Bpost: Brace For A Dividend Cut

Introduction
After having discussed Hunter Douglas (OTCPK: HDUGF) in the previous edition of Focus on Europe, we are sticking around in the ‘Low Countries’ to look at Belgian postal service company Bpost (OTC:BPOSF) (OTCPK: BPOSY), which saw its share price increase by a double digit percentage after releasing its financial results of the final quarter of last year. Investors appeared to be positively surprised there were no additional corpses falling out of the closet.
Bpost: Investors Were Expecting The Worst
The market seemed impressed with the set of financial results Bpost released last week. I’m not sure why there was such a sigh of relief, as those results were pretty much in line with my expectations. Perhaps the market was expecting Bpost to release more bad news?

Source: Yahoo Finance
Bpost’s main listing is on the Euronext Brussels exchange where it’s trading with BPOST as its ticker symbol. The average daily volume is around half a million shares.
A quick review of 2018
In 2018, Bpost’s revenue increased by 27% to 3.77B EUR, but as the Belgian postal service company had to deal with higher expenses (mainly related to the acquisition of Radial which increased the payroll costs as well as the ‘services and other goods’), the EBIT -which the company uses as one of its main benchmarks for its financial performance- decreased by 20% to 393M EUR. On top of that, the financial expenses increased as well, and the bottom line... Read more