, 2025, virtually two-thirds through the calendar year, the DCI rests at a cumulative value of $153.88  —  for a decrease in value of just under 1%.

Here’s a graphic of the information contained above:

Carriage Services bucks the trend — Carriage Services stock value increased in the time period from $39.02 per share to $42.74 per share, an increase of 9.53%.  As you can see from the chart above they were the only DCI stock to have a measurable gain for 2025’s first eight months.

This article from Yahoo Finance reports keys that management mentioned in their 2nd Quarter 2025 remarks that led to that increase.  Included among those key factors were:

• Funeral Segment volume growth
• Strong Preneed sales momentum
• Overhead Cost reductions
• Portfolio repositioning — The divestiture of non-core assets (presumably funeral home and cemetery facilities) coupled with the acquisitions of “higher growth, high-margin properties” (presumably funeral home and cemetery facilities).

Disclaimer-– The author of this article for Funeral Director Daily is a shareholder of Service Corporation International, Carriage Services, and Security National Financial Corporation.

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Funeral Director Daily published this article about 17 months ago that was headlined “Carriage Services’ Mel Payne transitions to advisory role at company”.   The article went on to say that Mr. Payne, who was the founder, Chairman, and CEO of Carriage Services had been in those positions since 1991.

If you have watched Carriage Services since the time of that article 17 months ago you would notice that the leadership team of Carlos Quezada, John Enright, and Steve Metzger have been, in my words, “putting the house in order“.  It appears that in the last year and a half the leadership team has been busy building partnerships with suppliers, strategically reducing debt, and selectively divesting of funeral homes and cemeteries that don’t seem to fit the company’s criteria.

One of the criticisms of Carriage Services in that time of adjustment has been that some in the investment community have not had the patience that the management team has had about future acquisitions to grow the company.  The 2nd Quarter 2025 report, that you can read here, should quiet that group down as in the report Carriage Vice-Chairman and CEO Carlos Quezada made this prepared comment, “. . . .we are excited to announce that we are under contract to acquire new businesses, which we anticipate will close this quarter. Combined, these premier locations served more than 2,600 families and generated more than $15 million in revenue last year. We are excited to return to our long-term strategy of adding shareholder value through high-quality acquisitions.”

The financial results for the quarter for Carriage Services show Total Revenue slightly down — from $102.3 million in 2Q24 to $102.1 million in 2Q24.  However, if you deduct a $2 million revenue figure in 2Q24 for “Divestment” Revenue, then Total Revenue would be up about 2%.

For the first-half of 2025 Total Revenue came in at $209.2 million . . slightly up from the first-half of 2024 where Total Revenue came in at $205.8 million.  Again, the 2025 revenue number would is more impressive when you consider that one-time “Divestment” revenue from the first-half of 2024 is about $3.3 million greater than the same category in 2025.

When it comes to Net Income from Consolidated Operations Carriage Services 2Q25 number in that category came in at $11.7 million as compared to the 2Q24 number of $6.2 million. For the first 6-months of 2025 Carriage showed a Net Income of $32.6 million as compared to the 2024 Net Income for the same period of $13.2 million.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take:  What do they say?  Patience is a virtue?  I think that this report continues to illustrate how the management team at Carriage Services has a plan and are executing on that plan.  And, they believe in what they are doing.

From my point of view, as an outsider but also as an individual stockholder, I can visualize the plan.  To me, it appears that the management team has analyzed the company’s situation and are taking the steps to make it better.  I see a management team that values “quality” over “quantity”.  In June of 2024 Carriage Services stated that they had 165 funeral homes and 31 cemeteries under their umbrella.  In this latest report they have stated that they have 159 funeral homes and 28 cemeteries — that’s almost a 5% reduction in number of facilities.

So, there has been some divestitures of properties for some reason.  Maybe because of underperformance, or maybe a facility was not located in the geographical sphere that the group wants to be in, or maybe the facility was not located in a demographically advantageous area.  Whatever the reason, one number that I ascertain from that is that even with about 5% less facilities the revenue numbers between 2Q24 and 2Q25 are almost equal.

