The Hindu Business Line : PSUs contribute bulk of dividend payout

More liberal
PSUs contributed 42.9% of the total dividend paid.
Led by the banking & petroleum sectors.
Oil firms accounted for 10.5% to the total dividend paid

Anil Sasi

New Delhi, Feb. 8 India Inc may have grown leaps and bounds in shoring up shareholder wealth, but it’s the PSU brigade that is clearly the most liberal when it comes to dividend payouts.

Public sector undertakings contributed 42.9 per cent of the total dividend paid out by the country’s top 500 companies listed out by Dun & Bradstreet in 2007. With just 54 State-owned firms figuring in the list, PSUs effectively accounted for 43 per cent of the total dividend paid by these firms, despite adding up to a mere 11 per cent of the list in number terms.

The top 500 firms paid out a total of 2.6 per cent of their total income as dividends during the year, amounting to Rs 50,290 crore, with PSUs alone shelling out Rs 21,574 crore to their shareholders. The PSU dividend charge was led by the banking and petroleum sectors, with the Government among the big beneficiaries of the payouts by virtue of it being the majority shareholder in these enterprises.

State-owned oil firms accounted for 10.5 per cent to the total dividend paid by the top 500 companies, forking out a cumulative dividend amount of Rs 5,270 crore during the year.

State-owned enterprises also rule the roost in terms of market capitalisation, according to the data. The 54 PSUs featured in the list cornered a high share of over 25 per cent in the cumulative market capitalisation of the 500 firms. Despite growing apprehensions of an economic slowdown, the report interestingly predicts that India Inc’s growth momentum is likely to remain robust, given the massive capital expenditure plans of domestic companies, with 14 key manufacturing sectors reporting a healthy 26.5 per cent increase in capital work-in-progress on a year-on-year basis.