Thread regarding Occidental Petroleum Corp. layoffs

Before the acquisition, Oxy paid a $0.79 quarterly dividend on roughly 750MM shares which came to around $585MM dollars around 6/30/19. If you go back to end of 2013, Oxy paid a $0.64 quarterly dividend on roughly 805MM shares for around $515MM dollars. Oxy currently has around 934MM shares outstanding. With the $0.01 quarterly dividend that is $9.34MM. The Buffet 8% on $10 billion comes to $200MM a quarter.

If Oxy wanted to return to a similar dividend payout while still paying the Buffett tax, I could see Oxy raising the dividend to $0.25 (nice $1 a year) which cost $234MM for the dividend. That combined with the Buffett $200MM would put the quarter expense at around $434MM for the dividend. Still well under the previous dividend, but a significant increase that would be manageable while still focusing on debt reduction.

Finally, if you want to ignore the Buffett tax and return roughly $550MM a quarter via a dividend (midway between the reference year and last dividend before acquisition inflated the number of outstanding shares) then they would raise it to roughly $0.59 a share.

Just my thoughts. Not an expert by any means.

Oxy was included in a Fidelity ETF for dividends. Bank of America rates it a buy. I bet the recent stock price increase is the smell of dividends in the oven.

@ocp Nailed it.

You cannot compare the two companies. Chevron is a real oil company.