‘Shrimp king’ Minh Phu spent VND 300 billion to pay dividends despite record losses

Minh Phu Seafood Corporation (MPC) approved paying cash dividends for 2023 at a rate of 7.5%. Each shareholder will receive 750 VND on January 9 of next year for one share held.

MPC currently has nearly 401 million shares outstanding. Thus, the company will deduct about 300.7 billion VND to pay dividends. The source of money comes from undistributed consolidated after-tax profits, accumulated until the end of 2023 is more than 775.5 billion VND.

Minh Phu pays dividends in accordance with the annual meeting resolution at the end of June. Accordingly, the company offers a payout ratio of 0-10% of par value.

Meanwhile, the “shrimp king” business suffered heavy losses last year. The company’s after-tax profit was negative at more than 105 billion VND due to ineffective operations of commercial shrimp farming companies. This is their record loss since announcing the information in 2004.

This year, Minh Phu plans to continue paying dividends. The rate given is about 50-70% of profit after tax. In the first 9 months of the year, they still lost more than 44 billion VND, mainly due to poor results in the third quarter, while the first half of the year was profitable. Shrimp breeding and commercial shrimp farming activities continue to be a burden for the company.

Minh Phu aims to export 70,000 tons of products this year. Accordingly, they expect to collect 18,569 billion VND and profit after tax is nearly 1,266 billion VND. Currently, the company has only completed about 58% of its revenue target and is still far from its profit plan.

Minh Phu Seafood Group, established in 1992, is the largest shrimp exporter in Vietnam. In the previous period, the company regularly made hundreds of billions of profits, the highest being in 2014 with a profit of more than 921 billion VND.

“King of Shrimp” is also known as a business with a history of paying regular dividends. They offered a payout rate of up to 70% in 2018. However, in subsequent years the payout rate gradually decreased to 15-23%. The lowest dividend rate Minh Phu implements is 4.1% in 2022.