General description of Walt Disney Company stocks.

The company trades its shares on New-York Stock Exchange and Pacific SE with the ticker DIS. It's CUSIP Number is 254687106.

The Walt Disney Company issues only common stocks and doesn't issue any preferred stocks. The total announced number of company's shares[8] is 1.8 bln and the market capitalization is 87.6 bln dollars (as for 21.12.2012)

Table 7 Walt Disney Stocks

Beside this, company did issue tracking stock for its subsidiaries, for instance, entertainment web portal Go.com.

Since Walt Disney Company is rather large, stable and profitable firm with a strong reputation, the stocks, issued by Disney, belong to the type of "Blue Chips" stocks. The shares of Walt Disney are part of the US blue chips popular index Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Dividends history.

The company started to pay dividends on an annual basis in 1999.

Recent dividend history can be seen in a table below or on a ‘Dividends’ worksheet of Valuing_Stocks.xlsx.

Table 8 Dividend History

The dividend history shows that company has been gradually increased the amount of annual dividends payment since 2004. That year there was the increase from $0,2071 per share in 1999-2003 to $0,23669. After that dividends grew constantly with the exception of the economic crisis period 2007-2009, when the annual payment remained $0,35. After the crisis the dividends started to grow again. In 2010 there was the modest growth to $0,40 per share. But in 2011 the growth was substantial (50%) and the shareholders got $0,60 per share.

The average dividend growth rate for the period 2004 – 2011, when the company has been raising the annual payment, is about 15%. Approximately the same growth rate (15,75%) is for the recent 5-year period 2007-2011. This is because the temporary cessation of growth in 2008-2009 years, caused by the crisis, was compensated by the subsequent impressive change last year. Thereby, we may conclude, that Disney reaffirmed its reputation of the reliable dividends payer.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 866