One conclusion to that mathematical equation could be that Carriage Services must be getting, on average, more revenue per location which can only be a positive in my eyes.  And, if you are gaining revenue per location that beats the alternative and one can be hopeful that Carriage can duplicate that feat with the new acquisitions they are pursuing.

Disclaimer —  The author of this article for Funeral Director Daily is a shareholder of Carriage Services.

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Funeral Director Daily’s analysis of the Death Care Index (DCI) for the 1st Quarter of 2025 shows that the four public companies that comprise the index held up favorably as a whole when compared against the larger followed indexes such as the Nasdaq, the S&P 500, and the Dow Jones Industrial averages.

Editors Note:  This article was ready to go before the markets dropped in value last Thursday and Friday.  I continued to keep it in the que for being published regardless because to me it represented a point in time and how Death Care compared to the rest of the investment world for the period of January 1, 2025 until March 31, 2025, a time period which did not include last Thursday and Friday.

For the quarter the DCI was down in stock price, compared to the first day of the year by about 3.9%.  That number, negative as it was, still beat both the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 and trailed only the composite average of the Dow Jones.  Here’s how those larger indexes fared for the quarter:

• Nasdaq:    -10.3%
• S&P 500:  -4.7%
• Dow Jones Industrials: -0.9%

Here’s a table of how the four companies that comprise the FDD Death Care Index fared:

As you can see, investors in three of the four DCI companies valued the companies at virtually the same valuations as they were valued at the beginning of the year.  The one exception to that fact was that the value of Matthews International dropped almost 20% for the quarter.

To be fair, only about 45-48% of Matthews International’s revenue comes from Death Care.  They are the parent company of Matthews Aurora Caskets and Matthews Cremation as well as offer products in the cemetery memorialization business.

In all fairness to the Death Care market and Matthews International, it was probably not the memorialization segment of the company that lead to the stock drop.  As this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette relates, during the first quarter of 2025 Matthews had both a challenge to its board membership and announced the sale of one of the other non-Death Care companies in its business portfolio.

Matthews Board Chairman Alvaro Garcia-Tunon made this comment in the Post-Gazette article, “We appreciate the constructive dialogue that we’ve had with our shareholders and want to thank them for their feedback and support. That said, we know we have more work ahead to improve performance and deliver the results our shareholders expect from us.”

That same article made note of this situation and wrote of Garcia-Tunon, “He called the results of the vote a “validation of Matthews’ strategy, our board and the leadership of our CEO Joe Bartolacci, as well as the governance actions we have taken in recent years in response to shareholder feedback.”

The Big “Melt-Down” –  As alluded to in the Editor’s note above, the public stock markets had a “melt-down” on Thursday and Friday, more than likely due to the tariffs imposed by President Trump.  The result of that situation, so far, has had the major broad-based market indexes drop by about 10-12% over the two days.

For your information, I put together this small chart of the DCI companies performance in the few days between the end of the 1st Quarter and Friday — a 4-day period.  In comparison to the major indexes, the Death Care Index is down only 6%.  In “relative” terms, that’s again favorable to the broader indexes.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take:  There’s bound to be some anxiety in the greater markets, not only in the United States but in markets around the world, as President Trump sets his sails on his vision for America’s economy.  I think the the relative stability of the Death Care companies stock prices both for the quarter and during the “Melt-down” indicates that investors don’t believe that the business fortunes of these companies, especially those that deal in services rather than products, will be much affected by President Trump’s greater economic vision.

Disclaimer— The author of this article for Funeral Director Daily holds stock positions in Service Corporation International, Carriage Services, and Security National Financial Corporation.

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The American stock market closed on Thursday, March 28, 2024, for the last time in the calendar of the 2024 First Quarter.  If you look at the results so far for the overall market for these first 3 months you would have to say that the results of the 1st Quarter as to the growth has been very good —  the Dow Jones Industrials have gained at a 5.6% clip, NASDAQ at an 8.0% rate, and the S&P 500 has increased right at 10%.  It would be probably pretty correct to say that anybody who has had investments in equities has had a pretty good quarter.

