Saturday, 27 April 2013

Imperial Tobacco profits reassured

Following on from my previous post regarding the uncertainty of Imperial Tobacco's dividend policy due to the reduction of profit in their last financial year it appears there is a logical and perfectly good explanation or this.

They felt during the last financial year that the goodwill in Spain was overstated and as a result wrote it down by £1.3bn as a result this reduced their assets and the profit. So whilst the dividend cover has been hit severely it could be deemed for being a manipulation of the figures - albeit negative.

It will be interesting to see what the half year results give shortly with regard to the profit and whether they stick with the progressive dividend policy and dividend growth.

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