Although its reputation has taken a battering in recent years, Appen Ltd (ASX: APX) is still one of the most prominent ASX tech shares on the share market. This annotated dataset company made itself into an investing household name a few years ago when it delivered back-to-back double-digit (sometimes triple-digit) share price rises over 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.
But the wheels have arguably fallen off the Appen share price ever since. 2020 was the last time Appen had a record high share price. Back then, this ASX tech share hit a high of more than $40 a share. But that was in August 2020, and it has been downhill for Appen ever since.
Today, the company's shares are trading at $6.54 each at the time of writing. That's on par with the pricing we saw back in early 2018.
A series of earnings downgrades, a lack of earnings certainty, and compression of Appen's price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio have all arguably contributed to Appen's recent woes.
Is Appen an ASX dividend share?
But even though Appen's status as a top ASX growth share has taken a battering, its dividend history is an entirely different tale. Unlike many ASX tech shares, Appen does pay a dividend. And what's more, the company has been able to keep its shareholder payouts growing fairly consistently, despite the difficulty it has had with its share price.
Appen has been an ASX dividend share for years. In 2015, the company doled out dividends worth just 1.2 cents per share. But a series of consecutive annual increases saw the company end 2021 having paid out 10 cents per share – an almost ten-fold increase in six years.
2021 saw an interim dividend of 4.5 cents per share, as well as a final dividend of 5.5 cents. Both payments were partially franked at 50%. But Appen has also paid out one dividend in 2022 so far. That was the company's final payment, which came in at 5.5 cents per share. It was paid out on 18 March.
At the current Appen share price, that gives this ASX 200 tech share a dividend yield of 1.53%.
