The Rich List gets richer

Dividend growth in Asia is picking up again after a post-crisis slowdown. Cash payouts for 2013 have risen by 12%, giving a total dividend pool of $138 billion for companies based in Asia ex-Japan, up from $123 billion last year.

That is good news for the region’s tycoons, who by the most conservative analysis own a quarter of all shares in the region — an estimate based on fully disclosed direct holdings by individuals, as recorded by Bloomberg.

In practice, the real level of ownership is much higher as few tycoons own their shares directly, preferring instead to disperse ownership across a web of offshore trusts that can often only be untangled by poring through the dense footnotes to each company’s annual report.

That is something we will be doing during the summer as part of our research for the FinanceAsia Rich List, a ranking of the region’s biggest dividend earners that will be published in the September issue.