NEW YORK — Companies stopped paying dividends and stockpiled cash during the Great Recession, and shareholders didn’t complain. Now they want a reward for their patience.
American companies are holding $1.9 trillion in cash, a record. The large businesses that make up the Standard & Poor’s 5
00 index, all of which answer to public shareholders, have $940 billion on hand — $300 billion of it accumulated since late 2008, said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P.
Shareholders want the companies to start putting that cash to use. The most pressure is coming from activist investors.
“We’ve been in bunker mentality for too long,” said Eric Jackson, who runs the hedge fund Ironfire Capital. He predicts that activist shareholders are about to become “a lot noisier.”
The loudest investors are finally being heard. Companies are letting go of some cash:
•Since the start of this year, 116 companies in the S&P 500 have raised their dividend, up from 78 a year ago. Overall, S&P 500 companies have paid out $16.6 billion more this year in dividends than last year.
Companies are buying back more of their own stock. Kohl’s, Conoco and Intel all recently announced buyback plans recently. Stock buybacks by S&P 500 companies increased to a record $86.4 billion in the final quarter of 2010, the latest data available. That was 81 percent more than the same period the year before. Investors like buybacks because they tend to push up a stock’s price since earnings are divided among fewer shares.
Companies are doing bigger deals than they did a year ago. Global mergers and acquisitions were valued at $755 billion for the first three months of the year, 24 percent more than the same period last year, according to financial data-tracker Dealogic. The number of deals declined slightly, to 9,568 this year from 9,825 in early 2010.
Large investors want higher dividends because it means more cash in their pockets to make other investments. Individual investors, especially retirees who depend on dividends for a big part of their income, want more cash to live on.
With acquisitions, investors hope the deals will eventually lead to higher corporate profits.
Investors also don’t want companies to let cash sit in the bank since interest rates are nearly zero, which means the money isn’t earning much.
“The best use of cash is to deploy it,” said Bill Miller, chairman and chief investment officer of mutual fund giant Legg Mason Capital Management. “If companies could maintain profitability and generate cash two years ago … then they don’t need that kind of cash on their books today.”
What has happened over the past few months at Family Dollar illustrates the tension between companies and investors.
Hedge fund Trian Fund Management disclosed last July that it had bought a 6.6 percent stake in Family Dollar. Trian is run by activist investor Nelson Peltz, who is known for making big investments and then forcing change at companies.
When the investment was announced, Trian said it would work with Family Dollar to boost sales and open new stores. At the time, the dollar-store chain’s cash balance ran about $503 million, a record high.
By September, Family Dollar had announced plans to spend $750 million, including some cash and some new debt, to buy back its stock. In January, Family Dollar increased its quarterly dividend by 2.5 cents, to 18 cents a share.
Family Dollar says it worked with Trian to boost shareholder value. But Trian still wasn’t satisfied. It made a $7 billion, all-cash, hostile bid for control of Family Dollar on Feb. 15 and announced it had raised its stake in Family Dollar to 7.9 percent, making it the largest shareholder.
Family Dollar rejected the bid in early March, saying it undervalued the business, and adopted a defense strategy to discourage unsolicited offers. Fights like this are likely to be more common this year if companies don’t accelerate their use of cash.
“Activists are interested in getting an outcome, but most do not need to storm the castle to get it,” said David Rosewater of the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel.
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