Arborbridge wrote:I guess that's in accounting years.
Well, yes, of course it is! Figures companies produce for their results announcements, annual and interim reports are generally produced for accounting years - and I'm fairly certain that it would be a breach of accounting standards for them to do anything else!
There are of course multiple figures that can be produced for an accounting year, and usually final results announcements and annual reports produce at least the dividends
declared for the accounting year and the dividends that have been
paid during the calendar year, basically because the former are set according to company earnings during the accounting year (so they relate to the income statement) and the latter report on cash leaving the company during the accounting year (so are an item in the cash flow statement). These results are no exception - from
https://www.investegate.co.uk/imperial- ... 00085078S/:
Dividend payments
The Group paid two interim dividends of 21.06 pence per share in June and September 2021.
The Board has approved a further interim dividend of 48.48 pence per share and will propose a final dividend of 48.48 pence per share, bringing the total dividend for the year to 139.08 pence.
The third interim dividend will be paid on 31 December 2021 to shareholders registered on 26 November 2021. Subject to AGM approval, the proposed final dividend will be paid on 31 March 2022 to shareholders registered on 18 February 2022.
In the year there were £1,305 million of shareholder dividend payments (2020: £1,753 million). The 25 per cent reduction represents the FY21 impact of the one-third rebasing of the dividend announced in May 2020 as part of the revised capital allocation policy to accelerate debt reduction.
That 25% reduction is for dividend payments made from October 2020 to September 2021, compared with those made from October 2019 to September 2020, and so takes two quarters of the dividend cut into account. In that context, your 14% reduction from calendar years, taking one quarter of it into account, fits pretty well.
The other aspect of this is that when reporting company results, it's an almost universal convention that the emphasis is on what's happened to company earnings and related figures such as declared dividends. My guess is that that's because those are the
new information in the results - that "
In the year there were £1,305 million of shareholder dividend payments" figure has been completely determinable ever since October 1st by anyone prepared to track how many shares the company had in issue on the relevant ex-dividend dates (and almost completely determinable for some weeks before that - "almost" only because the directors could in principle have declared an extra, surprise interim dividend).
Arborbridge wrote:Somewhat peversely, perhaps, I am more interested in what I booked as income in the calendar year. Company years are interesting to others for comparison, but income falling in a given year is more relevant to setting my pension withdrawals.
Well, I don't think it's at all perverse of you to be interested in the figure that affects your practical arrangements for the dividend payments. But you shouldn't be at all surprised that that sometimes results in reported figures that differ markedly from the figures you personally are interested in (nor should anyone else, by the way, whatever their preferred practical arrangements - the facts that January-to-December and April-to-March accounting years are both very common for HYP companies, July-to-June and October-to-September accounting years less popular but by no means unknown, and that there's even a scattering of others are enough to ensure that).
Essentially,
everyone has some personal 'perversities' of this type, and
everyone needs to translate reported results into their own preferred form from time to time...
Gengulphus
