Member Info for tomglan

Not a bad time for IMB to be using dollar profits to buyback shares priced in great british pesos either

Strange how Kwasi (whose budget caused gilts to tank) used to work for Odey. Small world.

From FY results: "We have already started to return £400m of the proceeds to shareholders in the form of special dividends, split equally over the interim 2021, final 2021 and interim 2022 dividends. 46 pence per share of the total final 2021 dividend (of 118 pence per share) is in respect of the Penguin sale and the final 45 pence per share will follow in October 2022."

Sabre insurance read across

Fair enough, I was just making the point that looking at total return for companies like IMB can be useful rather than focusing on share price alone

LTI that assumes one bought at the high and didn't reinvest any of the dividends during the decline. For example, I first started buying at just over £31, however thanks to reinvested dividends and some opportunistic buys during the lows (£12-14) I'm now slightly in profit on an average cost basis.

"The Board has approved an interim dividend of 42.54 pence per share which will be paid in two payments of 21.27
pence per share. The first interim dividend payment will be paid on 30 June 2022 to shareholders registered on 27
May 2022."

Divi do you have a source for the "saving £10 million per annum on Bromley office" comment? Was it mentioned earlier on the call?

Price action was always going to be a bit strange given the current macro environment. I notice that if the one-off lease purchase is added back onto the profit figure and then we divide by the actual outstanding shares, rather than the average over the year, we get an EPS of 32p (424/1330). This just about covers the 23p div and 7p buyback programme. With around £1.60 of tangible net asset value per share, this adds a floor to the share price (in theory). Overall I'm happy with today's results. GLA

Paul, this from page 8 of the presentation you may find helpful: "1. For regulatory reasons, and consistent with past practice, the final dividend will be declared and paid as a second, interim, dividend. Ex-dividend date 17 March, payment date 28 April;"

The reason IMB used to have a dividend cover of 1 was that they made around £2bn in operating profit and paid just under £2bn in dividends (just over £2 a share at the time). What the dividend cover figure didn't capture though was that another £1.3bn or so was added back to operating profit in that cash flow statement due to the non-cash expense of amortisiation/depreciation. It was this £1.3bn buffer that gave IMB headroom to pay interest, cover capex and slowly chip away at the debt. I think it got to the point where a lot of investors weren't happy with the speed of the debt reduction so Alison was shown the door and the dividend was subsequently slashed by a third. They also sold off our wonderful cigar division. Going forward I think there is a good case here for resumed dividend growth.

I was under the impression that advertising bans inadvertently helped tobacco co's in the past? The established players got to keep their market share without having to spend any money on marketing. No advertising = no new players gaining a foothold in the market.

The buyback is effectively an extra 87p dividend this year that gets automatically reinvested on your behalf to increase your ownership, this is on top of the £2.18 coming directly as cash. Let's see how many other companies increase returns to shareholders by 40% this year whilst managing to reduce debt.

<<<< 2020 is that way Falky. I think we're on the up and up ;-)

Does anyone know what will happen to my LON:BHP shares over the following months? I'm happy to hold onto the company but my broker is unable to trade with the ASX. Will I have the option to select whether I want the shares converted to BHP Ltd or the new LSE issue? Thanks

Think you're a month early on the ex-div

Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him

Continuing on this thread is a very good post from finumus: https://www.finumus.com/blog/what-if-my-broker-goes-bust

Slodo, short interest is way too low for that - only a couple % last time I checked. Not sure how far they expect to drive down the price though, our market cap is under £3.6bn now and if management surprised the market and said forget the div everything is going on buybacks they'd be looking at about £400m per year i.e. 11% of the company at current prices. That would get the shorts sweating pretty quick haha. We also have around £1.65 of tangible net assets per share which I feel should put a floor on the price.

Tinfoil hat time: It's worth hedge funds spending a few million trading down the price if it allows their mates to offer a cheeky bid and get the company for a few hundred million cheaper.