Although companies have been weighing whether to buy back stock or issue dividends over the course of the financial, recent trends show buybacks the more popular route. However, some companies are doing both.
According to recent data from S&P Dow Jones Indices, preliminary results show that S&P 500 stock buybacks increased 18.1 percent to $118.1bn during the second quarter of 2013, up from the $100bn in the first quarter. Year over year, buybacks are up 5.6 percent. The latest figures show the number of buybacks creeping back to the 2007 highs when companies spent $589bn over the 12 month period. It should be noted of course that Apple’s recent announcement of $16bn was responsible for a huge chunk of that 18.1 percent.
One reason for the buybacks is confidence in the long-term outlook. For instance, according to report from FactSet, Caterpillar has been on an aggressive buyback campaign in 2013. This is because, according to CEO Douglas Oberhelman, the company is confident its recent moves in mining will pay off.
“I still firmly believe long-term…we’ll view our moves into mining and what we’ve done the last few years as really changing the company for the better,” he said in the company’s first quarter earnings call. Then in the following quarter’s call, Caterpillar projected another $1bn in share repurchases for the third quarter. Caterpillar now has only $1.7 billion remaining under current authorization, according to FactSet.
Since the beginning of the financial crisis and the subsequent build-up of cash, companies within the NeuGroup universe have been debating which course to take, buybacks or dividends (issuing or increasing). Some members have frowned on both, with one company saying they were more of a sign of the company’s “inability of management to find better uses of cash.”
But given the environment, what’s a better use? For now, it’s buybacks. Treasurers also likely see an attractive tax-efficient instrument for returning cash to shareholders as they don’t trigger an immediate tax liability. On other hand, dividends can be taxed at up to 23.8 percent for earners in the top tax brackets.
One member of the NeuGroup’s Treasurers’ Group of Thirty said recently that his company takes an opportunistic approach and with rates still low now’s the time. The company, he said, measures its performance “the same as an investment manager” since it began repurchasing stock back in the early 2000s. “It can be difficult to measure intrinsic value, but we try to buy back stock opportunistically when we believe it is trading at attractive levels,” he said.
Meantime, there’s also been a widespread trend towards companies being more balanced with shareholder distributions. According to FactSet, the number of companies engaging in both a dividend and a buyback over the trailing twelve-month period has reached its highest level “since at least 2005.”