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It looks like HNI Corporation (NYSE:HNI) is about to go ex-dividend in the next 3 days. You can purchase shares before the 13th of August in order to receive the dividend, which the company will pay on the 1st of September.
HNI's next dividend payment will be US$0.30 per share. Last year, in total, the company distributed US$1.22 to shareholders. Looking at the last 12 months of distributions, HNI has a trailing yield of approximately 3.8% on its current stock price of $31.76. Dividends are an important source of income to many shareholders, but the health of the business is crucial to maintaining those dividends. We need to see whether the dividend is covered by earnings and if it's growing.
View our latest analysis for HNI
Dividends are typically paid out of company income, so if a company pays out more than it earned, its dividend is usually at a higher risk of being cut. HNI is paying out an acceptable 63% of its profit, a common payout level among most companies. Yet cash flows are even more important than profits for assessing a dividend, so we need to see if the company generated enough cash to pay its distribution. Fortunately, it paid out only 28% of its free cash flow in the past year.
It's encouraging to see that the dividend is covered by both profit and cash flow. This generally suggests the dividend is sustainable, as long as earnings don't drop precipitously.
Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.
Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?
Businesses with strong growth prospects usually make the best dividend payers, because it's easier to grow dividends when earnings per share are improving. Investors love dividends, so if earnings fall and the dividend is reduced, expect a stock to be sold off heavily at the same time. This is why it's a relief to see HNI earnings per share are up 7.0% per annum over the last five years. Decent historical earnings per share growth suggests HNI has been effectively growing value for shareholders. However, it's now paying out more than half its earnings as dividends. If management lifts the payout ratio further, we'd take this as a tacit signal that the company's growth prospects are slowing.
Many investors will assess a company's dividend performance by evaluating how much the dividend payments have changed over time. Since the start of our data, 10 years ago, HNI has lifted its dividend by approximately 3.6% a year on average. We're glad to see dividends rising alongside earnings over a number of years, which may be a sign the company intends to share the growth with shareholders.