Following our earlier analysis of Top Canadian Dividend Stocks,Top Banks of the World and Top 10 European Utilities in this post lets review the top dividend paying foreign stocks(ADRs) trading in the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

The total market cap. of all stocks listed in the NYSE is about $27.1 Trillion as of Dec 31,2007. Out of this, 421 foreign company stocks account for $11.4 Trillion market cap.(Source: NYSE). Thats about 42% of all the stocks listed in the NYSE.

Foreign stocks have usually paid higher dividend than their US peers. To figure out which foreign stocks are the top dividend yielders now, I ran my stock screen with the following criteria:

1.Stocks must trade on the NYSE
2.Market cap. >= $25B
3.Must have dividend yields of at least 5%

This search resulted in 28 stocks.Only 7 US stocks are in this list. 20 are from Europe and only 1 (Westpac Banking Corporation (WBK)) is from outside of Europe in Australia. Emerging market stocks from India,China, Brazil, etc. are not in this list.

Top Foreign Dividend Stocks in the NYSE:

[TABLE=80]

Top US Dividend Stocks in the NYSE:

[TABLE=79]

Analysis:
1. Half of the stocks in the list (14) are in the financial sector – Banking, IB and Insurance.
2.RBS with its 21.15% dividend yield is an anomaly since the stock has fallen a lot.
3.Generally many of these banking stocks have high yields due to their low stock price.
4.While oil major like Total Fina (TOT), Exxon Mobil (XOM) have been making record profits in recent times, they are not in this list because they reinvest majority of the net income for research and other growth initiatives.
5.None of the Canadian companies made it to the list.
6.Interesting to note that there are four telecom stocks.