Alphabet Is Paying a Dividend While Selling $85 Billion of New Stock
Money is flowing to shareholders while they are being diluted at the same time -- and the two amounts aren't close.
Overview
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) will pay its next dividend on Sept. 14 -- $0.22 per share, a rate the company raised 5% in April. The payout works out to about $10.8 billion a year across about 12.2 billion shares.
In June, the same tech company sold about $50 billion of new stock in a single week.
Details
Both moves are part of one capital story. Alphabet announced an $80 billion equity raise on June 1 to fund its artificial intelligence (AI) build-out, then upsized it to $84.75 billion at pricing a day later. Next to that, the dividend can look like a rounding error. I think it's better understood as a signal. But the signal only makes sense once you see how completely the direction of Alphabet's money has changed this year.
Source
Originally published at www.fool.com.