The legal marijuana industry is still very young, and new companies in growing industries need money to expand. Therefore, they don't have excess capital to pay out as dividends. This doesn't instantly make them bad investments; it just means that as a shareholder you are hoping to make money through capital appreciation (a rising stock price) as opposed to dividend income in the near term.
Lucky for investors who love dividends, there are a few companies in the cannabis industry that pay dividends or that have paid them in the past.
AbbVie Inc. (NYSE: ABBV)
AbbVie Inc., the manufacturer of Marinol (dronabinol), has been paying quarterly dividends consistently since the company was spun off from Abbott Laboratories in 2013. The company remains one of the most popular marijuana pharmaceuticals developers. However, in early January, AbbVie revealed that its drug Imbruvia had failed a key portion of a clinical trial to test its effectiveness against metastatic pancreatic cancer. At the time of this writing, AbbVie's annual dividend yield was 5.4%. The company's most recent dividend is $1.07 per share, which is set to be paid to qualifying investors on May 15, 2019.
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Associated British Foods Plc. (LON: ABF) (OTC: ASBFY)
Although Associated British Foods' main business is the processing and manufacturing of food, their wholly owned subsidiary British Sugar cultivates cannabis for the production of GW Pharmaceuticals’ Epidiolex. The company has been paying semi-annual dividends consistently (as is British custom, versus the U.S. standard of quarterly payments) for at least the last 18 years. At the time of this writing, Associated British Foods' annual dividend yield was 1.67%. The company's most recent dividend was £0.117 per share (~$0.15) and was paid on July 6, 2018.
Aurora Cannabis Inc. (ACB)
Major cannabis producer Aurora Cannabis Inc. completed the open market sale of its Australis Capital unit in November of 2018. While Aurora has not paid a traditional dividend to investors as of this writing, the spin-off of Australis yielded a somewhat similar result. Effectively, the sale of Australis represented a roughly 1% one-time dividend for shareholders.
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