Friday, October 08, 2010

Payout Ratio

Payout ratio is simply Dividend Per Share (DPS) divided by Earnings Per Share (EPS), which tells you how much buffer does the company have for it to increase its dividends. E.g. EPS for Singtel is about 22c and DPS is 11c on average for the last few years, so the payout ratio is 50%.

But what is a good payout ratio?

If the payout ratio is 30-40%, which I would say is probably below the global average, then you know the company has some room to increase dividends.

If the payout ratio is close to 100%, ie the company is paying everything that it earned as dividends, then we cannot expect a lot of growth in dividends unless earnings is going to grow significantly.

In Singapore, sadly, a lot of high dividend stocks also have very high payout ratio, ie no further room for dividend to grow unless earnings can grow. But if earnings can grow, then the firm would want the money to invest in growth and not return them to shareholders. Hence high dividend plus strong growth is an oxymoron. These stocks don’t exist. Or they are very rare.

When dividend and payout ratio both gets too high, dividend cut becomes inevitable.

However, cutting dividend is a big deal for many companies in Singapore, bcos a lot of shareholders buy Sg stocks mainly for their dividend and if it is cut, it means disappointment and selling pressure. Of course it also shows that management is not capable of steering the business well enough to pay their shareholders.

In fact, it got so important to the extent that some companies actually issued debt to pay dividends!

The two prominent cases being Singpost and Starhub.

In the early years when Singpost was listed, it was obligated to pay a high dividend yield for some reason that I forgot. So while Singpost’s net profit was just over S$100mn, it has to pay S$300mn in dividends! So bo pian, raise debt to pay dividend. However, that only happened more than 6-7 years ago and the company hasn’t done anything stupid like that ever since.

Ok let’s talk about Starhub.

For the past few years, Starhub generates annual net income of roughly S$300mn and pays roughly $300mn in dividends as well! At the same time, the firm increases its debt holdings almost every alternate year, in 1 year by as much as S$600mn! So people asked questions like why do they raise so much debt when they could have cut the dividends to save money?

Well I guess there are no easy answers. But if we analyse the cashflow statement of Starhub, we can see that perhaps the situation is not as bad. So it might be worthwhile to look at free cash flow vs dividend paid instead. Which is what I would do in the next post!

4 comments:

  1. And where goes then if starhub saves the money. one has to look at the return on equity or return on assets

    The ROIC for Singtel is so much lower than Starhub and M1. Acquisition is a good thing but the share price of Singtel did not fair as well as M1 and Starhub. Question to ask is that is it an efficient use of capital?

    Saving for rainy day is a good justification and you would have to see that Starhub does have adequate cash holding cover.

    For more info check out this article

    Best REgards
    Drizzt
    Investment Moats.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. So do you guys have a share in Singtel and Starhub?

    Daniel Su
    Dan @ Facebook

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Drizzt, thanks for the link, very interesting. Starhub would be paying down more debt if they cut the dividend. But they cannot cut, bcos the share price will collapse. So not sure what will happen. I wrote something about it in my next post.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Dan,

    I own Singtel more bcos of legacy, but I also like the overseas exposure. Starhub is a tough call. I like the 8% dividend but I also see limited growth, as cable TV penetration is quite high and some price war is going on.

    There is also some things that I couldnt quite figure out just yet about its equity.

    But 8% dividend is really a big draw.

    ReplyDelete