Not only oil companies: cereal, food and automotive companies also sent dividends abroad after the exit of the stocks

The demand for foreign currency from companies to send profits abroad has become more intense in recent months, to the extent that they began to present balance sheets with profits and decided, in many cases, to resume sending dollars to countries of origin. It is an alternative that was prohibited by exchange controls since 2019.

Many companies, to get around this prohibition, decided reinvest profits in the country to avoid a loss of capital, since the other variant was to transfer dollars through the quote cash with settlement in times of stocks and exchange gap. This meant absorbing a loss due to that price difference.

The dismantling of the dividend stocks was announced in April of last year and It began to be operational this yearalthough data from the Central Bank’s exchange market show that the first dividend payments began to take place since December.

According to the Central Bank’s detailed database, there are companies from 16 different productive sectors that managed to transfer dividends abroad. Between December and April, the latest information available, there are about US$ 1,543 million.

Most of it is concentrated in two winning sectors of the new economic framework of recent years: hydrocarbons and mining. The multinationals of energy sector turned over US$ 580 million in recent months. The main three “multis” that operate in Vaca Muerta are Shell, TotalEnergies and Chevron. The mining did it in almost US$280 million. They make up 55% of the total.

But there are also other areas with companies that sent profits to their parent companies. The nutritional they did it in US$161 millionlas cerealeras in almost US$145 million, Transport in about US$105 million y Chemicals (which includes plastic and rubber) by others US$94 million.

With smaller amounts, others also appear, such as Machinery and equipment, non-metallic minerals (includes cement and ceramics), Paper (along with editions and printings), gas (generation, transportation and distribution), automotive industry, construction, commerce, electricity (also generation, transportation and distribution) and even tourism and hospitality.

A sector that has not yet appeared is the banksfor a particular reason and that is that they agreed with the Central on a scheme for this. At the end of March, the Superintendence of Financial Entities regulated a system so that foreign capital banks can send last year’s profits to their parent companies. since May in three paymentsfor a 60% of your profits.

The Association of Banks of Argentina (ABA), which brings together international financial entities, assured that they ended 2025 with a positive result on their balance sheets, equivalent to 8.5% of their assets.

The BCRA assured in previous reports that not all of these dividends sent abroad are purchased in the official market (which would imply a demand that could put pressure on the price), but rather they come through another channel.

Until March, the companies in question acquired just over US$600 million in the single exchange market, but another good part (US$265 million) came from foreign exchange obtained by collecting the Bopreal bond.

It is the public security in dollars that the BCRA issued during the first months of Javier Milei’s mandate to decompress the debt of importers with their foreign suppliers. In recent days the Central canceled one of the Bopreales that it had issued.

Historically, according to the series prepared by the BCRA, in the four years of Alberto Fernández’s mandate, the transfer of profits through official channels was US$770 million. During the first two libertarian years, operations of this type were carried out by US$ 245 million and US$ 383 millionrespectively.

The years with the highest transfers of profits to parent companies were 2010 and 2011, before the imposition of the stocks during Cristina Kirchner’s second government. They were more than US$ 4 billion every year. In Mauricio Macri’s mandate, 2016 was the highest point of dividend turnover (US$3.1 billion) that declined until US$852 million in 2019.