Shareholders in Meta are about to start receiving a dividend for the first time. Most of them probably won’t notice. Investors will receive a piddling 50 cents per share each quarter, starting next month. Given the prevailing share price of the social media monster, this equates to an annual dividend yield of just 0.42 per cent. This sounds tiny. It is tiny. But this particular form of microdosing sent out a big signal, for the company and potentially for the wider market.Meta encapsulates the grinding decline in dividend culture in US equity markets over the past two decades. Few of its shareholders will have missed these disbursements over the past 10 years, during which its publicly traded stocks have delivered gains of almost 700 per cent. Instead, share buybacks have provided the primary way to return capital to shareholders — Meta bought back more than $90bn worth of stock from 2021 to 2023 and intends to buy much more, at a pace that far exceeds the scale of the new dividend payouts.
Meta的股东将首次收到股息。他们中的大多数人也许不会注意到。投资者每股每个季度将收到区区50美分，从下月开始发放。考虑到这头社交媒体怪兽当前的股价，这相当于全年股息率仅为0.42%。听起来很少。也确实很少。但对这家公司来说，这种微量派息发出了一个很大的信号——对更广泛的市场来说，此举也可能预示着什么。