Bailout

The ever-falling BP share price

By Felix Salmon

With its latest stock-price plunge today, BP has broken three important psychological levels: it’s below book value, it’s trading at less than half of its 52-week high, and it’s worth less than $100 billion. The culprit this time around would seem to be the dividend. The company has been paying out a steady 84 cents per share per quarter, and that payment is now in jeopardy; as recently as last week, it seemed to be safe.

How does the retention of $3.36 in annual dividend payments justify a $4.50 fall in the share price? Well, so long as BP holds on to that money and doesn’t transfer it to shareholders, it can be forced to transfer it elsewhere instead — for instance to workers who were laid off from other oil companies upon the introduction of the moratorium on off-shore drilling. BP’s coffers are not at all a safe place to store shareholders’ cash: they can be raided by all manner of legal and regulatory eventualities.

But there’s another dynamic at work here: BP and Shell between them account for 50% of the dividends paid by UK companies every year. It seems quaint, but there really are a lot of far-from-wealthy people in the UK who live off their dividend income, and those people constitute a surprisingly large part of BP’s shareholder base. If BP suspends its dividend, the only way they can get money from their stock is by selling it.

If BP doesn’t suspend its dividend, it would seem to be approaching screaming-buy levels right now: a $3.36 dividend on a stock worth $30.42 is a dividend yield of 11%. Plus of course there’s the possibility of an exit via takeover. But the fact is that the government can and will trump all of those considerations; it’s certainly not going to allow BP to declare an enormous special dividend, sell most of its remaining assets to Exxon, and then plead bankruptcy when the cleanup bill arrives. If such a thing were possible, BP stock would surely be worth a lot more than it is right now. But, thankfully, it’s not.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on June 09, 2010 (boomark / email).