Investors looking outside the FTSE 100 for bright income shares may want to give Renewi (LSE: RWI) some serious attention today.
The FTSE 250 business has fallen out of favour with share pickers more recently, its market value shrinking by a third over the past three months which leaves it languishing around 26-month lows. I reckon this is a serious buying opportunity.
The waste management and recycling giant’s integration plan following the 2017 merger of Shanks Group and The Netherlands’ Van Gansewinkel Groep continues to progress to plan, and the brilliant revenues opportunities afforded by the tie-up are reflected in bubbly broker estimates.
The City is expecting Renewi to follow a predicted 27% earnings rise for the year ending March 2018 with rises of 39% and 19% in fiscal 2019 and 2020 respectively. It is not difficult to see why strong and sustained profits growth is anticipated, given the company’s significant geographic exposure to growing European economies and the environmental legislation on the continent that is driving demand for recycling specialists.
What’s more, these bright profits prospects, allied with the company’s impressive cash generation, feed into expectations of above-average dividends being forked out in the near term and beyond. Underlying free cash flow jumped to £52.7m in the first half of the last fiscal year.
For the last year a 3.1p per share reward is currently being touted, and this is expected to shift to 3.2p in fiscal 2019 and 3.5p in the following year. As a consequence dividend yields stand at a colossal 4.3% and 4.7% for this year and next.
With Renewi also sporting a dirt-cheap forward P/E ratio of 11.3 times I reckon it’s a great buy right now.
Yields rise above 6%
Hastings Group (LSE: HSTG) is another top FTSE 250 income share with a strong record of dividend growth that can be picked up for next to nothing today.
With analysts expecting an 11% earnings rise in 2018 the car insurance colossus changes hands on a forward P/E multiple of just 11.3 times. A further 11% profits improvement is forecast for next year.
These perky profits predictions fuel expectations of strong dividend growth as well. For this year a 14.7p per share reward is forecast, up from 12.6p last year and yielding an impressive 5.2%. And for 2019 an 18.9p dividend is being anticipated, a figure that nudges the yield to 6.7%.
Hastings’ share price moved lower in March after it warned of “intense” competition, the insurer adding that it has witnessed “slower premium inflation since the end of the third quarter than that experienced in the first half of 2017 following the proposed Ogden rate review.”
Still, the pace at which the business is adding customers (its share of the market swelled to 7.3% in 2017 from 6.5% a year earlier) in an environment of rising premiums means that Hastings remains in great shape to keep delivering brilliant profits growth. As such, I reckon it is well worth buying today, and particularly given its low forward P/E ratio of 11.5 times.