Kinder Morgan Reduces Dividend - Quick Facts

(RTTNews) - Kinder Morgan, Inc. (KMI) announced that its board approved a quarterly cash dividend of $0.125 ($0.50 annualized) payable on Feb. 15, 2016, to shareholders of record as of the close of business on Feb. 1, 2016. This is down from $0.51 per share ($2.04 annualized) for the third quarter of 2015. KMI expects to declare dividends of $0.50 per share for 2016 and use cash in excess of dividend payments to fully fund growth investments.

"We expect the reduced dividend has completely eliminated our need to access the capital markets to fund growth projects in 2016. This insulates us from challenging capital markets and significantly enhances our credit profile. Moreover, by reducing the dividend and high-grading our backlog, we do not expect to need to access the capital markets to fund our growth projects for the foreseeable future beyond 2016," said Richard Kinder, executive chairman.

KMI reported fourth-quarter distributable cash flow before certain items available to common shareholders of $1.233 billion versus $1.278 billion for the comparable period in 2014. Distributable cash flow per common share before certain items was $0.55 for the fourth quarter compared to $0.60 for the fourth quarter last year.

For 2016, KMI expects to generate approximately $4.9 billion of distributable cash flow available to equity holders and approximately $4.7 billion of distributable cash flow available to common shareholders and generate approximately $3.6 billion of cash flow in excess of its dividend. KMI's revised growth capital budget for 2016 is approximately $3.3 billion which is a reduction of approximately $900 million from the preliminary 2016 guidance.

"We have reduced our expected 2016 spend by approximately $900 million, reduced our backlog by $3.1 billion from the third quarter of 2015 and expect further reductions in the coming months as we continue to high-grade our capital investments," President and CEO Steve Kean said.