As per the graphic shown below it has been almost all segments of the economy that has shown equity growth.  Communication and Technology sectors, buoyed by the emergence of the future potential of Artificial Intelligence in our world, have seen incredible 15.6% and 12.5% increases respectively and even “old-world” economics of Energy and Industrials have grown at an over 10% rate.

The laggard of the market has been Real Estate as it is the only “major” sector to be in negative growth territory.

What about Death Care services?  Where do they land?

In these lists of “Major” sectors I am guessing that Deth Care would be a subset of Healthcare, Consumer staples, or Consumer diecretionary purchases.  And, those sectors are among the smallest gainers — although growth at 4.8% of higher for a single quarter is still pretty good.

However, when you look at the public death care stocks by themselves as a unit, you will find that they actually had a loss of 1.1% for the quarter.  The Funeral Director Daily Death Care Index (DCI) which consists of one share of stock for each of the five public companies in the Death Care realm — Matthews International, Security National Financial Corporation, Service Corporation International, Carriage Services, and Park Lawn Corporation — slid from a combined price of $154.10 on December 31, 2023, to $152.52 on March 28, 2024. . . . a quarterly loss of 1.1%.

Here’s the individual companies and their stock prices on those dates:

Why is Death Care trailing other sectors? —  That’s a really good question but I think there are some reasons why investors have overlooked Death Care as an investible growth vehicle.  Some reasons may be valid and some may not be, but here’s what I think.

Small Sample Sizes —  There are only five companies that comprise the Funeral Director Daily Death Care Index.  There are literally hundreds of companies that comprise the other asset sectors listed above.  That makes a great deal of difference. I believe that the DCI sector is not so much a sector. . as it is the “additive summation” of a few “individual” public companies involved in Death Care.  I also believe that these companies are looked at “individually” for their promise rather than the DCI looked at as a “sector” for its promise.

Differing companies — The public Death Care companies are different from each other and really don’t fit into a “box” of sameness.  For instance, Matthews International, in my opinion is much more like an industrial company being a manufacturer and supplier to, not only the funeral home and cemetery markets, but to other markets as well.  Security National Financial Corporation, while owning and operating funeral homes, is also in the finance,  mortgage, and insurance businesses.

And, while SCI, Carriage Services, and Park Lawn Corporation are all in the funeral, cremation, and cemetery businesses, they have different structures, sizes, acquisition strategies, ambitions, and balance sheets which are somewhat a blueprint of how they operate.  So, while they “do” the same thing, the companies are all different.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Challenges investors see in Death Care —  I owned and operated a funeral home and know that there are daily challenges in operations.  Efficiency was the “big key” for me and I always was working to improve the margins between what I could sell services for and what they cost me to provide. . . . and we didn’t have an increasingly expensive overhead.

From my point of view, I think potential investors see funeral homes as being challenged right now with exploding overhead expenses — everything from costs of labor, to costs of loans, to costs of utilities.  And, on the other end of the spectrum they see a growth in lower cost services such as Direct Cremation with no services challenging the ability to grow revenues being brought in.

Furthermore, when you look at the corporate funeral home operations they also have the challenge of containing overhead expenses at the corporate level.

Finally, at the end of the day, it is about profits.  My dad has been gone for 47 years but he used to tell me as a teenager, “Stock prices are eventually all a function of profits or profit potential.”   When I look a the Seeking Alpha Income Statements from the funeral home/cemetery operators — SCI, Carriage Services, and Park Lawn Corporation — all of them show less “Earnings from Continuing Operations” for the year 2023 than they did in 2022.  That also presents some challenges.

There are some positives, however.  First of all, Death Care is relatively stable in an environment where many investors are looking for stability.  And, while margins are lessening there is still the anticipation of a higher number of death calls coming from the aging of the Baby Bomer population.

So, some of the Death Care stocks have had a positive 1st Quarter and some have had a negative 1st Quarter in companies that virtually do the same thing.  Why?   I believe, in those cases, the stock price is about history and potential of the individual company more so than the industry or profession as a whole.

Related article — How the U.S. stock market rocketed through the First Quarter.  Reuters

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