KMI's 1Q15 Earnings Transcript; Another Great App For The Apple Watch -- April 21, 2015

Remember, this is not an investment site. I follow KMI (and many, many others) to help me understand the US oil and gas industry in general, and the Bakken specifically.

The transcript is at Seeking Alpha. It begins:

Our Board today voted to increase the dividend for the first quarter to $0.48 or $1.92 annualized. That’s up 14% from the first quarter of 2014 when we paid a dividend of $0.42 per share. And it’s a 7% increase from the $0.45 we paid for the fourth quarter of 2014.

This is consistent with our announced intention of declaring $2 per share in dividends for ‘15, the full year of 2015, which would be a 15% increase over full-year 2014. And we are on track to do just that. We also continue to project growth in that dividend of 10% per year off of that $2 base out through 2020.

Our DCF per share was $0.58 for the first quarter, which equates to coverage in excess of our dividend of $206 million. Now, any comparison with the first quarter of ‘14 is a little bit apples to oranges, because of course we didn’t roll up KMP, KMR and EPB until the fourth quarter of 2014.

That said, I think the simplest comparison is this. In the first quarter of ‘14, we had 1.036 billion shares outstanding. We had DCF of $0.55 per share. We declared a dividend of $0.42 per share, which resulted in excess coverage of approximately $138 million.

This quarter we had 2.159 billion shares outstanding. We had DCF of $0.58 per share.

We declared a dividend of $0.48 per share, and that resulted in excess coverage of about $206 million. So we more than doubled the number of shares, we increased the dividend by 14% and we still substantially increased our excess coverage. All in an environment of dramatically lower commodity prices.

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Apple Page

Another treat app for the Apple Watch: headline news from Associated Press, ABC News, Bloomberg, Breaking News, CNN, CNBC, CBC News, Circa News, Fresco News, De Telegraaf, South China Morning Post, The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA TODAY, Yahoo News Digest, and more. This comes just a day after other great apps were announced.

This is really quite interesting. On desktops and laptops, apps, as such, are not needed. Apps on the other hand are quite useful but not necessary on the iPhone. But the Apple Watch: someone could argue that the driver of the Apple Watch was the realization that someone could make money off a device whose sole purpose in life was a) to tell time (hardly needed); and, b) to carry apps.  Apps are to the Apple Watch what tunes were to the iPods.

For Apple, another revenue stream. Perhaps small compared to the profits / profit margin selling iPhones and laptops and notebooks, but a revenue stream nonetheless.  A revenue stream, small as it is, might be big enough to make the Fortune 500 if spun off as its own company. I don't know; just idle chatter.