SPI Reducing Its Quarterly Dividend 75%

Stung by international sanctions against war-torn Yugoslavia and that country’s plummeting currency, SPI Pharmaceuticals Inc. said Friday that it is reducing its quarterly dividend by 75%.

Dividend payouts to be disbursed on Dec. 15 will amount to 6.25 cents a share on the company’s common stock. The company had said earlier that it would pay investors 26.5 cents a share.

SPI, the chief subsidiary of ICN Pharmaceuticals in Costa Mesa, has a 75% stake in ICN Galenika, once Yugoslavia’s largest state-owned drug manufacturer. Since the 1991 purchase of that operation, SPI has boasted that Galenika was a jewel in the conglomerate’s collection of companies, generating $225 million in 1991 revenue.

But with the outbreak of civil war in the former Communist federation, Galenkia has increasingly become a burden to SPI. Economic sanctions by the United Nations have kept supplies from reaching Galenika.

SPI officials were unavailable for comment Friday. In the prepared statement, the company said that it raised its quarterly dividend to 26.25 cents a share in March from 2.25 cents a share in 1990 “in recognition of the company’s five-year earnings performance and its future outlook.”

Chief Executive Adam Jerney, who succeeded SPI founder Milan Panic when the latter accepted the premiership of Yugoslavia, said in the statement that the company is reverting to a “more conservative dividend policy.” That policy, he said, will enable SPI to use a larger portion of its profit for venture financing, facility improvements, and research and development.

The company indicated that it may increase the dividend, which it says is now “the industry average . . . when the Yugoslav situation improves.”