1 Great Dividend You Can Buy Right Now: QUALCOMM, Inc. (QCOM)

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We can see this domination translate easily over to its bottom-line earnings results. In QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM)’s most recent quarter, the mobile device chip maker reported just your typical 29% year-over-year revenue growth to $6.02 billion, a 35% improvement in adjusted EPS to $1.09, and “just” $28.4 billion in cash and cash equivalents!

A heaping mound of shareholder incentives
Being a cash-flow juggernaut means one important thing for shareholders: a growing sense of equity-building activities on the part of Qualcomm’s management team. Just last week, Qualcomm announced that it’d be replacing an existing $4 billion share repurchase program that had around $2.5 billion left with a $5 billion share buyback program with no expiration date. The more shares Qualcomm repurchases, the more profitable it should be on a per-share basis and the more valuable shareholders’ holdings should become.

But, Qualcomm wasn’t done there. On top of the share buyback program, Qualcomm boosted its quarterly dividend by 40% to $0.35! Breaking out the fancy calculator, you’ll see that Qualcomm has raised its dividend by a massive 600% over the past decade, or a whopping 21.5% average boost per year! See for yourself:


Source: Nasdaq.com. *Estimated payout based on $0.35 quarterly payout.

Projecting out the new annual payout, Qualcomm’s yield will rise from a modest 1.5% to a more respectable 2.1%. Remarkably, even paying out $1.40 annually, Qualcomm’s projected payout ratio in 2014 is less than 29% of the company’s projected profits. To me, that signals another opportunity for a dividend boost around this time next year — especially given that it generated $1.85 billion in free cash flow just last quarter!

Foolish roundup
There really isn’t much argument needed as to why QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) is a fantastic company beyond its innovative capabilities and unsurpassed vertical integration. There isn’t a wireless device company that will even be within a stone’s throw of Qualcomm for another five years in my best “guesstimate.” On top of that, Qualcomm is making all the right moves that it took Apple so long to make by rewarding shareholders early and often with share buybacks and big dividend increases. This is definitely one technology dividend you can sock away in your portfolio and forget about for five or more years!

The article 1 Great Dividend You Can Buy Right Now originally appeared on Fool.com.

Fool contributor Sean Williams has no material interest in any companies mentioned in this article. You can follow him on Motley Fool CAPS under the screen name TMFUltraLong, track every pick he makes under the screen name TrackUltraLong, and check him out on Twitter, where he goes by the handle @TMFUltraLong. The Motley Fool recommends Apple and Google. The Motley Fool owns shares of Apple, Google, and Qualcomm.

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