Where Next for the Banco Santander, S.A. (ADR) (SAN) 10% Dividend?

A company’s cash flow can tell you a lot about a firm’s financial health. Is the company burning up its cash reserves on interest payments and operating expenses, or does it generate spare cash that can fund dividends or be retained for future investment? If a dividend isn’t funded by cash flow, there’s a greater chance the payout will become unaffordable and be cut, which is bad news for shareholders like you and me.

In this series, I’m going to take a look at the cash flow statements of some of the U.K.’s biggest listed companies, to see whether their dividends are being funded in a sustainable way, from genuine spare cash. Today, I’m looking at Spain’s largest bank, Banco Santander, S.A. (ADR) (NYSE:SAN), whose 50 billion-pound market capitalization and 10% dividend yield make it a very unusual investment opportunity.

Does Banco Santander have enough cash?
As private investors, we want to back businesses that are able to pay their dividends out of free cash flow each year. I define free cash flow as the cash that’s left over after capital expenditure, interest payments and tax deductions. With that in mind, let’s look at Santander’s cash flow from the last five years:

*A value of >1 means the dividend was covered by free cash flow.

In the U.K., we have adjusted to receiving low or zero dividends from our troubled banks — Barclays, RBS, and Lloyds. However, more than half of Santander’s profits come from its Latin American operations (mainly Brazil), and it also has substantial operations in the U.K. and U.S. This means the majority of the bank’s profits come from outside the eurozone, which has enabled Santander to manage the rising tide of bad property loans it faces in Spain, and remain profitable.

Risks remain
In its fourth-quarter results for 2012, Santander reported a 59% fall in full-year profits to 2.2 billion euros, after it set aside a further 18 billion euros last year to cover non-performing (bad) loans and losses on properties it owns and needs to sell.

The majority of Santander’s bad debts in Spain relate to loans made to property developers during the boom, not to personal mortgages, and worryingly, the level of bad debt is still rising, several years after the market crashed. In 2012, bad debt levels in Santander’s Spanish loan book rose from 5.49% to 6.74%, although the bank did manage to halve its real estate exposure by selling 33,500 properties from its books, and from those of real estate developers who owe money to the bank.

On a more positive note, Santander’s non-performing loan levels are 4% below the Spanish average, and the bank’s market share in Spain rose by 2.1% last year, with deposits rising by 12%, thanks to Santander’s apparent stability — many of Spain’s regional savings banks have come close to bankruptcy and are only being kept afloat with state assistance.