Today we’ll take a closer look at Nissin Foods Company Limited (HKG:1475) from a dividend investor’s perspective. Owning a strong business and reinvesting the dividends is widely seen as an attractive way of growing your wealth. If you are hoping to live on the income from dividends, it’s important to be a lot more stringent with your investments than the average punter.
With only a two-year payment history, and a 1.5% yield, investors probably think Nissin Foods is not much of a dividend stock. Many of the best dividend stocks typically start out paying a low yield, so we wouldn’t automatically cut it from our list of prospects. There are a few simple ways to reduce the risks of buying Nissin Foods for its dividend, and we’ll go through these below.
Explore this interactive chart for our latest analysis on Nissin Foods!
SEHK:1475 Historical Dividend Yield, February 4th 2020
Payout ratios
Dividends are usually paid out of company earnings. If a company is paying more than it earns, then the dividend might become unsustainable – hardly an ideal situation. So we need to form a view on if a company’s dividend is sustainable, relative to its net profit after tax. Looking at the data, we can see that 41% of Nissin Foods’s profits were paid out as dividends in the last 12 months. This is a middling range that strikes a nice balance between paying dividends to shareholders, and retaining enough earnings to invest in future growth. Besides, if reinvestment opportunities dry up, the company has room to increase the dividend.
In addition to comparing dividends against profits, we should inspect whether the company generated enough cash to pay its dividend. Nissin Foods paid out 105% of its free cash last year. Cash flows can be lumpy, but this dividend was not well covered by cash flow. While Nissin Foods’s dividends were covered by the company’s reported profits, free cash flow is somewhat more important, so it’s not great to see that the company didn’t generate enough cash to pay its dividend. Cash is king, as they say, and were Nissin Foods to repeatedly pay dividends that aren’t well covered by cashflow, we would consider this a warning sign.
With a strong net cash balance, Nissin Foods investors may not have much to worry about in the near term from a dividend perspective.
Remember, you can always get a snapshot of Nissin Foods’s latest financial position, by checking our visualisation of its financial health.
Dividend Volatility
Before buying a stock for its income, we want to see if the dividends have been stable in the past, and if the company has a track record of maintaining its dividend. The dividend has not fluctuated much, but with a relatively short payment history, we can’t be sure this is sustainable across a full market cycle. During the past two-year period, the first annual payment was HK$0.073 in 2018, compared to HK$0.095 last year. Dividends per share have grown at approximately 14% per year over this time.
The dividend has been growing pretty quickly, which could be enough to get us interested even though the dividend history is relatively short. Further research may be warranted.
Dividend Growth Potential
While dividend payments have been relatively reliable, it would also be nice if earnings per share (EPS) were growing, as this is essential to maintaining the dividend’s purchasing power over the long term. Nissin Foods’s earnings per share have been essentially flat over the past five years. Flat earnings per share are acceptable for a time, but over the long term, the purchasing power of the company’s dividends could be eroded by inflation.
Conclusion
Dividend investors should always want to know if a) a company’s dividends are affordable, b) if there is a track record of consistent payments, and c) if the dividend is capable of growing. First, we like Nissin Foods’s low dividend payout ratio, although we’re a bit concerned that it paid out a substantially higher percentage of its free cash flow. Earnings per share are down, and to our mind Nissin Foods has not been paying a dividend long enough to demonstrate its resilience across economic cycles. In summary, Nissin Foods has a number of shortcomings that we’d find it hard to get past. Things could change, but we think there are a number of better ideas out there.
Given that earnings are not growing, the dividend does not look nearly so attractive. Very few businesses see earnings consistently shrink year after year in perpetuity though, and so it might be worth seeing what the 10 analysts we track are forecasting for the future.
If you are a dividend investor, you might also want to look at our curated list of dividend stocks yielding above 3%.
If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at [email protected]. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.
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