Yahoo Finance 4 Days Left Until Orange SA (EPA:ORA) Trades Ex-Dividend
On the 06 December 2018, Orange SA (EPA:ORA) will be paying shareholders an upcoming dividend amount of €0.30 per share. However, investors must have bought the company’s stock before 04 December 2018 in order to qualify for the payment. That means you have only 4 days left! Investors looking for higher income-generating stocks to add to their portfolio should keep reading, as I take a deeper dive into Orange’s latest financial data to analyse its dividend attributes.
Check out our latest analysis for Orange
5 checks you should do on a dividend stock
When researching a dividend stock, I always follow the following screening criteria:
Is their annual yield among the top 25% of dividend payers?
Does it consistently pay out dividends without missing a payment of significantly cutting payout?
Has the amount of dividend per share grown over the past?
Is is able to pay the current rate of dividends from its earnings?
Will it be able to continue to payout at the current rate in the future?
Does Orange pass our checks?
The company currently pays out 86% of its earnings as a dividend, according to its trailing twelve-month data, which means that the dividend is covered by earnings. However, going forward, analysts expect ORA’s payout to fall to 63% of its earnings, which leads to a dividend yield of 5.0%. However, EPS should increase to €1.09, meaning that the lower payout ratio does not necessarily implicate a lower dividend payment.
When thinking about whether a dividend is sustainable, another factor to consider is the cash flow. A company with strong cash flow, relative to earnings, can sometimes sustain a high pay out ratio.
If there is one thing that you want to be reliable in your life, it’s dividend stocks and their constant income stream. Not only have dividend payouts from Orange fallen over the past 10 years, it has also been highly volatile during this time, with drops of over 25% in some years. This means that dividend hunters should probably steer clear of the stock, at least for now until the track record improves.
Compared to its peers, Orange generates a yield of 4.3%, which is high for Telecom stocks.
Next Steps:
Taking into account the dividend metrics, Orange ticks most of the boxes as a strong dividend investment, putting it in my list of top dividend payers. Given that this is purely a dividend analysis, I urge potential investors to try and get a good understanding of the underlying business and its fundamentals before deciding on an investment. There are three key aspects you should further research:
Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for ORA’s future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for ORA’s outlook.
Valuation: What is ORA worth today? Even if the stock is a cash cow, it’s not worth an infinite price. The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether ORA is currently mispriced by the market.
Other Dividend Rockstars: Are there better dividend payers with stronger fundamentals out there? Check out our free list of these great stocks here.
To help readers see past the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements.
The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
