2025 FCF & Dividend List

For this year's lists I have similarly used FCF as the main filter, but added dividend and net cash and excluded certain industries. The above shows the list for Singapore stocks.

Venture (Market cap c.SGD3.6bn) is the stand out here, with 35% of its market cap in cash and generating a whopping 12.7% free cashflow yield. This stock used to be a darling with share price hitting >$25 a couple of times since its IPO (today's share price is $12.5). It competes in a very good niche today, making hardware for the leading players in life sciences and networking equipment, the growth segments of today. The firm have successfully transitioned from making PC and printers eons ago with its decades of know-how.

However, such hardware manufacturing business is inherently cyclical and share price had gone through many boom and bust cycles. Today, it is trading near trough valuations but without studying closer, it is hard to say when things would recover. It is also worth noting that the founder still runs the company and Venture's success over the last 40 years is largely attributable to him. Should he retire, it is unclear if the company can continue to grow and compound as it had.

This second list churns out the US names of which Acuity (AYI, Mkt Cap USD8.7bn) and Dolby(DLB, Mkt Cap USD7.8bn) are the largest. Acuity makes lighting and Dolby makes sound systems. In this substack, we have covered IMAX, which is in the same space as Dolby - cinemas. Both names look interesting but again, without doing the work, it is hard to say if they are good buys are not. The other issue with US stocks for us is also withholding taxes. Dividends get taxed at 20% and so it makes more sense to buy US stocks with little dividend if we really want to optimize returns. Alas, almost all the stocks on this lists all have very high dividends (after it’s a dividend list). Dolby has a whopping 9% dividend! Maybe it’s ok to give a bit back to the US government, so they can stop bitching about spending too much in Ukraine.

Given the craze on Japan in 2024 and hopefully we see more buzz in 2025, this last list is on Japanese names. For those of us who don't look closely at the land of the rising sun, Japan has been undergoing a stealth transformation for many years after the burst of its bubble, banking crisis and corporate governance overhaul. The stock market finally exceeded its high in 1989 and a huge wave of shareholder activism is under way. We might see Nikkei successfully breaking through at hit 45,000, if not 50,000.

For the the full post please visit:

https://8percentpa.substack.com/p/2025-fcf-and-dividend-list