整理自《終極股息投資攻略》第4章，作者來自美國基金評級公司晨星(Morningstar)。
A Tale of Two Seat Makers (2)This story raises a good question: Are the respective dividends paid by Johnson Controls and Lear an effect of the fate of each business, or were dividends also part of the cause?
I believe the answer is yes to both.> Effect. Johnson Controls clearly did a superior job of allocating capital in a very competitive and arguably dysfunctional industry. It partnered with better customers, made fewer and better acquisitions, and used much less debt while running a much tighter ship overall.
Lear largely failed at this task. Success allowed Johnson Controls to pay significant and growing dividends, while Lear's constrained finances made dividends difficult to pay and, in the end, impossible to sustain.
> Cause. The fact that Johnson Controls was already paying a dividend in the early 1990s meant that, for all practical purposes, it had to go on paying it. Dividends are paid at the discretion of management, and Johnson Controls could have diverted those dividend payments into a more aggressive acquisition strategy, the way Lear did. But had Johnson Controls taken this path and cut or eliminated payments to shareholders, investors almost certainly would have hammered the stock. Management thus had to run the business in such a way that both growth initiatives and regular shareholder dividends could be maintained. The dividend forced intense discipline on the management of Johnson Controls.
Moreover, Johnson Controls had established a practice of raising its dividend every year, with a streak of consecutive annual increases going back to 1975. Not only did Johnson Controls' shareholders require that current dividends would be maintained as virtually sacrosanct, they expected consistent annual growth. This made the discipline imposed on Johnson Controls' management even tighter. The company's spending on new factories and acquisitions had to be funded with the cash flow left over only after dividends were paid, and those investments had to generate ever higher levels of cash flow in future years. (See Figure 4.6.)
Lear didn't pay a dividend during the 1990s and, without a record suggesting that it should, no one ever expected it to. Freed from this financial constraint, Lear was able to spend the cash it generated internally--plus billions more from borrowing--in pretty much whatever way management thought best. Lear built an empire with $18 billion in annual sales, but the profitability of that empire has been dismal.
I strongly suspect that had Lear paid a meaningful dividend during the 1990s, it never would have made some of the acquisitions that subsequently caused so much pain. Not only would shareholders have had more money in their pockets, having collected cash from their investment over those years, but the company itself would have been healthier, wealthier, and possibly wiser.The folks at Johnson Controls and Lear made their choices, and now they'll have to deal with the consequences (fame and fortune for the former, pain for the latter). But investors had a choice all along. They could listen to management's stories, look at earnings, and watch backlog growth and acquisitions; no doubt these two rivals were always trying to top each other. However, even a cursory look at dividend prospects would have steered the outsider to the more profitable stock.
