Regular readers will know that we love our dividends at Simply Wall St, which is why it's exciting to see Texwinca Holdings Limited (HKG:321) is about to trade ex-dividend in the next 3 days. If you purchase the stock on or after the 5th of December, you won't be eligible to receive this dividend, when it is paid on the 3rd of January.

Texwinca Holdings's next dividend payment will be HK$0.10 per share. Last year, in total, the company distributed HK$0.20 to shareholders. Based on the last year's worth of payments, Texwinca Holdings has a trailing yield of 8.9% on the current stock price of HK$2.25. 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.

Check out our latest analysis for Texwinca Holdings

Dividends are typically paid out of company income, so if a company pays out more than it earned, its dividend is usually at a higher risk of being cut. Texwinca Holdings paid out 101% of its earnings, which is more than we're comfortable with, unless there are mitigating circumstances. A useful secondary check can be to evaluate whether Texwinca Holdings generated enough free cash flow to afford its dividend. Dividends consumed 69% of the company's free cash flow last year, which is within a normal range for most dividend-paying organisations.

It's disappointing to see that the dividend was not covered by profits, but cash is more important from a dividend sustainability perspective, and Texwinca Holdings fortunately did generate enough cash to fund its dividend. Still, if the company repeatedly paid a dividend greater than its profits, we'd be concerned. Very few companies are able to sustainably pay dividends larger than their reported earnings.

Click here to see how much of its profit Texwinca 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. If business enters a downturn and the dividend is cut, the company could see its value fall precipitously. With that in mind, we're discomforted by Texwinca Holdings's 13% per annum decline in earnings in the past five years. When earnings per share fall, the maximum amount of dividends that can be paid also falls.

Many investors will assess a company's dividend performance by evaluating how much the dividend payments have changed over time. Texwinca Holdings has seen its dividend decline 6.7% per annum on average over the past ten years, which is not great to see. It's never nice to see earnings and dividends falling, but at least management has cut the dividend rather than potentially risk the company's health in an attempt to maintain it.