Watching Nestlé’s management shoot themselves in the foot by explicitly committing to keep increasing dividends in Swiss francs, while their free cash flow available for such payouts is, at best, not growing. A quote from Nestlé’s CFO on their FY 2023 earnings call: “We are committed to maintaining our practice of increasing the dividend every year in Swiss francs … this will be the company’s 29th consecutive annual dividend increase, in line with our practice of increasing our dividend in Swiss francs.” Dividend payments are already close to 100% of free cash flow (see chart below), so we can pretty much guess what happens next. With high probability, management will try sticking with the policy until they no longer can. The market will force them to admit reality and cut the dividend for the first time in sixty-something years. That will be a big blow to Swiss investors who rely on Nestlé’s “stable” dividend.

Creating interactive charts with @v0 is so much better than Excel / Google Sheets. It’s also much quicker to give instructions in a chat format than keep searching through thousands of Excel chart settings to get what you want. Probably can be a separate product on its own.

@nextofficial is still probably one of the most misunderstood public companies. Back in 2017, when I first invested in the company, my variant perception was that Next was already the biggest online clothing retailer in the UK (ahead of ASOS, Boohoo, etc.), while most people saw it as a declining bricks-and-mortar business. Now in 2024, it’s still the largest online UK clothing retailer, but it’s also transforming into an investment/infrastructure platform, taking majority ownership in companies like @REISS. Roughly 10% of the group’s sales and 8% of the group’s profit already come from this segment. Overall, I can’t recommend Next’s annual and half-year reports highly enough. I learn so much from every report I read. I love their no-nonsense, direct approach.