Thread regarding Intel Corp. layoffs

Retail owns nothing compared to big di-k funds. These huge institutional investors are the ones with deep pockets and are the reason why mgmt. has to perform these "investor day", "investor summit", whatever one wants to call them. These are long term investors, hedge funds, pension funds etc. They look at the peformance of the stock on a wider time scale and take appropriate positions based off their profit targets. Given their deep pockets and long timeframes, quarterly dividend is a way of appeasing these investors. If they cut dividend with the markets overall being week and stock price being cut in half from beginning of year, what are these investors going to do? hold on to the stock? They will gladly dump the stock, cut their losses if no dividend is paid. Look at the dividend no's for the last decade or more, it has been on a steep incline. Quarterly dividend measured in pennies does not seem much, add it over a decade and multiply that with the free standing float we have, we are talking about billions. Cutting dividend would be more than shooting themselves in the foot

Because your only job is to make shareholders happy. That's it. Not customers. Shareholders. Once you understand this, you understand that being retained is a curse and being cut is a blessing.

Because on of the only reasons to hold Intel stock right now is that they are paying 3-5% in dividends.

That stops you will see a mass sell-off and the stock tank twice as much as it already has.

Because that would tank the stock. This has nothing to do with Pat getting fired by shareholders, but rather with some hedge fund or private equity being able to afford to move in to take over the company on the cheap and make money by performing some financial surgery on it. One metric that rarely gets talked about is that Intel is trading at basically book value making it an attractive target for such attempts. Keeping the dividend high helps to support the stock price, making such attempts harder.