The idea of companies returning more and more to their shareholders through various types of dividend-related events (such as increases and decreases of a company's annualized dividend and the announcement of stock buybacks) is always something that has intrigued me. With that said, I wanted to highlight one particular company that has recently announced a 25.58% increase in its regular quarterly payout.

Seagate Technology (STX) – On Wednesday, October 22, Seagate Technology, which now possesses a forward yield of 3.97% ($2.16/share annualized), announced a 25.58% or $0.11/share increase, from its prior payout of $0.43/share, for the upcoming quarter.

Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, Seagate Technology Public Limited Company designs, manufactures, and sells electronic data storage products in the Asia Pacific, the Americas, and EMEA countries. The company provides hard disk drives, solid state hybrid drives, and solid state drives that are designed for enterprise servers and storage systems in mission critical and near-line applications; for client compute applications comprising desktop and mobile computing; and for client non-compute applications, such as digital video recorders, personal data backup systems, portable external storage systems, and digital media systems. It also offers data storage services, including online backup, data protection, and recovery solutions for small and medium-sized businesses.

Based on Wednesday’s closing price of $54.28/share, Seagate Technologies now possesses a market capitalization of $17.70 billion, a P/E ratio of 12.01, and a forward yield of 3.97% ($2.16). Its trend behavior, although negative in both the near-term and the long-term (given the fact shares are trading 1.60% below their 20-DSMA, 6.51% below their 50-DSMA, and 1.61% below their 200-DSMA), should get a boost from its upcoming earnings which are due out on October 27. If the company can demonstrate a very solid quarter and surpass Wall Street’s expectations of $1.25/share in terms of EPS, I strongly believe we could see its shares reach a sustainable range of $57.00/share-to-$60.00/share by late-November.

Conclusion

For those of you who may be considering a position in Seagate Technologies, I strongly recommend keeping a close eye on both the company's dividend and earnings behavior over the next 12-18 months as each of these catalysts should directly impact the long-term value of the company shares.