ACC 620 - Final Paper: Introduction/Stockholder’s Equity. Essay.

ACC 620 - Final Paper: Introduction/Stockholder’s Equity. Essay. Introduction/Stockholder’s Equity Pfizer is a multinational pharmaceutical company that specializes in all kinds of medicines and treatments that plagues our species and, possibly, other species as well. Pfizer was founded in 1849 by Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart, each are related to each other as cousins, and they borrowed $2,500 from Pfizer’s father (about $72,000 in 2015 dollars) (Pfizer History: ) (Friedman, M.). I was unable to find a source to compare Pfizer’s equity portion of their balance sheet with the industry average. However, going back three years shows the Pfizer’s total shareholders’ equity has been decreasing from 81,260,000 in 2012 to 76,307,000 in 2013 to 71,301,000 in 2014; 2015 data is not available yet. (Mergent Online - Pfizer, Inc.). Pfizer’s primary competitor is a company called Merck & Co., Inc and had a similar trend of decreasing total stockholders’ equity where it went from 53,020,000 in 2012 to 49,765,000 in 2013 to 48,647,000 in 2014. (Mergent Online – Merck & Co., Inc ). After some digging, it is more than likely that the reason for the decrease in stockholder’s equity is the execution of a stock repurchase plan that both Pfizer (Udland, M.) and Merck (Owusu, T.) announced. Pfizer’s dividend policy is pretty simple from its fifteen year history which is to always give something back to its investors. The earliest dividend in the NASDAQ history file was August 16th, 2000 and then dividend was $0.09/share. That figure climbed to a peak of $0.32/share in February 2009 before crashing to $0.16/share in May 2009. However, the dividend has slowly crept back up since then and was mostly recently reported that Pfizer will distribute a $0.30/share dividend in February 2016 (Pfizer Dividend History).