It looks like Daejan Holdings Plc (LON:DJAN) is about to go ex-dividend in the next 3 days. You can purchase shares before the 3rd of October in order to receive the dividend, which the company will pay on the 1st of November.
Daejan Holdings's next dividend payment will be UK£0.7 per share, on the back of last year when the company paid a total of UK£1.1 to shareholders. Based on the last year's worth of payments, Daejan Holdings has a trailing yield of 2.1% on the current stock price of £50.6. We love seeing companies pay a dividend, but it's also important to be sure that laying the golden eggs isn't going to kill our golden goose! So we need to investigate whether Daejan Holdings can afford its dividend, and if the dividend could grow.
View our latest analysis for Daejan Holdings
If a company pays out more in dividends than it earned, then the dividend might become unsustainable - hardly an ideal situation. Daejan Holdings paid out just 14% of its profit last year, which we think is conservatively low and leaves plenty of margin for unexpected circumstances. Yet cash flow is typically more important than profit for assessing dividend sustainability, so we should always check if the company generated enough cash to afford its dividend. It distributed 44% of its free cash flow as dividends, a comfortable payout level for most companies.
It's encouraging to see that the dividend is covered by both profit and cash flow. This generally suggests the dividend is sustainable, as long as earnings don't drop precipitously.
Click here to see how much of its profit Daejan Holdings paid out over the last 12 months.
Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?
When earnings decline, dividend companies become much harder to analyse and own safely. Investors love dividends, so if earnings fall and the dividend is reduced, expect a stock to be sold off heavily at the same time. So we're not too excited that Daejan Holdings's earnings are down 4.4% a year over the past five years.
Many investors will assess a company's dividend performance by evaluating how much the dividend payments have changed over time. Since the start of our data, ten years ago, Daejan Holdings has lifted its dividend by approximately 3.8% a year on average.
To Sum It Up
From a dividend perspective, should investors buy or avoid Daejan Holdings? Earnings per share are down meaningfully, although at least the company is paying out a low and conservative percentage of both its earnings and cash flow. It's definitely not great to see earnings falling, but at least there may be some buffer before the dividend needs to be cut. Overall, it's hard to get excited about Daejan Holdings from a dividend perspective.