Decisive Dividend's (CVE:DE) Shareholders Will Receive A Bigger Dividend Than Last Year

Decisive Dividend Corporation (CVE:DE) has announced that it will be increasing its dividend from last year's comparable payment on the 15th of August to CA$0.04. This makes the dividend yield 6.3%, which is above the industry average.

While the dividend yield is important for income investors, it is also important to consider any large share price moves, as this will generally outweigh any gains from distributions. Investors will be pleased to see that Decisive Dividend's stock price has increased by 31% in the last 3 months, which is good for shareholders and can also explain a decrease in the dividend yield.

See our latest analysis for Decisive Dividend

Decisive Dividend Doesn't Earn Enough To Cover Its Payments

Impressive dividend yields are good, but this doesn't matter much if the payments can't be sustained. Prior to this announcement, Decisive Dividend's dividend was making up a very large proportion of earnings and perhaps more concerning was that it was 140% of cash flows. Paying out such a high proportion of cash flows can expose the business to needing to cut the dividend if the business runs into some challenges.

Earnings per share is forecast to rise by 25.5% over the next year. Assuming the dividend continues along recent trends, we think the payout ratio could reach 99%, which probably can't continue without putting some pressure on the balance sheet.

Decisive Dividend's Dividend Has Lacked Consistency

It's comforting to see that Decisive Dividend has been paying a dividend for a number of years now, however it has been cut at least once in that time. This makes us cautious about the consistency of the dividend over a full economic cycle. The dividend has gone from an annual total of CA$0.24 in 2015 to the most recent total annual payment of CA$0.48. This means that it has been growing its distributions at 9.1% per annum over that time. It's good to see the dividend growing at a decent rate, but the dividend has been cut at least once in the past. Decisive Dividend might have put its house in order since then, but we remain cautious.

Dividend Growth Could Be Constrained

With a relatively unstable dividend, it's even more important to see if earnings per share is growing. We are encouraged to see that Decisive Dividend has grown earnings per share at 14% per year over the past five years. The payout ratio is very much on the higher end, which could mean that the growth rate will slow down in the future, and that could flow through to the dividend as well.

We should note that Decisive Dividend has issued stock equal to 39% of shares outstanding. Regularly doing this can be detrimental - it's hard to grow dividends per share when new shares are regularly being created.

The Dividend Could Prove To Be Unreliable

Overall, this is probably not a great income stock, even though the dividend is being raised at the moment. In general, the distributions are a little bit higher than we would like, but we can't ignore the fact the quickly growing earnings gives this stock great potential in the future. We would be a touch cautious of relying on this stock primarily for the dividend income.

Market movements attest to how highly valued a consistent dividend policy is compared to one which is more unpredictable. Meanwhile, despite the importance of dividend payments, they are not the only factors our readers should know when assessing a company. Taking the debate a bit further, we've identified 3 warning signs for Decisive Dividend that investors need to be conscious of moving forward. If you are a dividend investor, you might also want to look at our curated list of high yield dividend stocks.

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