Walter Watson

A journalist for the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, Sergei Mingazov, was detained on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military, his lawyer said Friday.

A Russian missile attack pounded power facilities in the centre and west of Ukraine on Saturday, mounting pressure on the ailing energy system as the country faces a shortage of air defences despite a breakthrough in U.S. military aid.

Warren Buffett is a fan of buying dividend-paying stocks, but his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway doesn't offer a payout itself, despite its tens of billions cash. A regular dividend is a way to reward shareholders by distributing a portion of a company's earnings, often quarterly, in the form of cash. Sometimes companies even offer a small discount for reinvested dividends. But the main reason Berkshire doesn't pay a dividend is that the Oracle of Omaha has been confident in his ability to deploy capital in more profitable ways. Even if Buffett thought he couldn't use the cash pile effectively, he would choose a buyback program to return capital to shareholders, instead of dividends. “Dividends have the implied promise that you keep paying them forever and not decrease them,” whereas repurchasing Berkshire's own stock is often even more beneficial for shareholders, Buffett said in a 2018 interview with CNBC. Of the two, “we would probably lean toward repurchase,” he said. The 93-year-old investor also ruled out the possibility of a special, one-time dividend payout. The top holdings in Berkshire's equity portfolio are almost all dividend payers. Apple , which accounts for more than 40% of the portfolio, pays a 0.6% dividend yield. Berkshire's second biggest holding, Bank of America , pays a dividend equal to a yield of 2.5%. Longtime holding Coca Cola pays a 3.1% dividend yield. Chevron offers a lofty 3.9.%, while American Express pays 1.2%. Berkshire initiated a buyback program in 2011 and relied on repurchases in recent years during a competitive deal-making environment and an expensive stock market. The conglomerate spent a record $27 billion in buybacks in 2021 as Buffett found few external acquisition opportunities. Even then, the buyback activity has slowed over the past year. ‘Terrible mistake' Buffett recently recalled the only time Berkshire ever paid a dividend: it was in 1967, only two years after Buffett took over the failing textile manufacturer, and was for 10 cents a share. “It was a terrible mistake,” Buffett said during the 2023 annual meeting, followed by a small burst of laughter. “I always tell people that I'd gone for the men's room and the directors voted while I was gone. But that isn't true. I was there, I confess.” In 2014, there was a vote on Berkshire to pay a “meaningful annual dividend.” The small number of Class A shareholders who own the original, expensive Berkshire shares that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars each, voted no by a margin of 89 to 1. But even the hundreds of thousands of Class B, or “Baby Berkshire,” shareholders voted no by 47 to 1. “I think they expect us to do whatever we think makes sense for all shareholders,” Buffett said in 2023. “And obviously, if we really thought we never could use the money effectively in the business, we should get it out, one way or another.”

There's one dividend stock that Morningstar says is “deeply undervalued” right now and which it's bullish on for the long term. That's crop chemical producer FMC , whose shares are down more than 50% over the past 12 months. But Morningstar said in an April 18 note that the fall is due to global “inventory destocking,” which it says has “crippled the results” of the firm. “Yet we're bullish on this undervalued stock for the long term. We expect destocking to end in 2024 and think that the narrow-moat company's strong research and development pipeline will more than offset generic competition,” said Seth Goldstein, equities strategist at Morningstar. Goldstein noted that FMC's products lean toward insecticides, which generate over half of its revenue. But many of its products in the pipeline include herbicides and fungicides, which should result in a more balanced portfolio across the primary types of crop protection chemicals, he said. “We expect demand for FMC's new products will allow the company to continue to safely outearn its cost of capital over at least the next decade,” said Goldstein. According to FactSet, FMC has an indicated annual dividend yield of 4% for 2024. Its five-year average dividend yield was 2.1%. “FMC stock looks deeply undervalued, trading at half of what we think it's worth,” Goldstein added. Morningstar gave the stock a five-star rating. Earlier in April, Morningstar's chief U.S. market strategist Dave Sekera also included FMC in his list of five “dirt-cheap” stocks to buy for the month. “So we saw what happened was in 2021 and 2022, a lot of fears of the supply because of Covid as well some supply chain disruption, led customers to buy and hold excess inventory. And that pulled forward a lot of future sales,” he said of the stock's decline. “Now as those fears subsided, customers used up that excess inventory in 2023, resulting in a sales slowdown last year. And we really saw the stock get hammered because of that.” But now, Morningstar expects that sales “should return to a much more normalized historical pattern,” and also identified it as one of its top picks for next year. Morningstar forecast that FMC's EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) will grow at a low- to mid-single-digit average annual rate over the next 10 years. But Goldstein cautioned that one risk for FMC is its ability to maintain its premium prices as its patents expire, which could affect its revenue growth and profitability.

The latest data from the University of Maryland's Global Land Analysis and Discovery laboratory was shared on Global Forest Watch – a platform run by WRI that provides data, technology and tools for monitoring the world's forests.

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A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange on April 25, 2024.

The European Union announced on Monday that it is tightening visa requirements for people from Ethiopia, accusing the government there of a failure to cooperate in taking back citizens found to be living illegally in the 27-nation bloc.

An editorial montage of the Japan flag and Japanese yen cash bank notes. Javier Ghersi | Moment | Getty Images

Laborers work at a coastal road project construction site in Mumbai on January 12, 2022.