The car manufacturer Mercedes Benz wants to acquire further own shares on the market for up to 3 billion euros. The program is scheduled to start immediately after the completion of the share buybacks announced in February 2023 and are still ongoing and be completed by July 7, 2025, the company announced on Wednesday evening. The papers should then be collected. In addition, a share buyback policy has been decided.
Based on this, the future free cash flow from the industrial business (after possible smaller takeovers), which exceeds the dividend payout ratio of approximately 40 percent of net profit, will be used to finance share buybacks. The papers should then be confiscated. Details on the background should be available this Thursday. The DAX group will then present its business figures for 2023 and the outlook for the new year.
If both share buybacks are exhausted, Mercedes-Benz would own more than 100 million shares at the current price, almost 10 percent of the share capital. This is also the upper limit that the board had approved at the 2020 general meeting.
Analyst Daniel Röska from Bernstein Research wrote in a recent study of US and European car manufacturers that many of them were sitting on plenty of cash. Therefore, they should increase dividends and conduct larger share buybacks.
Meanwhile, the car manufacturer’s supervisory board extended the contracts of sales director Britta Seeger (54) and legal director Renata Jungo Brüngger (62), which expire at the end of the year. Seeger has been ordered until the end of 2029, the company announced on Wednesday. She has been on the board of Mercedes-Benz (formerly.) since January 2017 Daimler). Jungo Brüngger’s contract has been extended until the end of 2025. She has been on the board since 2016.
The group follows the guideline that the order period should not exceed one year from the age of 60, it said. “We are very much looking forward to continuing to work with the experienced managers. They have been doing excellent work for Mercedes-Benz for years,” said Supervisory Board Chairman Bernd Pischetsrieder (76).