In This Article:
Regular readers will know that we love our dividends at Simply Wall St, which is why it's exciting to see KBR, Inc. (NYSE:KBR) is about to trade ex-dividend in the next 4 days. This means that investors who purchase shares on or after the 13th of September will not receive the dividend, which will be paid on the 15th of October.
KBR's next dividend payment will be US$0.08 per share, and in the last 12 months, the company paid a total of US$0.32 per share. Based on the last year's worth of payments, KBR stock has a trailing yield of around 1.2% on the current share price of $26.15. Dividends are an important source of income to many shareholders, but the health of the business is crucial to maintaining those dividends. We need to see whether the dividend is covered by earnings and if it's growing.
See our latest analysis for KBR
Dividends are typically paid from company earnings. If a company pays more in dividends than it earned in profit, then the dividend could be unsustainable. KBR has a low and conservative payout ratio of just 24% of its income after tax. 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. What's good is that dividends were well covered by free cash flow, with the company paying out 16% of its cash flow last year.
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 the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.
Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?
Businesses with strong growth prospects usually make the best dividend payers, because it's easier to grow dividends when earnings per share are improving. Investors love dividends, so if earnings fall and the dividend is reduced, expect a stock to be sold off heavily at the same time. It's encouraging to see KBR has grown its earnings rapidly, up 21% a year for the past five years. KBR looks like a real growth company, with earnings per share growing at a cracking pace and the company reinvesting most of its profits in the business.
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, 10 years ago, KBR has lifted its dividend by approximately 4.8% a year on average. Earnings per share have been growing much quicker than dividends, potentially because KBR is keeping back more of its profits to grow the business.