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Fascinating that they’re issuing a dividend. Can’t find anything better to do to drive growth?
by endisneigh 2y ago
Fascinating that they’re issuing a dividend. Can’t find anything better to do to drive growth?
- neel8986 2y agoIt is $300B/year company growing at 15%. I don't think growth is an issue here
- endisneigh 2y agoBetter
- duringmath 2y agoIt's not like they can make any major acquisitions in this political environment.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoGoogle has $100B+ of cash and is giving out $10B/yr as a dividend. I think they will be able to scrape something together if they have a good idea.
- endisneigh 2y agoYes - and what they’ve decided is a dividend. It’s the first in their history. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but it’s something.
- lupire 2y agoThe interesting part is why they chose to issue a dividend instead of sticking only with a theoretically equivalent buyback.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoPut money in Larry and sergey's pockets without them having to sell any shares?
- futureshock 2y agoThat’s not a terrible guess. Together they own 56% of the voting shares and maintain control of the company. A divided puts money in their pocket without needing to sell any of their class B 10x voting shares.
- tryptophan 2y agoYeah, they should spend it making 5 new chat apps.
- adonovan 2y agoOr halting the layoffs.
- lupire 2y agoThis has nothing to do with layoffs. They have plenty of money for salary even after these payouts. The layoffs are intended to reduce costs / increase profit. Google has no desire for employees; they only have employees insofar they are a necessary expense.
- jldugger 2y agoOnce upon a time it was said by Google leadership the biggest cost Google pays is opportunity costs, chiefly in the form of projects and products they don't pursue.
- mepiethree 2y agoAnd back at that time they had way fewer employees than they do now, so that made sense.
- brap 2y agoWhy? It’s not a charity.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoWhy halt them with performance this good? Maybe there isn't a useful role for that many people at Google as-is
- nolist_policy 2y agoGoogle released their latest chat app 7 years ago.
- VirusNewbie 2y agoThey are growing as fast as they can in terms of data center and GPU output. They're supply constrained.
- londons_explore 2y agoWhere would you spend that cash? They already have >150k employees they can redeploy at will to enter any new market.
- ZephyrBlu 2y agoFunnily enough, Peter Thiel called this years ago.
- _mlbt 2y agoDividends were originally the main point of owning corporate stocks in the first place.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoDividends started in 1602 with the Dutch East India company. However corporations with shares predate that somewhat. So it wasn’t technically the original point.
- formercoder 2y agoI’m a Googler who doesn’t do anything remotely close to setting capital return policy. Just remember Alphabet has been buying back 10s of billions for a while. Dividends are just a different capital return mechanism.
- jnwatson 2y agoImportantly, dividends devalue issued unvested RSUs.
- kidintech 2y agoCould you please expand on this? If a person got issued RSUs but they have not vested yet, wouldn't they be happy that the RSUs are going to be worth more by the time they get vested?
- saagarjha 2y agoNo, because they would be worth the amount less the dividends during the vesting period.
- kidintech 2y agoIn a vacuum where precise numbers do not exist, maybe. In this real scenario, if someone's goog shares were vesting at an earlier value - let's take a rough average at a glance of goog YTD to be $145, they will have lost on a year's worth of dividends at $0.2 per share. However, the current share price is $175. So, through this maneuver, a person holding N goog shares will lose at most 3 quarters of dividends: N * 0.2$ * 3 = N * 0.6$ But they will have gained whatever the stock has appreciated, which at this moment in time works out to: N * (175-145)$ = N * 30$ What am I missing which would make the scenario above result in OP's claim of "dividends devalue issued unvested RSUs"? EDIT: This also fails to take into account "Dividend Equivalents (DEs)", which are not factored above, and would yield extra income to the person that owns unvested shares.
- 2y ago
- iaseiadit 2y agoFacebook did it, so they will follow.