Societe Generale: A Current Dividend Yield Of 10% More Appealing Than It Looks

Introduction
After checking up on Ingenico (OTC:INGIF) (OTCPK: INGIY) last week, we are staying in France for this week’s edition of Focus on Europe. All major French banks have now reported their earnings over the first semester and despite bolstering its capital position and strengthening its balance sheet, the market appeared to be indifferent to the results of Societe Generale (OTCPK: SCGLY) (OTCPK: SCGLF).
Although SocGen is scoring points with investors that are focusing on how safe a bank is by aggressively increasing its CET1 capital ratios, it looks like both dividend investors and value investors are still ignoring the company despite its 10% dividend yield and 50% discount to its tangible book value.
About SocGen
Societe Generale is a French financial institution with approximately half of its ‘Exposure at Default’ in France while maintaining a very geographically diverse portfolio for the other half of its banking exposure:

Source: SocGen presentation
As it’s a European bank reporting its financial results in Euro, we will obviously use the Euro as base currency throughout the article. And considering the bank’s French listing on Euronext Paris is definitely more liquid than any secondary listing (the average daily volume in Paris is approximately 5.3M shares), it goes without saying you should try to trade in SocGen stock using the Euronext Paris facilities. The ticker symbol there is GLE.

Source: Yahoo Finance
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