Shareholders in Meta are about to start receiving a dividend for the first time. Most of them probably won’t notice. Investors will receive a piddling 50 cents per share each quarter, starting next month. Given the prevailing share price of the social media monster, this equates to an annual dividend yield of just 0.42 per cent. This sounds tiny. It is tiny. But this particular form of microdosing sent out a big signal, for the company and potentially for the wider market.Meta encapsulates the grinding decline in dividend culture in US equity markets over the past two decades. Few of its shareholders will have missed these disbursements over the past 10 years, during which its publicly traded stocks have delivered gains of almost 700 per cent. Instead, share buybacks have provided the primary way to return capital to shareholders — Meta bought back more than $90bn worth of stock from 2021 to 2023 and intends to buy much more, at a pace that far exceeds the scale of the new dividend payouts.
Meta的股東將首次收到股息。他們中的大多數人也許不會注意到。投資者每股每個季度將收到區區50美分，從下月開始發放。考慮到這頭社交媒體怪獸當前的股價，這相當于全年股息率僅為0.42%。聽起來很少。也確實很少。但對這家公司來說，這種微量派息發出了一個很大的信號——對更廣泛的市場來說，此舉也可能預示著什么。