Emerald Oil offers 5% interim cash dividend

The board of directors of Emerald Oil Industries has offered a 5 per cent interim cash dividend to its shareholders for the first nine months of the current fiscal ending in March 2023.

This oil producer’s board took the decision after reviewing its unaudited financial reports for the first three quarters ended on March 31 this year, as per a DSE filing.

The company set the record date at June 26 to determine investors’ eligibility for the interim dividend.

The company just a week ago, announced a 2 per cent cash dividend to its shareholders for the year ending in June 2022. Meanwhile, the company also released its financial reports for the first three quarters of the fiscal year 2022–23 yesterday.

The company reported earnings per share (EPS) of Tk 0.22 for the July-March period of FY23 against earnings per share of Tk 0.16 negative for the same period last fiscal.

The company’s EPS for the current fiscal’s October–December quarter was Tk 0.21, which was Tk 0.11 negative for the same quarter of FY22.

Moreover, its EPS for the January–March quarter of FY23 was Tk 0.19 against Tk 0.14 negative for the January–March quarter of FY22.

As per its recently published financial data, the producer of the rice-bran oil Spondon, returned to profit in the fiscal year 2021-22. The loss-incurring company was out of production for four years since 2017 due to loan defaults by its previous founders.

Later in 2021, Minori Bangladesh, a subsidiary of Japanese farming company Minori Co Limited, had taken over the inoperative firm by investing more than Tk 40 crore, and the company subsequently returned to production in January 2022. The publicly traded edible oil manufacturer reported a net profit of Tk 1.21 crore in the year ended in June 2022, against a net loss of Tk 3.62 crore in the previous year, according to sources at the company.

The board of directors of the company proposed a 2 per cent cash dividend to its shareholders for the year ending in June 2022.

The listed firm had not given any dividends to its shareholders from 2017 to 2021. The listed company reported earnings per share (EPS) of Tk 0.17 for the FY22, against a loss per share of Tk 0.58 for the previous fiscal.

Its net asset value (NAV) per share stood at Tk 11.36 as on June 2022.

Listed in 2014, the company has a paid-up capital of Tk 59.7 crore, while its authorised capital is Tk 100 crore.