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Comment by space_fountain | Hacker News Reader

I think there have been times in the past were dividends were thought to be conditioned on the company performing well. Say not having to lay off people. I recognize there are other ways to think about the situation, but I think it definitely isn't clear to me that there should be any dividend while a company is losing money and literally being forced to fire people

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They aren't losing money. Wherever did you get that idea?

Also issuing a dividend because you saved a bunch of money by laying off people you don't need is exactly the sort of thing that shareholders would demand and expect. It's called good corporate governance.

https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+profit&rlz=1C5GCEM_enU...

Seems to say they lost 2.7B in the first quarter of 2023?

Yeah I dunno what they're talking about. This was the largest loss of all time for Intel. Nobody in their right mind should be issuing a dividend... and I'm a shareholder.

There are a lot of things that go into GAAP EPS. You can be profitable and have negative GAAP EPS.

Can you list some real world examples where the difference was in the multiple of billions?

Writing down a merger/acquisition is probably the main scenario where this could extend to the billions.

I don't have an exact list but I think you'll see differences of that order in the years following big acquisitions like AMD / Xilinx for this sector.

A very recent example - but the other way around - is Credit Suisse which is going a paper accounting profit of $14bn in Q1, while also having basically gone bankrupt. In addition UBS is also going to post a $53bn paper profit in Q2, without actually having “earned” any surplus money from acquiring Credit Suisse…

Matt Levine goes into the gory detail: https://archive.is/0T1CG

Apple barely pays dividends. Shareholders seem very content in not getting them.

> From 2012 through the end of 2022, Apple spent over $572 billion on share repurchases [1].

They’re comfortable because they get most of the returns by selling their shares back to Apple.

1 - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/05/03/apple-q2-2023-earnings-p...

Intel announced losses of 2.8B in 1Q 2023, and warned analysts that they would lose money again in 2Q. So I presume that GP got the idea that Intel was losing money from the accountants that Intel pays to tell them what the company financial situation is, who would seem the best placed to know whether the company is losing money.

Now, the 2.8B included a lot of one-time charges that made the loss larger than normal on a continuing basis- on a continuing basis the losses were more like 200M, which is about what the company guidance was for 2Q. But losing 200 million dollars is still losing money.

Disclaimer: long INTC

> It's called good corporate governance.

Surprisingly similar to Darwinist capitalism.

Think the term your looking for is "shareholder capitalism". We definitely need to go back to "welfare capitalism" as what we're doing now is simply a race to the bottom.

That take is questionable and is a byproduct of failed corporate strategies that place 0 value on people and experience. It's precisely why there needs to be a resurgence of unions to cull some of the nonsense that was birthed in 80s corporate greed and survives until today.

I think you're right, but I'd say it's from a bygone era in which there was a stronger expectation of loyalty between employers and employees. (Maybe post-WW2 U.S.? Not my area of expertise.)

> I think there have been times in the past were dividends were thought to be conditioned on the company performing well. Say not having to lay off people. I recognize there are other ways to think about the situation, but I think it

Companies can do well and lay off people at the same time. In such case, they just believe they'll do even better without those people.

Firing people is "literally" how you avoid losing money.

If they issued the dividend after they fired people and became profitable again that would be one thing. That isn't what happened here right? Or did I misunderstand something?

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