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Reporting Season 15th February 2022

BHP announces record dividend & earnings beat | BHP Group (ASX:BHP) Reporting Season Results

BHP Group (ASX:BHP) reported its half-year 2022 results this morning. I’ll take you through the key highlights now.

The largest company on the ASX after its recent unification reported record results despite a challenging backdrop.

BHP reported its revenue was up 27% to US$30.5 billion. The company announced underlying profit of $US9.71 billion for the past six months. That’s up an impressive 57% compared with the prior corresponding period.

And despite COVID-19 headwinds, BHP also announced a record US$1.50 a share interim dividend, which comes in about 15% ahead of both Macquarie’s and Morgan’s estimates.

Its underlying EBITDA came in at $US18.5 billion, which was also ahead of Morgan’s forecast of US$17.4 billion.

Now what drove its strong result? Well strong commodity prices. The result was driven primarily by the strength in its iron ore operations. The steel-making ingredient made up 58% of BHP’s total revenue.

Its CEO, Mike Henry stated that the business had “mitigated the impacts of COVID-19 and significant adverse weather events to turn in a solid performance, particularly from its flagship Western Australian iron ore business”.

Looking to the future, BHP highlighted that they do expect cost headwinds to supply bottlenecks to remain challenging in the 2022 calendar year and Henry predicted that the global economy would feel inflationary pressure for the remainder of the decade.

Since the announcement, there has been one broker update. Macquarie has maintain its outperform rating with a $51 price target.

And as at the time of recording BHP’s share price is up 0.43%.