Since coming public in June of 2013, Coty Inc. (NYSE: COTY) has boosted its share price by more than 60%, but the annual dividend has been stuck at $0.20. That reflects a dividend yield of just 0.7%. Friday morning, Coty announced an increase to $0.25, which will lift the yield to about 1%.
When the company announced in early July that it would pay $12.5 billion for 43 of Procter & Gamble Co.’s (NYSE: PG) beauty brands, Coty’s shares dropped about 19% before turning around somewhat. At Thursday’s closing price, the stock remains down 13% from its peak before the announcement.
A large increase to a modest dividend follows an earlier announcement by Coty that it will buy back $700 million in common stock, another effort to win back investors’ affection. In Friday’s announcement, Coty CFO Patrice de Talhouët said:
This dividend increase and our recently announced $700 million share repurchase authorization demonstrate our confidence in Coty’s ability to generate substantial cash flow as well as our commitment to return cash to our shareholders.
The deal with Procter & Gamble was expensive, but it could be a game changer for Coty. The deal adds Hugo Boss and Gucci to Coty’s fragrances business and CoverGirl and Max Factor to its cosmetics lineup, as well as a new hair color business with Wella and Clairol. The Procter & Gamble businesses have annual sales of around $5.5 billion, compared with $4.4 billion for Coty in its most recent fiscal year.
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Coty expects the transaction with Procter & Gamble to close in the second half of 2016. That is a long time for short attention span shareholders to have to wait to see the impact of a $12.5 billion deal.
Coty shares were up 1.9% to $28.92 Friday morning. The stock’s 52-week range is $15.74 to $32.72.
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