Many ASX 200 shares announced dividend hikes during this February's earning season – much to the delight of income investors to be sure. Those invested in Wesfarmers Ltd (ASX: WES) shares are thankfully counting themselves among this happy group.
Wesfarmers reported its half-year earnings for the six months to 31 December on Thursday 13 February.
As we went through at the time, investors seemed fairly impressed with what the company had to show for itself.
Wesfarmers reported a 0.5% rise in revenues to $22.67 billion. Earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) rose by 1.6% to $2.2 billion, while net profit after tax increased by 3% to $1.43 billion.
That all underpinned Wesfarmers' declaration that its first dividend of 2024 would be worth a fully-franked 91 cents per share.
This interim dividend represents a 3.4% lift over 2023's interim dividend of 88 cents per share.
Together with October's final dividend of $1.03 per share, it takes Wesfarmers' full-year payouts to $1.94 per share. At Wesfarmers' current share price of $65.76 (at the time of writing), this gives the company a dividend yield of 2.95%.
What will the dividends from Wesfarmers shares look like in 2024?
This means that investors who bought Wesfarmers shares a year ago (assuming they bought at the current price, which they wouldn't have), would bag around $295 in franked dividend income for every $10,000 they had invested in Wesfarmers.
But, if you haven't picked this up already, that's not an especially useful metric to use.
Of course, we can't know what Wesfarmers' future dividends will look like until the company tells us itself. But current projections on CommSec have pencilled in a total of $1.95 in dividends per share over 2024.
That implies that these projections assume Wesfarmers will up its 2024 final dividend (due this October) by 1 cents to $1.04 per share.
If that indeed turns out to be the case, it means Wesfarmers shareholders will enjoy an annual total of $1.95 in dividends per share over 2024. And that would lead to a forward dividend yield of 2.97% at current pricing. That would translate into almost $297 in dividend income for every $10,000 invested.
Let's see if this turns out to be on the money when we do hear from Wesfarmers later in the year.
