Dividend Help (White Giant)

About a year ago, I performed IPOs on three state corporations. Before then, I was receiving $0 in dividend income. After the IPOs my dividend income at one point hit $14B, with my percent holdings being somewhere around 85%. That was a significant source of income for me, but since those percentage owned numbers drop - which I have bumped back up to 85% by the way - my dividend income now totals about $300M a month, even with upwards of 70% holdings. Can anyone tell me what's going on here, before I IPO more companies?

Your corps will pay out dividends of $4 billion periodically, I don't know the formula for it, some of my corps paid dividends 6 times in one year, others only once. But each time a corp pays dividends the 4 billion is divided by the number of shares on the market. So if a corp has 4 billion shares, and you own 3.4 billion (85%)you should get $3.4 billion. I haven't figured out how the game decides when to issue a dividend, if I could figure that out it would be easy to make some megabucks on the stock market.

I would advise to set the dividend to 0% for public corporations. When its cash levels get too high they pay a once off dividend, and continue to do this every time the cash gets too high. Because you cant put funds into a public corporation (short of doing another IPO) its a good idea to let them have th highest level of cash in them.

The $14B once off was probably a result of decrease the cash level in the corporation, or from sold shares occurred from a share split.

How do you change the dividend setting for a public corp where you are major shareholder? (We're talking 24% here.)

I'd like to set to zero...

Inside the corp page, it is in the menu labeled "Shares>Profit sharing with shareholders".

This works just like the profit transfer of private corps and will show in the monthly statement under the same heading as a private corp under "Profit Payment Paid".

The lump sum dividend payment works as Angus has said which is also just like private corps. Once the cash in a corp gets to a certain level, it will begin making auto payments to the owner/s. I assume under "Automatic Cash Transfers" though I have never looked for or seen this. I am not sure what that cash level is but seems to me in my experience that it is around 50B cash. Private corps are higher. Nowhere on a corp's main page does a dividend listing appear though.

Interestingly enough to me is whether that lump sum payment goes to the majority shareholder AKA the CEO or country that "owns" the corp or if it does in fact distribute t

OK now I am seeing that the lump sum auto-payments are being listed in the ""Profit Payment Paid" as well. Oh and I forgot to say that you can change the dividend/Profit payment on the 'Profit/Cash/Debt" page along with the private corp. You may as well consider public corp dividend and private corp profit transfer as the same thing under a different name.

Depending of some factor unknown to me, the cash reserves in public corporations seam to vary. The range I have noticed is 50-90B before they start reducing cash. It may be a percentage of yearly revenue as profitability has seam to effect the cash reserves for the same corporation different years. When there was 1200 production plant deficit my public production plant corporation had cash reserve of 200B.

Dividends are laundered between Income from dividend under monthly finance statement, income/cost shares (from share splits or merges), and automatic cash transfers.

Out of curiosity...

If you have a corp that you set the amount to 30%, and it pays out a regular dividend, now if you change that to 0%, it will delay paying the dividend, but eventually, the corp will build up money to the distribution point and distribute the excess money, then it will build it up again and distribute it again, so while you may be keeping a higher amount of cash in the corp, aren't you still paying out the high dividend regardless.

And out of curiosity, why would I want to keep the highest amount of cash in a corp, instead of let it pay it's regular dividends and keep only a moderate amount of cash in it?

You'd want to keep high cash in a corp in case it decides to take out a loan to buy FMU.

While loans are no longer a big deal to countries because of the worth-nothing-interest rates, one tiny loan can completely ruin a corp thanks to teh "support functions." Despite the fact that it now probably costs as much to pay the prepayment penalty on a new loan as it does to pay interest to term now, apparently one loan is enough to send a corp into bankruptcy in a matter of seconds.

Keeping lots of cash in corps makes sense as a buffer against said loans.