Any investors in QBE Insurance Group Ltd (ASX: QBE) shares may have watched intently as the insurance giant delivered its full-year earnings report last week.
As we covered at the time, QBE reported a statutory net profit after tax of US$750 million, rising strongly from the previous year's loss of US$1.5 billion. That's not quite as high as some investors were expecting, seeing as the QBE share price fell 9% after the report was released. Even so, QBE shares remain up 3.7% over the past month, and up 0.5% in 2022 so far, which is more than you can say for the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO).
But a key part of QBE's earnings report was its dividend announcement. Last week, the company declared a final dividend of 19 cents per share, partially franked at 10%. That was well above the insurance company's interim dividend of 11 cents per share (also franked at 10%) that was paid out in September last year. It brings QBE's total dividends for FY2021 to 30 cents per share. QBE shares will trade ex-dividend for this final payout on 7 March. Investors will get the paycheque on 12 April.
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Are QBE shares back to a dividend heavyweight status?
So how does this dividend stack up against QBE's past payments? Well, it certainly looks good against the company's FY2020 record. In the previous financial year, QBE only managed to fork out an interim dividend of 4 cents per share. It skipped its final payout probably due to the effects of the pandemic.
Perhaps FY2019 is a better year to compare against then. Back in FY2019, QBE was back to two dividend payments. The interim dividend was a 27 cents per share payout, franked at 30%. The final payment was worth 25 cents per share, franked at 60%. So that's a total of 52 cents per share, well above the company's recent payouts.
So QBE's dividends have certainly recovered from the drought of FY2020. But they still have a long way to go to match the company's bumper cash payments of FY2019.
At the current QBE Insurance share price, this ASX 200 company has a market capitalisation of $17.65 billion, with a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 18.18. Plugging in the new final dividend, QBE's dividend yield now stands at 2.5%.
