Rosneft shares surge on extra dividend payout plans
Shares in Russia’s largest state-run oil company Rosneft switched to growth in MICEX-RTS trading on Wednesday, after opening lower than yesterday’s close, on news the company plans to pay extra 2011 dividends, RIA Novosti reports.
The company will pay additional dividends for 2011 and keep paying 25 percent of profits as dividends thereafter, Rosneft President Igor Sechin said on Wednesday at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting.
“We support this suggestion and if for 2011 we planned to pay 3.45 rubles per share, this...allows us to pay a dividend of 7.53 rubles a share, or 25 percent of profit and more than twice what was previously planned. And we’ll keep that level permanently,” RIA quoted Sechin as saying.
The company’s stock traded at an intra-day low of 199.4 rubles on Tuesday’s close or 0.7 percent down and surged 0.6 percent to 201.87 rubles as of 12:18 Moscow time (08:18 GMT) on the dividend news, compared with the MICEX index 0.5 percent falling to 1,383.15 points.
President Vladimir Putin called on the company last week to consider substantially increasing its dividend payouts to raise its attractiveness for investors.
Rosneft needs a higher market value than the price set at the company’s initial public offering in 2006 to offer for sale the government held stakes in the company, Sechin said.
“The question is how much: if you want to sell expensively, you need to work on it, while we have no desire to sell cheaply,” Sechin said.
“As you remember, we sold 15 percent for $10.6 billion and now the terms must be better and the approach must be comprehensive,” Sechin said when asked about selling state shares in the oil giant.
During the company’s popularIPO in 2006, Rosneft shares were sold for 203.24 rubles or $7.75 per share. At Tuesday’s close, Rosneft shares cost about 201 rubles per share or about $6.26 per share at the official exchange rate set by the Central Bank of Russia for Tuesday.
