Dividend Plays

[timhyma]

SLCA- I flipped this one a few times, and put some shares into a long term account at $18.50. I didn't get the dividend announcement I was looking for, but the stock set new 52-week highs after the earnings release.

This is from seeking alpha-

Ben Swanley - Morgan Stanley
I was hoping you could discuss for me a little bit more about what you plan to do with all of this free cash flow you’re about to generate.

Don Merril

I guess the way we think about it is that both the management team and the board is always looking then at best use of cash and our focus is to try and generate the highest total return for our shareholders, as you might imagine.

We have a number of great options. We can reinvest in our business. We have a lot of growth projects that have extremely high returns.

We continue to look at some highly accretive M&A alternatives. As you are probably aware, as many folks on the call today, there are many assets that are for sale right now in the sand business and so that’s one potential but there’s others there as well from an M&A front.

We’ve done share repurchases in the past and, of course, dividends. So at the end of the day we have to evaluate all of that in terms of our business strategy and what we can do to best grow the company.

Right now we do see a lot of M&A opportunities and we tend to look there, as I said. We’ve been talking a lot to investors and we know there’s interest in dividends. And so we haven’t made any firm decision at this time around some of the different avenues here but we’re exploring all of them and keeping them open and at the end we want to focus on what we can do to bring the highest total return to our shareholders.