RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:Dividend Maintained? Except, one big thing, ETC is a sub scale ITS company vs Transcore, Conduent, etc. Some of these at scale players have 10-20X the R&D budget and don't have to finance litigation campaigns and losses for an IP subsidiary.
Any sign of success from ETC will lead to competitive responses.
You can look at the facts of the ITS business. It doesn't produce cash flow. It requires significant upkeep and maintenance and investment to keep its business modern. Inventories need financing and they need cash buffers for cost overruns.
They can make up all of their excuses and use EBITDA measures. But EBITDA hides these issues that show up in the cash flow statements.
Selling WiLan will give them more cash to drain. Then they have to gut the corporate structure to help keep the dividend going. When you see that announcement, it is just to pay for the dividend as cutting it from these levels would make it the pariah of the TSX pariah firms.
I think they will try everything to turn the annual cash flow situation around before cutting the dividend. That includes cutting the corporate structure and issuing dilutive equity to buy a cash flow producing company.