General Motors (GM) has authorized a new $6 billion share buyback program and raised its quarterly dividend by 33%, citing the growth of its electric vehicle business.

Yahoo Finance’s Alexandra Canal and Brad Smith break down the company’s valuation and the growth of corporate buybacks this year.

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This post was written by Melanie Riehl

Video Transcript

Uh simpler trick or simple GM General Motors authorizing a new $6 billion share buyback program and raising its quarterly dividend by 33%.

The automaker saying in a statement it’s quote growing and improving the profitability of its EV business allowing it to return cash to shareholders.

Now, for anyone that can remember back to last year, there have been a few different uh accelerated share repurchases.

Uh November 2023.

Even the company noting this in 2023 they had announced that $10 billion accelerated share repurchase continuing to have approximately $1.4 billion in remaining capacity under that prior share repurchase authorization as well.

Uh And they have also been purchasing throughout Q one of 2024 as well.

About uh $300 million worth of shares purchases then and expecting to exhaust the remaining 1.1 billion before the end of the second quarter.

And look the share repurchasing narrative, the dividend story.

It’s one that we’ve seen from these big companies since the start of the year and this is a fun stat.

42 other S and P 500 companies have announced buybacks this quarter.

So continuing to return that value to shareholders Bank of America also came out with a note saying that they expect continued pick up and that corporate client buybacks just last week were the second largest in its tracking history since 2010 with 70% of year to day S and P 500 buybacks being in the tech and communication services sector.

So this is something that we’re consistently seeing and for GM in particular, comes on the heels of the growth of that EV business, which we know came a little bumpy at the beginning for them, but they’re, they’re committed to this market.

It’s gonna be a big update.

July 23rd, 2024 is when they release their next quarter earnings results.

We got a little bit of time until that.