How do I calculate dividends per share?

Does anyone know how to calculate total dividends and the per share dividends?

• Answer:

  Total dividends is simply the amount of divedends that a company pays on all of their outstanding public shares. Dividend per share, is simply the dividend for each of those outstanding shares. Side question to this would be how do I know how many public shares a company has? The answer to this is that you look for one of two things in a profile on a finance site, Total outstanding shares (which makes it really easy) or total market capitolization which is the number of shares multiplied by the current share price, so to give an example of this I looked on Yahoo's Finance page for GM on the key statistics tab (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GM) Market cap on 3/17/2006 is 11.95 Billion, with a share price of 21.13 so there are approximatly 565 million outstanding shares. So if GM announded a 0.75 per share dividend the total dividend would be approximatly 424 million (all prices in USD)