RE:RE:RE:RE:Thinking about 2014 guidance
I have significantly more then 100,000 dollars (multiples) of COS stock and last week had to remind management that they are chairing a 30 billion dollar organization and it not acceptable to not post production numbers in a timely matter because the IR person is on holidays.
Someone has to hold the finance people accountable for their blunders or otherwise they do the same things again and again.Sometimes i wonder how finance people balance their personnel accounts, they are not all that smart.
COS does not get credit for our low tax rate or our goverment is simply being responsible.
COS pays out yearly dividends of almost 700 million and all their logic around a strong balance sheet and no requirement to hedge, goes out the window when they have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank that they are paying interest on for no good reason. With a company paying almost 700 million in dividends a year that give you a fair amount of balance sheet flexibility and if you run into a cost over run of say 170 million dollars you simply skip on quater divident, that represents using the strength of your business engine that generates significant cash. What COS management has done to the share holders is burden them with unnecassary debt, for money sitting in the bank that we are paying interest on. A seven percent return to share holders is negated by paying six percent on debt. It like issueing a lot more shares and paying a dividend on them, i guess we need to support the bond market and the banks. The entire aruguement around being unhedged and balance sheet strength goes out the window when these type of blunders occur.
We need strong operation people at COS that will explain to us why the performance continues to be dismal and have a plan to fix it, their plan not Exxons, one they will stand behind rather then pointing fingers. The finance people need to stop playing finance games and maybe hedging would allow a proper forcast to be put into place.
They compromised our strong balance sheet by acquiring capitial they did not need and paid it back on year later, these types of activites result in millions of dollars in fees and consultants only to stiff the common share holders of value and dividends they deserve.