Читать книгу The Dividend Investor - Rodney Hobson - Страница 11

Total dividends paid by UK quoted companies actually grew in 2008, after the scale of the credit crunch had become only too apparent, to £67.1 billion from £63.1 billion in 2007. That is a lot of money for non-investors to be missing out on.

Admittedly, dividends were scaled back in 2009, to £58.4 billion, and again in 2010 to £56.5 billion. However, the fall in 2010 was entirely due to the suspension of BP’s dividend for the first three quarters of the year, according to figures compiled by Capita Registrars, which keeps the shareholder records of well over 1,000 quoted companies up to date.

Companies apart from BP increased their dividends by an average of 7.5% in 2010 as their shareholders received an early boost from the nascent economic recovery.

Even better was to come, for in 2011 UK-quoted companies paid £67.8 billion in dividends, more than they had ever handed to shareholders in any one year.

It is true that Capita’s data showed a heavy dependence on a few dividend payers. For instance, in 2010 just five very large companies – Shell, Vodafone, HSBC, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca – paid 38% of total dividends, while the top 15 companies paid 61% of all dividends.

So anyone investing in the largest companies would have received solid dividend payments notwithstanding the misfortune at BP, which in any case restored its dividend, albeit at a lower level, in the final quarter of 2010.