Another Reason for Companies to Pay Dividends

I am a firm believer that companies that pay dividends by default represent an elite group of sound enterprises which should comprise an investor’s watchlist for further research. The second criterion should be focusing on fundamentals in order to determine whether the company could afford to not only generate enough cash to grow and maintain its business, but also to be able to distribute any excess to shareholders in the form of dividends. The third criterion that I use is that the company has been able to grow distributions for at least ten consecutive years. These criteria pretty much decrease the list of eligible dividend stocks to less than 300.Nonbelievers of dividend investing often claim that only poorly managed companies or companies which are in decline tend to pay dividends. This group of investors often is under the false belief that a company will be able to reinvest all of its earnings back into the business, while achieving high incremental returns on investment. The problem with this strategy is that in the real world of corporate governance, it is extremely difficult for companies to reinvest all of their earnings back into the business and still maintain high profitability on any excess reinvested dollars. This is because of constraints in the utilization of these assets, management’s desire to build an empire at all costs, expensive acquisitions, bad timing of capital allocations and simply because not all investments are guaranteed to earn a profit. Warren Buffett is often cited as the type of manager who has been able to allocate funds to profitable ventures, and thus has avoided paying dividends to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. The only issue with this analogy is that unfortunately few CEO’s have the business acumen of the Oracle of Omaha who built a small struggling textile mill into a diversified conglomerate with a market cap of over $200 billion.... Read more