Dividends5 Feb 2025 14:27
Dividends are NOT being considered; the writer of that article seems to have made a conclusion based on the free cash being produced. This is from the recent Investor Meet Q&As after the Interims were released [TurboScribe transcription]:
Carl has asked, when do you envisage starting to pay dividends? Gavin has said, what is the dividend policy? And Keith has said, well, shareholders greatly appreciate the progress being made by the company. Our reward is at the mercy of the market. Is there any other way whereby shareholders can be rewarded for their patience? Yeah, I think that, as you say, James, that all comes down to a bit of guidance on the dividend policy, doesn't it? So something we've talked about in the past on these forums, and we last time did this promise to review it again, and we did that at our scheduled meeting in December where the board met and talked about dividend policy.
We agreed for the time being that the dividend policy would remain the same, which wasn't paying a dividend. And that is simply because whilst we're growing the business and we believe we can utilise any free cash better to grow the business, that's what we should do. And quite simply, the finance facilities that James has talked about, particularly on the asset finance side, most of them allow us to draw down between 90 and 92.5% against the blocks of leases and loans.
So we have to find the balance of those funds. When we're growing, obviously, we need to find more of those funds because the new business and the growth outstrips the collections that you collect in from the previous loans and leases that were done between one and five years ago. So the model is that we can use any spare cash that we've got over and above, obviously, what we class as being needed for sensible rainy day funds to grow the business.
And that's what we've decided to do. So this is still a growth stock rather than a dividend paying stock. Thanks, Ed.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
