Dividends Workout
- 01:34
Calculate the dividend per share and growth rate for a life insurance business
Transcript
In this workout, we've been asked to calculate the dividend per share growth rate for Generali in 2018 and also what the solvency ratios for the company imply about future dividend growth rates. But let's start off with the historic numbers. And for that, we've been given the proposed and paid dividends for financial years in 2017 and 2018, as well as the weighted average shares in issue in both of those years. So we can use that information to calculate the dividend per share. So we take the paid and proposed dividends for the financial year and divide that by the weighted average shares in issue and we'll do that for both years. So you can see that the dividend per share in 2017 was 0.85, and in 2018 it was 0.9. So clearly, there's a growing dividend, but let's see what the actual growth rate is. So we take the 2018 dividend per share and divide it by the prior number and then minus one. So that gives us a dividend per share growth rate of 6%. That's a nice healthy dividend growth rate. But what about the solvency ratio numbers? Let's take a look at those now. So you can see that the solvency ratio in 2018 was 216% and that's higher than it was in 2017. So despite the healthy dividend growth rate, the amount of retained capital is also growing and the actual solvency ratio is well in excess of the 100% minimum required by the regulator. So actually, there's a very healthy buffer here, suggesting there's a reasonable amount of headroom for them to continue paying a healthy dividend and sustaining that existing growth rate of 6%.