>> Seriously, Vulcan paid out almost as much in dividends as it had come in
from operating cash flow.
What the lam is the reason for that?
>> Now that's an excellent question.
We've been all over Vulcan for cutting back on their investment.
Yet they're paying out almost 128 million in dividends.
Why not cut the dividend and plow some of that into investment?
Well, there's probably a couple reasons.
One is we've talked about earlier in the course,
companies are very reluctant to cut dividends or
cut them dramatically because it's viewed as a very negative signal to shareholders.
So Vulcan is probably trying to do whatever than can to keep their
shareholder confidence and maintain their dividends is one way to do that.
The second reason, and, and
to be fair to Vulcan, maybe the reason that they're cutting back on
their capex is they're over capacity from this Florida rock acquisition.
So they, they bought Florida Rock, they have all this extra capacity, and
then their business slows down.
So, it doesn't make sense to be able to go build new capacity invest in new
equipment or new facilities or new land if you're drastically under capacity already.
So in that case, why not just give money back to the shareholders, and
maybe they can find something to invest in,
where Vulcan doesn't have those opportunities right now?