Moscow exchange withheld dividends – Finance – Kommersant

The Supervisory Board of the Moscow Exchange proposed to allocate 11 billion rubles to pay dividends for last year, which amounted to only 30% of the record net profit. Analysts point out that the remaining funds at the disposal of the site can be used to maintain capital adequacy standards, as well as to develop new products. Investors were not too inspired by such prospects – the shares of the site lost more than 6% in price.

The decision of the Supervisory Board of the Moscow Exchange to allocate a little more than 11 billion rubles for dividends. from net profit (4.84 rubles per share) clearly disappointed investors. Share quotes after the announcement of this news on March 10 fell by 2.8%, and according to the results of the main trading session, they lost 6.3% (the MOEX index fell by 0.6%), rolling back to the level of 117 rubles. As a result, they turned out to be the outsider of Friday’s trading among the shares included in the MOEX index. At the same time, the volume of trading in these securities exceeded 4 billion rubles, the second result of the day after Sberbank. And the main turnover on the shares of the stock exchange fell on the period after the decision of the supervisory board.

In 2022, the Moscow Exchange earned a record net profit of 36.3 billion rubles, and it was possible to count on payments at least at the lower limit of the dividend policy, complains Igor Dodonov, an analyst at FG Finam. “According to the published recommendation of the Supervisory Board, they turned out to be two times less, to which the shares of the Moscow Exchange reacted with a decrease in quotations,” he notes. According to Dmitry Alexandrov, Managing Director of Ivolga Capital Investment Company, “the current values ​​have become a disappointment for the market, especially given the expected dividend yield on other blue chips.”

In fact, it is planned to allocate 30% of IFRS net profit for 2022 to the payment of dividends.

At the same time, the dividend policy of the exchange implies the payment of dividends in the amount of at least 60% of net profit, and for 2017–2020, the trading floor paid dividends based on the calculation of 85–89% of net profit.

In 2022 (based on the results of 2021), the supervisory board of the exchange recommended that shareholders not pay dividends (profit exceeded 28 billion rubles), which they agreed to at the annual meeting. At the same time, the head of the supervisory board of the exchange, Sergei Shvetsov, noted that “the suspension (of dividend payments.— “b”) is an exclusively forced measure associated with a period of turbulence.

Since the exchange publishes reports in a heavily cut form, it is difficult to say what caused such low dividends, analysts say. “Most likely, the exchange has chosen a conservative policy and is not ready to spend resources on paying dividends in the face of uncertainty in the financial sector,” Dmitry Alexandrov believes.

There is no need for large dividend payments, says Anna Avakimyan, chief analyst at RegBlock, but maintaining a minimum dividend yield is strategically important for the required level of investment attractiveness. Investment strategist of Arikapital Management Company Sergey Suverov believes that such a decision is connected with internal capital adequacy standards, due to which the exchange is forced to revise its dividend policy. According to him, “with a dividend yield of 4%, the exchange’s shares can hardly be called a dividend aristocrat, and therefore the focus of investors’ attention may shift from dividends to new products that the exchange will develop, taking into account the sanctions restrictions.”

The Moscow Exchange did not promptly respond to Kommersant’s request.

Ksenia Kulikova